On The Mirage Of Self-Esteem
How the language of esteem turned inward and lost its meaning.
The phrase self-esteem is so familiar that it sounds natural, but the words were never meant to be joined.
Esteem comes from the Latin aestimare—to assess, to appraise, to assign value. It is a word of calculation, not of being.
It belongs to merchants, not mystics. To esteem something is to place it on a scale and decide what it is worth in relation to something else.
When the word was turned inward—when people began to esteem themselves—the comparison did not vanish; it multiplied. The self became both assessor and assessed. The mind, having learned to judge the world, now judged its own right to exist within it.
And so the modern project of self-esteem was born: an internal marketplace where a man buys and sells his own reflection according to ever-shifting rates of social currency.
The problem of internalised measurement
The trouble is not that self-esteem is too low, but that it exists at all. To esteem oneself is already to have split the self in two: the observer who measures and the subject who pleads for a good report.
One half is always disappointed, the other always exhausted.
And since the standards of estimation are imported from the outside—success, beauty, strength, likability—the scale keeps changing. No one ever wins.
A man with “high self-esteem” is merely someone whose current self-appraisal happens to align with his culture’s temporary definition of value. But when that definition shifts, as it always does, he must chase it again. This is not self-respect; it is a quiet addiction to approval.
From esteem to presence
The Practice of Peace rejects esteem as a metric of worth. It asks: What if the self did not need to be estimated at all? What if a man could stand, ungraded, unranked, unassessed—neither high nor low, simply here?
That state is not arrogance, nor humility; it is neutrality. It is what happens when the act of measurement ceases.
A man no longer needs to admire or condemn himself. He no longer needs to feel “better” to be at peace. He has stepped out of the auction house of identity and back into being.
This is why the practice begins in stillness and unguarded presence. When there is no noise, no conversation of comparison, the mind’s internal accountant falls silent.
What remains is a quieter form of self-knowing—not esteem, but intimacy.
Intimacy without evaluation
Intimacy, in its original sense, means to make known. To be intimate with oneself is simply to know oneself without appraisal—to see what is there without moving to adjust it. It is the opposite of self-esteem. It is self-recognition without transaction.
In that recognition, shame loses its function. If worth is not comparative, there is nothing to rise above or sink beneath. The self cannot be “improved” because it was never defective; it can only become more aware of its own being.
The quiet redefinition of worth
The man who learns this begins to live differently. He stops negotiating his right to exist. He no longer asks, “Am I good enough?” but “Am I present?”
He understands that value is not achieved; it is expressed. And the more present he becomes, the more his presence itself is the measure.
So the task is not to build self-esteem. It is to end the need for it. To walk out of the mirror hall where everything is compared, and stand instead in the simple light of being—unmeasured, unremarkable, complete.
That is not self-esteem. It is self-peace.
