What Is The True Essence of Self-Love?
Investigating why true self-love needs to begin from within and practical solutions to develop more self-love.
I hope all our efforts towards self-love are truly for ourselves.
I hope our brand of self-love is true, as there’s authentic self-love and then there’s its deceptive impostor, vanity too.
True self-love is about savouring who we are at our core, vanity is its deceptive impostor.
Merriam-Webster defines vanity as “inflated pride in oneself or one’s appearance,” while the Cambridge Dictionary identifies vanity as “the fact that you are too interested in your appearance or achievements;” there’s a deeper, more authentic version of self-love that transcends these superficial concerns.
In today’s social-media-driven world, where selfies and self-promotion are normalised, the lines between self-love and vanity blur.
Yet, as we navigate personal growth in the digital age, it’s crucial to differentiate between genuine self-love and vanity.
Why do we do the things we do? Why do we share so freely with strangers and acquaintances alike? Why do we feel compelled to use a megaphone to announce every detail of our lives?
Is our brand of self-love also about self-admiration that seeks external validation? Is the self-love we nurture also always dependent on another’s approval and intertwined with the allure of algorithmic hits of dopamine too?
Genuine self-love begins from within.
Likes, shares, flattering comments, and ballooning followings can enhance our self-image, but these momentary highs are illusions compared to lasting validation.
Vanity, masquerading as self-love, often rules the world of doom scrolls. What vanity coupled with social media can do is create fictitious elevations of confidence and self-worth too.
The quickest way to understand whether our self-love hinges on vanity is to remove the source of external validations first.
Without the likes, comments, and the dopamine hyper-loop, how do we feel about ourselves?
Influenced by high doses of dopamine, instant social approvals, and hunger for convenient gratifications, our online existence can become louder than our independent ideas of ourselves.
The more we lean on social media, our avatars and created online personas, the more we depend on them to inform us of our self-worth and social value.
In this scenario, our sense of self becomes intimately intertwined with the never-ending validation cycle, that’ll rewire our brains to become entirely dependent on how others perceive us.
