By Georgia Kaufman

Media Production Editor

I am awesome.

Like really awesome. I love myself a lot. Truly. 

It’s inspiring to witness people beginning to understand their self worth through affirmations of self-love, as the philosophy of loving yourself has become extremely prevalent in today’s society. However, this influx of personal pride has quickly become an overflow of narcissism, egocentricity, and vanity. There is a fine line between the concepts of arrogance and confidence. While confidence is the act of being assured in one’s self worth and abilities, arrogance is the act of exaggerating one’s self worth by deprecating the importance of others. The aforementioned line between these two ideas has quickly become non-existent among teenagers.

Take, for instance, the idea of “main character energy.” This concept — established through social media, namely TikTok — romanticizes superiority complexes. With this ideology, one must prove to either themselves or others that they are interesting enough to be one-of-a-kind; God-forbid any aspect of them is similar to that of another person. This idea, now dubbed amongst Generation Z as “main character energy,” has disregarded its original intent.

There is a difference between loving yourself in public and loving yourself in private. It seems that the central facet of public self-love has evolved into a measurement of superiority and inferiority. If loving yourself encourages you to make others feel “less than human,” that has evolved from self-love to the development of a superiority complex. No longer are we loving ourselves for the good of our own well being; rather, we are loving ourselves because it has become a social media trend. The genuinity behind self-love is becoming less and less, for many people do not truly love themselves, they only claim to do so for the aesthetic of “romanticizing their lives.”

I believe that private self-love is what truly loving yourself is all about. This doesn’t necessarily mean you only love yourself in private, but it does mean you don’t gloat and boast about yourself and how awesome you are as a normal topic of conversation. 

Self-love should not be a competition, for it cannot be measured. Self-love does not mean that you are the only person who matters, for the world does not revolve around you. And self-love certainly does not mean your importance as a human is any greater or less than any other person, for each of the 7.7 billion people on this planet matter just as much as you do. Re-draw the line between confidence and arrogance.