Journalist and podcast host Allie Beth Stuckey puts our culture’s conventional self-love wisdom on trial and finds it guilty of making us miserable. In her book, she examines some of the most common beliefs in the light of biblical concepts and proposes antidotes to the debilitating culture of self-love.

Try as you might, you will never be your own source of fulfillment. The phrase that you are enough is a counter to the frenzied striving that possesses so many people and encourages people to pause for a moment. The best course of action is not stopping long enough to realize that you’re enough, but to stop and realize that you’re not enough and that your attempts to become enough aren’t working. 

Enoughness is an ever-moving target. It can’t be your goal—even if a culture obsessed with self-discovery and self-actualization might tell you otherwise. For all the truisms floating around in the societal ether about self-acceptance, self-love, and true happiness, no one really seems to find it. Depression and anxiety are on the rise. The best we can do to cope is find a self-conscious kind of solidarity in memes about social anxiety and the struggles of “adulting.” It might seem bemusing, considering we live in history’s most prosperous era and in the most prosperous part of the world, but many people are bewildered and unhappy.

The problem is that the self cannot simultaneously be the problem and the solution. Believing it can is expecting emptiness to fill emptiness. Obviously, positive thinking and eating right are not devoid of merit, but there’s no cosmic inner force that we tap into to become okay. We need something beyond ourselves. In short, we need the one who called himself the Bread of Life and Living Water, and promises to satisfy us and be enough for us. He knows very well that our attempts at becoming enough won’t cut it. We weren’t meant to be enough. It’s a burden we can let go of.

Another popular myth that’s emerged from the ferment of our self-love culture is that the truth resides within each person and it’s simply a matter of finding it and living it. Psychologist and bestselling author Brené Brown maintains that, “the truth about who we are lives in our hearts.” And so people follow their hearts and navel gaze hoping that the truths they discover deep within will heal and free them.

On the face of it, it seems wonderfully convenient to make the truth so subjective, and declare ourselves its ultimate arbiter. But doing so is much more of a burden than a benefit. It brings more chaos than serenity—especially when everyone’s personal truths begin to conflict. Moreover, there are standards for truth and morality that apply regardless of whether or not people’s ad hoc fabrications conform to those standards. There’s a reason that the Holocaust and pedophilia make our stomachs churn. There’s a moral code written into our hearts. That Jews are animals who deserve to be exterminated might have been Hitler’s “personal truth,” but those beliefs have to be held to standards of objective morality. Even if your personal truth doesn’t involve the systematic annihilation of an entire race, personal truths are often just Satan’s lies masquerading as authenticity and autonomy.

When the author’s boyfriend broke up with her in their last year of college, she picked up heavy drinking, binging and purging, and hooking up. She was living “her truth,” but her truth was trapping her rather than liberating her. It wasn’t until she stopped living by her own standards and submitted to God’s that she began pursuing what was truly good. The standards we set for ourselves constantly change with feelings and circumstances, but God’s standards, which are laid out in Scripture, never change.

Many women are caught up in a mess of mixed messages. On the one hand, they hear and internalize that they are perfect just the way they are while also internalizing the message that they’re deficient and have to do something to become perfect. We can call this the “paradox of perfection.”

Self-help and self-love cant is the epicenter of this perfection paradox. Jen Sincero, author of You Are a Badass, tells her readers, “You are perfect…You are the only you there is and ever will be.…Do not deny the world its one and only chance to bask in your brilliance.” It’s a message that appeals to narcissists who believe the real “them” is good and perfect—a great excuse for failing to own actions by dismissing them as “not you.”

If we really are perfect the way we are, then why do people need to write books to let us know, and why are millions of people buying them? Presumably the writers hope to make readers’ lives “better,” an unnecessary step if their readers are already in the state of perfection. There’s the belief that we are perfect, but there are things that get in the way of embracing that perfection: capitalism, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, and so on. But here’s the hook: Self-help still shows you things you need to do in order to manifest your perfection. Different gurus will advise different variations of pithy self-talk, nutrition, exercise, cleaning your room, or treating yourself once in a while.

The cultural refrain that, “You are perfect just the way you are” is failing to ease people’s anxiety about inadequacies. Part of the problem is that perfection is not what we are aspiring to. Whether we strive harder to arrive at perfection or lower the bar of perfection (which is impossible by definition), we are still trying to reconcile ourselves to an ideal that’s made us slaves.

What if we could be free from the taskmaster of perfectionism—not be meeting the bar or lowering it, but by allowing Jesus to give us his sufficiency?

We’re a very entitled generation. The clothing line Spiritual Gangster recently had a top that read, “You deserve to have everything you want.” This is consonant with the spirit of the times, the Age of Entitlement in which we find ourselves. Among many other domains of life, this mindset has affected our relationship to work. What has crept in is the assumption that we will be able to achieve what we want without too much toil. Self-help and self-love logic condition us to believe that, by saying and doing the so-called “right things,” the universe will just serve us up the job and career we want.

But we’re not entitled to success. It doesn’t just come when we call for it. There are some people from younger generations that believe work is not as important as doing what brings us joy—regardless of whether it is marketable or not. This mindset presumes an amorality to work. It’s no coincidence that socialism’s popularity is on the rise along with this mindset. It comes through in current legislative proposals like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, which promises “economic security for those who are unwilling to work.”

The biblical vision of work is different from the world’s. Work was part of God’s original design for humanity—it was not neutral, but good. Adam and Eve were to tend the garden. After the Fall of humanity, God declared that there would be an element of toil to work. So work is still good, but successes don’t come nearly as easily. Crops fail, investments crash and burn, businesses fold, our ideas don’t always go viral like we thought they would.  

Scripture shows us that work matters, but does not define or satisfy us. The culture of self-love we see in the world tries to maintain just the opposite, that work is not necessarily part of a meaningful life, but, somehow, our identity is bound up in career. Modern feminist rhetoric is a perfect case in point, which speaks of career as the path to satisfaction in life.

You don’t have to be doing your dream job or be the best at your job in order to be engaged in good, meaningful work. Whether you’re running a business, replacing pipes, or caring for kids, there is opportunity to do meaningful work. What matters most is not whether or not we have our dream job, but how we engage in the task at hand: Are we seeking to work as unto the Lord (Colossians 3:23), believing that whether or not the work succeeds, he will be faithful? Seeing our mission as bringing him glory first and foremost brings peace that many forgo as they restlessly wait for their dream job to materialize and fulfill them.

“You can’t love others until you love yourself first.”

This is a common bit of worldly wisdom, but, increasingly, we hear it from the pulpits, too. Joel and Victoria Osteen frequently tell their congregation that God’s love gives us the power to love ourselves, which is an important first step if we ever hope to love others. This is not a new idea. Back in the 1970s there was a rash of books that folded pop psychology vocabulary of self-acceptance into theology.

Self-love is presumed to be the fount and foundation of genuine love for others. What many celebrities, influencers, and self-help gurus miss is that self-love is really just dignifying self-obsession. They also miss how innate self-love is. We don’t have to learn it. We are constantly trying to make ourselves happier and more satisfied. We naturally seek after our best interest—whatever we consider that to be. Blaise Pascal believed that even suicidal thoughts were entertained in pursuit of happiness.

In some sense, we’ve been loving ourselves since we were infants crying for mom. The concern for self shows up all over the place, not just as self-preservation but as self-justification. Think about how ardently we seek to extricate ourselves from blame.

Even people who hate themselves still love themselves. The person who tears herself down, who constantly feels inadequate, and struggles against insecurities is still the center of her universe.

There’s a great deal of evidence to suggest that self-esteem levels are not the best predictors of success or failure. People with low self-esteem usually perform just as well as people with high self-esteem—sometimes even better. If anything, high self-esteem is an impediment to success and healthy relationships.

Our love for self and others is fickle and often runs dry, but God’s love is a constant. Through the salvation that Jesus offers, we open ourselves up to a love that never changes or ends, that doesn’t ebb and flow with circumstances or emotions. It holds up much better than our frantic attempts at self-love. We experience God’s love not as a result of self-love, but as a consequence of self-surrender and self-forgetfulness. When he fills us with himself, we no longer have to continue filling ourselves. When we are filled with his love, we have what we need to love our neighbors.