The cult of faux confidence

There are few structural problems plaguing young people today that haven’t been given a heavily-individualised, medical-sounding label. Are you experiencing capitalism’s encouragement to see your worth through your work, or do you actually have imposter syndrome? If not, maybe productivity dysmorphia? The complexities of generational economic disparity are boxing out home ownership and economic stability, but it’s easier to neatly call this “burnout”. With the rise of these pathologies over the last decade, SEO-friendly articles and pop psychology TikToks have proliferated, explaining what these catchy labels mean and how best to cope if you’re experiencing them. The result of these discussions is a generation well-acquainted with the fact that they feel bad about pretty much everything and well-equipped to describe the effects of these serious political issues in the shallowest terms possible.

But in the last few years, a shift has begun to occur. Armed with this knowledge, a new movement has grown in backlash to this widespread self-doubt, with young people now being encouraged to proudly “own their worth” — not just to themselves privately, but to everyone around them online. Now, when you log onto social media, you will see Instagram captions, TikToks, and Twitter threads littered with the language of confidence. Instead of practising coy self-deprecation or pathologising feelings of lack with those snappy phrases, Gen Z and young millennials post about their positive traits, their achievements, and what more they feel they deserve. Women in particular are told to speak affirmations aloud; to practise believing that they are a “lucky girl”. Young people have learned to perform this self-belief not just in their intelligence or worth as a human being, but also in their beauty: constantly reminding themselves and their online audiences of their hotness. 

There is no doubt that we are in the midst of a boom in affirmational language, following on from a boom in the 2010s of campaigns and movements encouraging women to improve their self-esteem, such as body positivity, and that there is a need to correct a longstanding deficit in how we feel about ourselves. But with this sudden rise in a projection of confidence, are we actually en masse feeling better about ourselves? Are the problems triggering these feelings truly being solved? Despite the prolific posts about our increasing self-assurance, this trend of obsessively backing ourselves seems to be masking (and creating) a rapidly growing crevasse — one between the things we truly feel about ourselves and the ones we perform feeling online. And rather than bringing about an era of empowerment, this language has begun to trend in a direction that is more harmful to our self-esteem than it is helpful.

We can see the oxymoronic effects of this trend in the various ways it tends to manifest (few of which reflect a generation whose self-worth has actually improved). One of these is in the rise of excessive bragging, where people constantly post about their talents, good genes, and especially their accolades. Different from the odd announcement post, these posts typically look like someone hell-bent on proving something to their audience, sharing these positives not once or twice, but repeatedly, obsessively. The poster would, of course, say they are practising self-love by sharing this information – however, more often than not, this practice appears to be a transparent attempt to use engagement on these posts to gain external validation. It’s now common to see a Twitter thread or a multi-slide set of Instagram Stories openly gloating about how many views/followers/awards the poster has received, swiftly followed by a complaint about not receiving enough recognition for this objective success (claiming they should be experiencing more formal benefits, such as a TV show, more work commissions, or a book deal, or arguing that a lack of engagement proves they’ve been shadowbanned). Not only does this put outsized emphasis on things that shouldn’t actually be important — like metrics and trophies — it claims that this pursuit of external validation is evidence of a healthy internal validation system (it doesn’t help that this system is self-affirming, where likes and followers can feel like evidence of your worth). In claiming to be owning one’s worth, it practises the opposite. This is even before considering the futility of boasting as a habit.

But another vector of this trend has more victims beyond the people feigning this self-confidence. An ugly tic has emerged where owning positive attributes about yourself is now often done in direct contrast to the lack of these traits in others. Posts of this ilk are typically dripping in misogyny, criticising other women’s looks – their frumpiness, their clothes, their cosmetic work —as a way to assert one’s own attractiveness. One popular example can be found in a viral tweet last month, in which a 24-year-old user wrote: “want to write a think piece on the way the term ‘bimbo’ has become completely meaningless in its adoption by bookish intellectual women who want a proximity to hotness”. 

Dressed up in pseudo-intellectual framing (and some absurdity – did the term bimbo ever have serious meaning before we overanalysed it?), the anti-feminist argument here is obvious. But this post also appears fundamentally motivated by insecurity, despite the self-assuredness it is trying to perform — there is an evident fear of being categorised into the “bookish”, unattractive category of women, rather than where this person feels they belong: in the bimbo hot one. Despite the projection of someone with a grasp of their worth, they reveal their desire to close the gap between certainty and their own self-doubt. The collateral damage in this attempt, though is other women, rather than the patriarchal systems that gave them this insecurity in the first place. This tweet is not alone. A similar post from another user – an American author and writer —read: “Joyce Carol Oates shouldn't have written Blonde. What could a literary non-hottie know about the exploitation of femme, highly sexualized women - women who look and act like Oates have no compassion or love for women like Marilyn. They're just as bad as men at writing them.” This tic occurring repeatedly on a mass scale (as it has done in the last few years) normalises demeaning other women so long as it builds another woman up, obscuring the misogyny which underpins it.

In general, this response to the mass pathologisation of our poor self-esteem has done little to improve our circumstances and often comes at the expense of others. But the root problems triggering this phenomenon aren’t imagined or overegged – in fact, they are very real. While the pathologies —such as burnout and impostor syndrome – and the corrections to them, faux-confidence, encourage people to see the solutions as individual, it is a set of major societal issues (be it the effects of capitalism, economic turmoil, the rise of social media catering financial and emotional stability) which are making young people feel this way. Because of this, shifts in language signal little beyond an external change. These are global systemic issues — ones that won’t be fixed by calling yourself beautiful every day in the mirror (or on TikTok). But social media rarely offers an alternative framework to effectively address the oppressive structures that have brought us to this point, leaving young people stuck with these bad feelings and few tools to do anything about them.

Anything posted online — no matter how honest, positive, or authentic — will always be tinged with an element of performance. This is an inescapable part of posting to an audience. Equally, we should be resistant to the narrative that our social media profiles should be an accurate representation of real life, showing lowlights, not just highlights — no one is beholden to share their deepest vulnerabilities with the people who happen to follow them online. But we would do better for ourselves and our communities to try to make our online persona closer to the truth of our emotional reality (or at the very least, not completely divorced from it). All we do by pretending to feel good about ourselves is distract from the fact that we still don’t — taking us further away from deconstructing the systems that make us feel this way.

For more content like this, explore the rest of the Digiverse, or connect with us on TikTok or Instagram. If you’re a brand or business and want to inspire your audience in innovative ways, reach out to our strategic & creative lab eve@thedigitalfairy.co.uk