The consulting rooms of modern psychiatry and the pharmaceutical counters of our pharmacies overflow with evidence of something profoundly gone wrong. We are, by almost every measurable standard, more anxious, more depressed, and more medicated than we have ever been. The curious fact is that this epidemic of emotional distress has coincided precisely with an unprecedented cultural campaign to esteem the self: to celebrate it, to affirm it, to raise it to heights never before imagined in human history.
This is not coincidental. It is, rather, a lesson in what occurs when a false principle is pressed to its logical conclusion. And the source of that falsehood lies in the world’s fundamental misunderstanding of a concept the Bible addresses with stark clarity: self-worth.
The World’s False Foundation
The modern world has constructed an elaborate edifice upon the assumption that low self-esteem is the root of human suffering. If we could only esteem ourselves sufficiently, if we could only build ourselves up, affirm ourselves constantly, celebrate our uniqueness, and broadcast our best selves to an admiring world, then surely anxiety and depression would dissolve like morning fog before the sun. This is the promise that has been sold relentlessly: You are special. You are worthy. You must love yourself first. You must put yourself first. Your esteem matters above all.
Yet something has gone terribly wrong. The data tells an uncomfortable story. Young people, raised in the age of unprecedented self-affirmation and digital self-promotion, report higher rates of depression and anxiety than any previous generation. Those who spend the most time curating elaborate personas on social media, carefully selecting which images and moments to display, crafting narratives of success and desirability, report the highest rates of psychological distress. The very infrastructure built to celebrate the self has become the machinery of its destruction.
And why should this surprise us? A foundation built upon sand cannot support a house, no matter how palatial its construction. When self-esteem is constructed solely from internal affirmation, from the flickering dopamine hit of social media validation, from the hollow praise of a culture that demands we think higher of ourselves than any sane accounting could possibly justify, it is inevitably destined to collapse. One rejection, one failure, one moment when the carefully curated image shatters against the reality of human limitation and mortality, and the entire structure comes crashing down.
The tragedy is precisely measured in prescription bottles and crisis hotlines. When the fall comes, as it must, it comes with devastating force.
The Biblical Alternative:
The Apostle Paul, writing to the church at Philippi, presents a vision so fundamentally at odds with our contemporary moment that its very ordinariness, once understood, becomes luminous. He does not counsel the Philippians to esteem themselves more highly. Quite the opposite. He tells them explicitly:
“Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.” (Philippians 2:3)
Notice the simplicity and the radicalism of this instruction. In lowliness of mind. Not a false, performative humility, the kind we see in social media when someone posts a humble-brag. Not the practiced modesty of the person who is really only fishing for compliments. But genuine lowliness of mind: the settled conviction that others merit more consideration than oneself.
This is immediately followed by an injunction equally discomfiting to the modern ear: “Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.” (Philippians 2:4)
The world’s prescription is precisely inverted: Look to your own things. Secure your own oxygen mask first. Prioritize your own self-care, your own self-actualization, your own journey of self-discovery. But Paul suggests something far more radical, and far more liberating. The path to genuine flourishing does not lie in the intensification of self-regard, but in its diminution. It does not lie in looking inward, but in looking outward, toward the needs and interests of others.
And then comes the Biblical model:
“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” (Philippians 2:5-8)
Here is the scandal at the heart of Christianity: the One who had every conceivable claim to exaltation, the One who, in the form of God, could have demanded worship and glory, chose instead to empty Himself, to take the form of a servant, to humble Himself unto the most degrading form of execution known to the brutes of the ancient world. The cross was reserved for rebels, for slaves, for the dregs of society. This is where Christ placed Himself.
And why? Not because humiliation was virtuous in itself, but because obedience to the Father, and sacrificial love for fallen man, transcended all considerations of personal reputation or dignity. Christ’s entire trajectory was outward: toward God’s will, toward man’s redemption, away from Himself.
The remarkable thing follows almost as a corollary: “Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name.” (Philippians 2:9)Exaltation follows humility and obedience. It is not pursued directly. It is not the object of ambition. It is the consequence of a life oriented entirely away from self-advancement and toward obedience and service. The paradox is inscribed into the very structure of reality: the way up is down.
The Collapse of the Counterfeit
Contrast this with the trajectory of the contemporary self-esteem movement. Here, the logic is inverted. Exaltation, success, recognition, influence, admiration, becomes the direct object of pursuit. The self must be hyper-visible. It must be celebrated. It must accumulate followers, likes, validation, status. Every action is filtered through the question: How will this reflect on me? How will others perceive me? What image of myself am I projecting?
Social media is simply the technological manifestation of this deeper impulse. It provides the perfect apparatus for the cultivation of an inflated self-image. One selects only the moments that flatter, presents only the angles that deceive, edits out all the mundane failures and quotidian disappointments that constitute actual human existence. The result is a persona, a carefully constructed fiction, that bears almost no resemblance to reality.
The psychological consequences are predictable. When the true self is divorced from the presented self to such a degree, internal conflict becomes inevitable. The person living such a division knows, at some level, that the image is false. They know that their real life, with its genuine struggles, its real fears, its actual limitations, does not match the curated fiction they present. This gap between the false self and the true self creates a state of constant anxiety.
Moreover, the entire structure is fragile because it rests upon external validation and a conflated self-image. The self-esteem of someone dependent upon social media metrics is hostage to the opinions of strangers. It rises and falls with the algorithmic whims of digital platforms. It can be destroyed in an instant by a comment, by a screenshot taken out of context, by the simple fact that the world moves on to more entertaining content. There is no solid ground here. There is only quicksand.
When the collapse comes, and it always does, it is catastrophic. The research is unambiguous. Young people with high rates of social media engagement report the highest rates of depression and anxiety. Those who spend more than two hours daily on social media show significantly worse mental health outcomes. The carefully constructed ego, starved of anything resembling genuine affirmation or real community, finally crumbles.
And so we arrive at the current moment: a generation raised on the gospel of self-esteem, medicated at unprecedented rates, struggling with anxiety and depression at epidemic levels. The promised solution has become the problem. The cure has proven to be the disease.
The Christian Alternative:
But the Christian is offered something radically different. Your worth, your real, unshakeable, eternally significant worth, does not depend upon your achievements, your appearance, your social media metrics, or the approval of the crowd. It depends upon a fact established before the foundation of the world: God loved you enough to sacrifice His only Son for your redemption.
This is the extraordinary claim embedded in the Gospel. You are valuable not because you are special or unique or talented or beautiful or successful. You are valuable because you are the object of God’s love. You were purchased with a price, the blood of Christ. Your worth is not constructed; it is bestowed. It does not depend upon what you think of yourself or what others think of you. It depends upon what God thinks of you.
And what does God think of you? He thinks you worthy of redemption. He thinks you worthy of His attention and His care and His investment of Himself. But notice: this estimation of your worth comes with a condition. It is inseparable from the truth of your radical need and your moral deficit. You are not valuable because you are intrinsically impressive. You are valuable because you are intrinsically needy, because you are broken, fallen, and incapable of saving yourself, and God has chosen to redeem you anyway.
This is the paradox that liberates. The Christian is told explicitly: “Think not more highly of yourself than you ought to think.” (Romans 12:3) There is a realism here, a clear-eyed assessment of human nature. We are, all of us, sinners. We are all morally compromised. We all fall short. None of us has any ground to stand on before God except the grace of God.
But this very limitation becomes the source of genuine peace. If your worth does not depend on your performance, then your worth cannot be destroyed by your failures. If it does not depend on your achievements, then it cannot be threatened by your limitations. If it rests not in what you have done but in what Christ has done, then it is stable. It is secure. It is, in the most literal sense, eternal.
This is why the Christian can genuinely esteem others more highly than himself. Not from a place of false self-deprecation or neurotic self-abandonment, but from a place of genuine freedom. Because your worth is secure in Christ, you do not need to defend it, promote it, or constantly reaffirm it. You are free to look outward. You are free to serve. You are free to consider the needs of others without the constant background anxiety of self-protection that characterizes the life built on the foundation of self-esteem.
The Pharmaceutical Symptom
There is something grimly appropriate about the fact that the solution offered to the crisis of self-esteem has so often been pharmaceutical. The world’s answer to the anxiety and depression created by the impossible demands of the self-esteem gospel is to medicate the feelings away. Take a pill. Numb the discomfort. Continue the charade.
But pills cannot solve a problem that is fundamentally spiritual and philosophical. They may mask the symptom, but they cannot address the disease. The disease is that we have shifted the foundation of our entire civilization onto a lie: that the human self is adequate unto itself, that we are capable of generating our own worth and our own meaning, that the solution to our problems lies in looking inward and affirming ourselves.
The pharmaceutical answer is simply the logical extension of this lie. If the problem is that my feelings are uncomfortable, then of course the answer is to chemically alter those feelings. If I feel anxious because my false self-image is constantly threatened, then of course I should take something to calm my nervous system. But this is not healing. It is technological avoidance of the real issue.
The real issue is that we have constructed our lives on sand, and we feel, quite correctly, that we are sinking.
A Different Way
The Christian is offered a different way. Not the way of self-centered self-affirmation, but the way of other-centered service. Not the way of hyper-visibility, but the way of obedience that may never receive recognition in this world. Not the way of constant internal affirmation, but the way of resting in external grace. The way, in short, of humility, not as a performance, but as a fundamental reorientation of the self toward the purposes of God and the needs of others.
This way is harder in some respects. It asks you to die to yourself. It asks you to esteem others more highly than yourself. It asks you to care more about obedience than about reputation. It asks you to be willing to be invisible, unrecognized, undervalued by the world’s standards.
But it offers something the world cannot: genuine peace. A worth that cannot be destroyed. A significance that does not depend on the approval of others. A future that is not hostage to the fluctuations of circumstance or the judgment of the crowd.
To the young person drowning in anxiety because their social media persona does not match their reality: There is a way out. It is not more self-affirmation. It is less. It is the way of looking away from yourself, toward the God who knows you fully and loves you anyway, and toward the neighbor whom God has called you to serve.
To the one crushed beneath the weight of building and maintaining an inflated self-image: There is an alternative. You do not need to be impressive. You do not need to be special. You do not need to earn your worth. It has been given to you. Rest in it. And then, freed from the exhausting work of self-promotion, you are free to do what humans actually flourish doing: serving something larger than yourself.
The paradox is real. The way down is the way up. Humility does not diminish the person; it elevates him. Not to the hollow exaltation of social media celebrity, that precarious and temporary thing. But to something far more real: participation in the life of God, the restoration of genuine community, and the deep satisfaction of a life oriented toward purposes larger than the self.
The world promises that if you esteem yourself highly enough, you will be happy. The data suggests otherwise. The Gospel offers the opposite counsel: esteem yourself rightly, that is, as a sinner in need of grace, and you will find not happiness, which is fleeting, but joy, which is eternal. Not the exaltation that the world offers, but the exaltation that comes to those who humble themselves before God.
This is not pessimism. This is realism. And realism, when it opens onto the grace of God, becomes the only authentic basis for hope.
Pastor Thomas Irvin
George County Baptist Church
Lucedale, Mississippi
