The Flaw with 'Love Yourself'

It's unfortunate that the idea of 'you are good enough' is impressed upon someone in their twenties. In fact, it is a dangerous proposition. It is rooted in the present but lacks the expanding vision of what you could be.

Open any social media platform. Wait, don't open it yet. Read this piece and then open some social media platform, Instagram, Meta whatever you open every morning. You will find your social media feed flooded with motivational quotes telling you to 'love yourself' and 'be brave'. I don’t have a problem with someone telling you to be brave. It is the former that gets my goat.

With a background running crimson or containing quaint mountains, there is a constant barrage of posts and videos around us practically forcing on us the universally accepted mandate of loving yourself. The modern day self-help wormhole is filled with ideas of unconditional acceptance of how you currently are. Take the example of the blessed Fat Pride. It is a classic example of narcissism fueling depravity. It is justification of one's own deficiency and masquerading it as strength.

It's unfortunate that the idea of 'you are good enough' is impressed upon someone in their twenties. You shouldn't be excited by the prospect of what you currently are but what you could be. You've got over 50 years to get where you could be. Do you really want to content yourself with where you currently are?

When self-love is conflated with unrelenting acceptance of your current state of being, it acts as a deterrent to further progress. It becomes toxic. It defeats the very purpose for which self-love exists – proclivity towards progress. Self-love has to be the stepping stone to making yourself better in as many aspects of life as you can. It is the tendency towards self-improvement, not limiting yourself to where you currently stand.

The flawed notion of self-love stems as a direct consequence of self-hate. For those who find themselves in the clutches of guilt and self-hate become the first victims of the nihilism that self-love offers them in a shiny wrapper. They go from the extreme of beating themselves up to the opposite extreme of using defiance as a tool to justify their flawed existence. That is not self-love. It is covering your inadequacies and adorning it with faux confidence that makes them even more hollow on the inside.

Here is the catch: you could be better. Yeah you have trouble sticking to a workout routine and can't stop stuffing your mouth with junk every chance you get. But, the silver lining is that you are still equipped enough to rectify your inefficiencies. It is a testament to your free will to turn your predicament. There is more to you than you think. If you start pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and push the limits of your potential, you would find that you are a measure of your accomplishments and what you have overcome.

Thanks for reading.

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