Narcissus, a beautiful but intolerably proud and disdainful young man, fell in love with himself. When seeing his image in the pool, he could not get away but remained fixed until he was turned into a flower of his own name. However, as a flower, narcissus yields no fruit when it’s ripe and simply fades away.

Narcissus is a person who has an extremely high self-esteem—valuing himself too good.

But what is self-esteem? The definition is straightforward: self evaluation of your own worth. How attractive are you? Do you think you are important? How successful is your life? Or, simply answer this daily greeting: How are you?

American society seems to be maniac in boosting self-esteem. Thousands and thousands of books, programs and scientific literatures are convincing people that if you have high self-esteem, you will be a winner, sooner or later. Dr. Baumeister is one of many psychologists who disbelieve this credo.

In a recent Scientific American review, Dr. Baumeister and his colleagues argued that boosting self-esteem is worthless, if not harmful (http://www.sciam.com). To solidify their arguments, the authors discussed school achievement, youth sex, drug use, and family and career success. They showed that a high self-esteem poorly predicted academic success in high school and college students. Self-esteem was also not related to job performance. People with high self-esteem were more prone to prejudice, violence, drug use, unrestrained sex, and more extramarital affairs, simply due to their curiosity and tendency of overlooking others.

So what was wrong with those positive self-esteem studies? The authors pointed out several fundamental flaws in many previous studies. One flaw was self-reported outcomes in many psychological studies, thus subjecting to self serving bias—people always want to show good impression to others. For example, to objectively measure physical attractiveness, studies used independent panels to examine the attractiveness of participants. These studies found that there was no relationship between attractiveness and self-esteem despite that there was a strong relationship between self-reported attractiveness and self-esteem. It seems that people are beautiful in the eyes of themselves. Recall Narcissus.

Another flaw in many positive studies was that they examined the correlation but interpreted the relationship as if it was causal. For example, there was a strong correlation between self-esteem and self-reported happiness. We can’t say that self-esteem causes happiness because the other way around can also be true. It is possible that people are successful in work and feel self-worthy and happier.It may exist a positive feedback: more successes—more self-esteem—happier life—more successes.

So what can we do? It seems to everybody that something must be good when viewing oneself positively. It at least makes you feel good. Unfortunately, the authors didn’t give us definite answers. Studies found that self-esteem might improve one’s persistence when facing failure. Those with higher self-esteem sometimes did perform better than those with low self-esteem. It seems to me these reasons are enough to boost one’s self-esteem.

The real problem of self-esteem, I think, lies in its magnitude. When one boosts his self-esteem to the extent of arrogance and egotism, it is certainly too much and likely causes social problems. Otherwise, keep working on your self-esteem because lower self-esteem is harmful to you in all respects.

“Some days are blue, some days are yellow”, Dr. Seuss versed in My Many Colored Days. We need good feelings to live through tough days, and some good feelings to enjoy good days. That’s the way life goes.

PS. I read the story of Narcissus from the Francis Bacon’s writing. I can’t help telling you that narcissus is also a toxic plant.