Menu
Menu
Self-Love will Destroy You (I'll explain)
- Written by NelsonQuest
- October 24, 2022
Table of Contents
What is it about self-love that seems so… inauthentic?
Why is it that all of the self-help guru’s and positivity-obsessed masses who shout from the mountaintops that we need to ‘love ourselves more’, appear to anyone with their eyes even half-open to not have any idea what they’re talking about?
Self-love isn’t self-love, it’s self-delusion – and it’s wreaking havoc within our health, our careers, our relationships… within every important aspect of our lives.
Self love has become the very formula for self-sabotage, and in this video I’ll explain why that is, how this all started, and what I believe the solution to all of this mess is.
One thing is for sure – by the end of this video, I promise that you will never look at self-love the same way again.
Let’s begin.
Step 1: Why The Modern Idea of Self-Love is Broken
The whole point of ‘self-love’ is to love ourselves no-matter what, even if we have no objective basis for loving ourselves.
I understand that this ‘sounds good’ in theory – but is it good to just love ourselves completely regardless of the actual qualities that we possess?
What if we’re addicted to drugs?
What if we’re morbidly obese?
What if we spend most of the day attacking others because of their physical appearance, or because we see them as being inferior to us?
There’s this idea that most bullies are people with low self-esteem, people who don’t love themselves – but research shows that most bullies actually have extremely high-self esteem. Most bullies actually love themselves too much.
Now there’s a good argument to be made that self-love is just about self-acceptance, and feeling confident…
But if that was the case… then why wouldn’t we just call it those things?
I’ll tell you why – it’s because doing so destroys the whole narrative that we are somehow special just by existing.
Not everyone is special. In the real world, people don’t get trophies just for participating…
The trophies go to the winners. Why? Because, at least most of the time, those are the people who worked the hardest to put themselves in a position to win.
Step 2: Understand that “Self-Love” is NOT ‘Confidence’, nor is it ‘Self-Acceptance’
The reason that self-love is NOT ‘confidence’, is because real confidence is something we EARN – whereas self-love promotes the idea that confidence is something we are simply entitled to.
We feel confident about competing in a triathlon when we run, swim and bike every day.
We earn the confidence that we’re going to ace a job interview when we arrive prepared.
We earn the confidence that we can grow and lead a business when we wake up earlier than everyone else, stay home on weekends, and never ask someone to do something that we weren’t at one point willing to do ourselves.
Now why is self-love also not the same thing as self acceptance?
Because whereas self-love encourages us to blindly love each and every part of ourselves, ‘self-acceptance’ means actually looking at each individual part of ourselves, and accepting that there are ‘good’ parts, and there are ‘bad’ parts.
And when we look deeply into the mirror and are able to accept if we have a drug problem, or that we have a problem with eating, or that we lack the sort of discipline that we need if we want to really achieve success.
When we accept our flaws and weaknesses – we simultaneously establish a clear ‘starting point’ from which we can improve.
Self-love on the other hand limits our ability to improve because it promotes the idea that we don’t need to improve – this is completely delusional – of course we have weaknesses and of course we should work to improve them!
Get the Dark Mode guide
The Dark Mode Guide
is a simple system designed to help you achieve a specific goal by facilitating the development of relevant habits and creating the perfect environment to make failure impossible.
This guide is about actually walking the path. It creates a perfect environment devoid of excuses and forces you to face who you are and what you need to do in a way that’s sustainable.
Step 3: Understand Why People Actually Promote Self-Love
Look closely at the people who most praise the importance of self-love, and you will find that the overwhelming majority of them fall into three categories.
- Self Help Gurus: These are people who gain financially by making people feel good by telling them the things that they want to hear, which is very different from telling people what they need to hear.
- Public Figures: In category two, we have ‘weak-minded attention-hungry public figures – the obvious example here are plus-sized models and overweight actresses who promote ‘body positivity’
When they post photos of themselves in bikinis or shoveling down pizza, or sometimes both, with hashtags like #bigandbeautiful, they’re ‘self-love’ as a tool to seek approval for their lack of self-control via the massive praise they receive from masses of equally weak-minded individuals.
Also quick side note – it’s not my intention to be ‘mean’ here, but let’s be honest. Obesity is unhealthy – it’s a leading comorbidity factor in literally everything – including the recent pandemic we just had… it puts a tremendous burden on healthcare systems…
I’m not saying that we necessarily feel ‘bad’ – at least if we feel bad, we can feel motivation to change. Self-love kills that motivation.
- Weak People: The third and final category, are the ‘weak-minded’ masses who are essentially just mindless robots that blindly accept the idea that ‘self love cures everything’ being spread by the copy-paste self-help gurus in the first category, and the weak-minded, attention hungry public-figures in the second category.
Ask anyone in any of these categories ‘why’ they love themselves, and their programmed response will be ‘just because I’m me’.
There’s a word for that – it’s called ‘narcissism’, and research shows that people who think highly of themselves without having any objective basis for doing so, are often less successful in the long-run.
Step 4: Understand Why “Self-Love” Is Actually A Sinister Motive
So if we already have terms like ‘self-acceptance’ and ‘confidence’, then why do we even need self-love in the first place? And why has it only recently become such a popular idea?
Believe it or not, but there was actually a time not too long ago where self-love wasn’t something that people even thought much about.
How we felt about ourselves didn’t really matter… What mattered was simply who we were, and what we did.
And if you’re thinking that self-love is somehow a ‘cure’ for feelings of self-doubt –
Why do we need a cure for that?
We should feel self-doubt if we haven’t first earned confidence, and if we have earned confidence and still feel self-doubt – then how fuck does self-love fix the problem? All it does is pull a carpet over it.
So why is it that over the last few decades, the concept of ‘self-love’ has gone from relative obscurity, to now being promoted as the magical remedy to all of our pain?
I’ll tell you why, even though you might not want to hear this.
In the modern age, we exist in societies where ‘PROFIT’ is the highest goal – these societies have evolved, and are going to continue to evolve, NOT to promote our well-being, but promote what is profitable, which more often than not comes at the cost of our well-being.
If you need proof, just ask yourself the following simple question – which version of humanity is more profitable to the profit-hungry individuals and corporations at the top?
The version where most of us are weak-minded, unhealthy, and love ourselves because we believe ourselves to be ‘special’?
Or the version where most of us are strong-minded, healthy, and we accept our weaknesses so that we can improve on them, and earn confidence through hard-work and preparation?
Which one of those two versions of humanity is more likely to buy lots of things – to seek out medications to treat what are entirely normal and often necessary human emotions – to spend more money on external solutions to problems that can only be solved internally?
Therein lies the fatal flaw of self-love.
My Solution
Alright guys – so my solution to all of this is simple – realize that ‘self-love’ is a silly-made up concept, and that we should just move past it.
Pretty much all of the ‘self’ concepts – self-love, self-esteem, self-respect – these all breed narcissistic, ego-centric world-views because these are all emotions that we’re supposed to experience with other people, not with our selves.
Self-love is simply unnecessary – and it causes catastrophic harm under the illusion that it is something good.
For the most, part the self is ‘who we think we are’ – but there are two others selves – ‘who we really are’ and ‘who we aspire to be’.
If you really want to love your ‘self’ – love the self that you aspire to be, as that self is constantly working to see past who you think you are – to understand who you really are – so that you can be your best version.
Stop loving your ‘self’ and start loving who you could be.
This is the path –
Stay
Updated!
Subscribe to e-mails
Join 100k+ others and receive weekly tools, tips, and secret resources directly from Nelson.
