‘I Want You to Be Honest With Me . . . as Long as You Affirm Me!’
Common sense tells us that we’re to discover who we are by getting in touch with our deepest desires, and once we emerge from that cocoon of self-reflection, we put ourselves on display for the world.
This is the “look in” approach to life that prioritizes looking in yourself for discovery and purpose, followed by looking around towards others to applaud that self-discovery. The goal is to gather around us people who appreciate the uniqueness we’ve discovered in ourselves, and who will affirm and support our quest for authenticity.
Displaying yourself doesn’t take much effort these days. With the arrival of social media, you can start an account and begin to build a personal, public profile within minutes. It has never been easier to create and broadcast the image you want others to see.
We want to be liked. We want to be noticed. We want others to accept us as we are. So we look for ways to create the kind of persona we want online. Some like the social competition for other people’s attention and comments. Others like sharing their progress in a fitness app, or when they reach a new goal in a popular game.
The point is, we’re all broadcasters now, and we’re all waiting for someone’s applause.
THE EROSION OF FRIENDSHIP
It’s hard to overestimate what this has done to the notion of friendship. In a world where looking in takes priority over looking around, when we eventually do look around, we’ve trained our hearts to gravitate toward people who will affirm the way we define ourselves and who will cheer us on no matter what.
In this kind of culture, the meaning and significance of friendship undergoes a significant alteration. In ancient times, friendship meant mutual commitment and unabashed truth-telling. The truest of friends cared about your heart enough to confront you when you started down a path that was bad for you or bad for others.
True friendship was about acceptance and aspiration—accepting you as you are (warts and all), but also calling out the best in what you could be.
Today, the aspirational side of friendship has slipped. Friendships that involve truth-telling falter fast. We are told that a true friend accepts you as you are and celebrates you as you are, full stop. True friends don’t just accept your warts and flaws; they’re supposed to celebrate them (or at least never mention them).
We expect total acceptance and affirmation from our friends these days. Because we broadcast so much of our lives so much of the time, and because cyberbullying and negativity and criticism run rampant in society, we feel we need the support of our friends to pick us back up and encourage and strengthen us. Even if we’re wrong about something, we want someone to tell us we’re right. We want someone to tell us that even our flaws and failures are beautiful.
So we look around for friendships based on affirmation and support, even if what we really need are people who will tell us the truth about ourselves. We turn to friends who will coddle us, and that process of coddling makes us less capable of dealing with criticism in the real world. We feel more fragile than ever because our friendships are built upon flattery, not reality.
Ironically, the more we are flattered, the more fragile we become. The thing we expect to build us up is the very thing that makes us so easy to tear down.
DETERMINING THE BEST WAY TO LIVE—FOR YOU
Many people think that in a “look in” culture everyone should just naturally become more accepting of each other’s quest to find and express themselves. But that’s not what happens. Our self-displays are in conflict with each other. One person’s life choices will call into question another’s, because all of us, despite our intentions, are indicating by our choices what we think is the best way to live.
Add to this atmosphere the pressure that comes about in a world where we’re supposed to believe in equality (we are fundamentally the same deep down) but also in uniqueness (we are all special), and we run into a strange contradiction. On the one hand, we’re all equal, so no one should stand out. On the other hand, we’re all unique, so everyone should stand out all the time.
Obviously, this won’t work. The result is a lonely world where everyone is individually trying to figure out who they are and what they want to be, where we don’t have as many true friends, while our feeds are filled with superficial friends.
Our friendships, thus, become shallower because our commitments are thin. True friendship might impinge upon our time, demanding that we sacrifice our own freedom and pursuit of fulfillment in order to help someone else. And so we prefer looser attachments that won’t drag us down.
PRAISE THAT DOESN’T SATISFY
Strangely enough, here’s an example where our desire for friendship and support doesn’t actually line up with what we really want. We say we want friends who will affirm us just as we are and not challenge us or question our self-definition. But when our friends do that—from a distance, rarely committed to us in any substantive way—all their comments and thumbs-up signs become less significant.
The praise doesn’t satisfy us. We stop believing it. Because our friends don’t tell us the truth about ourselves when it hurts, we stop trusting that they’re telling the truth about us when it feels good. We drown in showers of praise.
The world is awash in superficial compliments, and rather than making us all feel good about ourselves, we begin to question whether or not we’re truly understood and loved. We feel like the person we’re portraying in public or online isn’t the “real me,” and all the likes in the world ring hollow because our friends are expressing their approval for an avatar, not a real person. Or we feel like the person we’re portraying is the real me, but the likes still don’t satisfy because we don’t feel close enough or committed enough to invite someone to say what they really think.
Do you see the conflict? We yearn to become better, to grow, and to get feedback from others. In other words, we do want to be judged. We want to get better. But at the same time, we want to be affirmed. We want to be declared “good” just as we are, but we also want to be called to something better.
And when these desires run up against each other, our friendships fail. We are left with further disappointments in ourselves and in those around us who we value.
The “looking in” approach, then, with its ideal of self-discovery to be displayed for affirmation to reach fulfillment, leaves us feeling less special and less valued than we had hoped for.
SEEN FOR WHAT WE TRULY ARE
Though the world tells us to live this way, when we stop to think and rethink, we can understand that there’s got to be a better way. It doesn’t come from others affirming us in our current state, but from the One who made us—accepting us as we are in all our imperfection, while calling us to step into the purpose for which he made us.
We look up in order to be declared “good,” and we keep looking up in order to receive the power to become good.
Our worth and value comes from the One who made us and who sees us, not in how we are seen by others.
Excerpted with permission from Rethink Your Self by Trevin Wax. Copyright 2020, B&H Publishing Group.
Trevin Wax is senior vice president of Theology and Communications at LifeWay Christian Resources and a visiting professor at Wheaton College. A former missionary to Romania, Trevin hosts a blog at The Gospel Coalition and regularly contributes to The Washington Post, Religion News Service, World, and Christianity Today, which named him one of thirty-three millennials shaping the next generation of evangelicals. As former director of Bible Publishing at LifeWay, he led the launch of the Christian Standard Bible (CSB) and served as general editor of the CSB Worldview Study Bible. Currently he is the general editor of The Gospel Project, and an author of many books, including This Is Our Time, Eschatological Discipleship, Gospel Centered Teaching, and Rethink Your Self. He and his wife Corina have three children and live outside of Nashville, Tennessee.