You Can Never Get Enough of What You Don't Really Need
Approval, achievement, and appearance cannot deliver self-worth — which is why no amount of them is ever enough. There is exactly one thing that works.
There is an old slogan in Alcoholics Anonymous about alcohol: you can never get enough of what you don’t really need.
I have never found a better sentence for explaining why so many accomplished, admired, attractive people are quietly miserable.
Think about the mechanics of it. If you are thirsty and you drink water, you stop being thirsty. The remedy matches the need, so a finite amount of it does the job. But if you are hungry for self-worth and you reach for approval instead, no quantity will ever finish the transaction — because approval is not what self-worth is made of. So you go back for more. And more. And the returns get smaller each time, which you interpret as needing even more, and now you’re in a loop that has no exit at the top.
Three reasons the external stuff can’t work
It’s relative, and relatives move. Nearly every external win is defined by comparison. Fastest, smartest, thinnest, richest, most followed. That isn’t a measure of being inherently valuable, it’s a measure of being ahead of someone — and today’s fastest runner gets passed eventually. You cannot be the most amazing for very long. People spend decades outdoing each other and collecting genuine rewards for it, and none of it makes anyone feel worthy, because worth was never a ranking.
It puts your value in the hands of luck. If you locate your worth in outcomes, you have handed it to a system you don’t control. You can write the best paper in the class and get a professor who doesn’t like your argument. You can be the best candidate and remind the interviewer of his ex, and watch an unconscious bad feeling cost you the job. The world is imperfect and sometimes you get bad breaks. You are so much more than outcomes.
Diminishing returns. You make a fire while camping and cook one hamburger, and it is the best burger on earth. The fourth one is just food. There is only so much satisfaction available in thinner, smarter, a million more dollars.
Miranda Kerr, who modeled for Victoria’s Secret, put it about as plainly as anyone could: “Models are some of the most insecure people I’ve ever met. They’re constantly being told they’re not good enough. You’ve really got to practice loving yourself.” If professional beauty doesn’t produce a sense of worth, that should tell us something structural about where worth comes from.
The one thing that does work
Here it is, and it is almost annoyingly simple:
Self-worth comes from one thing and one thing only — treating yourself as if you are worthy.
That’s the whole mechanism. When you act as though you are worthy, you demonstrate to yourself that you are, and the belief follows the demonstration. Not the other way around.
I keep returning to the parent-and-child analogy because it makes this obvious. Give a child a candy bar and he’s happy for four minutes. Give him the newest phone and he’s pleased for a week. Post his accomplishments so your friends can admire your parenting and he gets a small bump of pride. But if you also put his needs behind appearances, or put him down, or ignore him, or over-indulge him instead of doing the harder work of caring for him properly — he will not feel worthy. Not for a second. Children are not fooled by inventory.
Neither is the child part of you. It is watching all of it: whether you keep the agreements you make with yourself, whether you tell the truth when a lie would be easier, whether you clean the sheets, whether you speak up, whether you go to the doctor. Love is not only a feeling. I can love my car as a feeling, meaning I like it. To love my car as an action means I wash it, I don’t fill it with garbage, and I change the oil. You will feel like you love yourself once you start acting like you do.
What that means practically
It means the intention behind an act matters more than the act, because the intention is what your inner child actually hears.
Two people run the same three miles. One is running to punish a body she has decided is unacceptable, hoping to earn the right to be seen. The other is running because she wants more years of a strong, healthy life. Same distance, same pace, opposite messages. Their bodies may end up identical. Their sense of worth will not.
The same test applies everywhere. Are you achieving because you want the life that achievement makes possible, or because you’re hoping it will finally settle the question of your value? It won’t, and the effort of pretending it might is exhausting.
One version of this I run into constantly: people who won’t buy clothes that fit until they lose weight. Turn it around. Would you refuse to dress a child properly because he was heavier than you wanted? Would you leave him in things that pinch as a motivational technique? Of course not. If it would be cruel to a child, it is cruel to you.
About comparison
A brief word, because it undoes more people than anything else on this list.
No skilled parent compares their child to another child. It is one of the few nearly universal rules of decent parenting, and we violate it against ourselves hourly.
We compare against information we do not have. You see the mother of three with the chemistry master’s who ran a half marathon and conclude you’re not measuring up. You have no idea what motivates her, or whether her life would suit you at all — and you’re comparing your daily experience to her outcome, without the six months of five a.m. alarms that produced it. Comparison is also a snapshot of a moving picture. Nobody’s life is permanently amazing.
There is one comparison worth making, and it’s to your own yesterday. Am I more solid than I was? Did I keep more agreements this month than last? That’s a measurement you can actually act on.
You can decide this today
Here is the part I most want people to hear, and the reason I find this work hopeful rather than grim.
You do not have to feel worthy to start acting worthy. You do not need anyone’s permission, validation, or apology. You do not need to wait until you’ve fixed the thing you think disqualifies you. Many people wait an entire lifetime to feel it, and die waiting.
Treating yourself as though you matter is a decision available to you this afternoon — regardless of how you were raised, regardless of how you were treated, regardless of what you have done. You may have been conditioned to treat yourself harshly. You can choose differently starting now.
That is a genuine superpower, and nearly everyone has it lying around unused.
Lori A. Strayer, M.Ed., LPC, is a licensed professional counselor and the author of Solid Inside: Cultivating Authentic Self-Worth and Lasting Inner Peace. Nothing here is a substitute for care from a licensed professional. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.
