Last week blogger Megan Cuilla wrote, “Society and life circumstances have told us over and over that, no matter how hard we try, no matter how much money we spend, that it’s simply not true, we’re not enough. Not pretty enough. Not thin enough. Not feminine enough. Not reserved enough. Not Christian enough.” Finally, through a long journey, she discovered that she is enough — and she has the tattoo to prove it.
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Interesting, Megan. I want to know more!
I think the psychology of “I’m not good enough” is an interesting problem. The Megan points at “society” as the source of this issue, and I think there is merit in this idea, but it’s not the whole. For one thing, this problem appears to be a human universal. For example Buddhism describes the “Jealous God” state of mind in which the individual is stuck in a “must get better” mind-set, which is described as “trying to get into heaven” (Buddhist heaven means something different than Christian heaven, just to be clear). So here is an example of another society identifying this mindset.
On the other hand, clearly social norms and processes support and encourage this mindset. Capitalism is a great example of an economic system driven by the (one might say addictive) process of always needing more to be better. But where does the basic psychology come from?
Here are some ideas I’d like to share: First, evolution. Human beings want status as a strategy for survival. Human survival is hugely dependent on the behavior of other humans. Therefore the more status you have the more access to resources the better your chances of survival and the higher quality of mate you are likely to attract. A psychology of “not good enough” motivates behaviors that drive us to pursue “more” as a way of showing our fitness as a mate, and our ability to handle complex social relationships in community-supporting roles. Addiction studies have shown the primates feel rewarded by having high status in the group, and that this seems to be hard-wired into us.
If this theory is right, there is a basic human psychological infrastructure that “society” acts upon to create the dilemma of “Must be better than I am right now.” This said, it is often a source of suffering in our lives. One solution to this suffering is to believe in an all-loving God and to use that as a way of obtaining a sort of validation for your existence. Certainly this is a popular strategy, and it comes complete with a huge ideological in-group to support it.
My own strategy for dealing with this is two-fold. First, I reflect on how lucky I am to be alive and to be a piece of a universe that has obtained sentience. Second, I reflect on the fact that I’m living in the most privileged and wealthy time in all of human history. So, I was born incredibly well off. This doesn’t stop me from falling into the emotional trap of “more better,” but it does give me a rational point of reference for reality testing my own value, and that works pretty well most of the time to pull me out of my funk.