How the self-esteem craze took over America

This is a great article, but despite its nuance I feel like the author is still misrepresenting "self-esteem" as a concept just a bit. I realize that the point of the piece is to go through the history of the "craze" in all its most outrageous aspects, particularly in childhood education, and also to make it clear that "Maybe it isn't that high self-esteem causes high performance, but rather the reverse, that people who are more talented or smart or successful have higher self-esteem because of their positive attributes and accomplishments." These are important things to lay out, particularly that telling people how amazing they are—on its own—means very little unless the power structure they inhabit is actually capable of responding to the desire to do great things that this increased self-esteem would prompt in a person. That's what I think we should be emphasizing: raising people's self-esteem absolutely can "solve problems," but only if it's accompanied by a pathway to actually realize that desire. This binary system of "motivation" and "pathway" is interdependent, and the absence of the one element would be similarly ineffective the other way around; give people the literal ability to do something good for themselves and they're not necessarily going to do it without any encouragement. Maybe this is a truism, but I feel it's unhelpful to focus on just one half of the picture here.

The examples of self-esteem boosting the author uses are characteristically sappy: "Believe in yourself and anything is possible." That's obviously a hyperbole, and "anything being possible" does not necessitate that said anything will be achieved, just that it can. If you are given a key to unlock a door, you are not obligated to actually walk over and unlock it, but it would definitely make you feel much better about being able to get inside (without the key, your options would be to sit outside or try to kick the door down; a pretty demotivating set of options). If nothing else, although people acquiring higher self-esteem may not "solve the problem" it was intended to solve (a given societal issue), it absolutely raises the happiness of the person in question. And thus if it had zero impact on the societal issue it was presumed to solve, but one unit of impact on a personal issue it wasn't necessarily expected to solve (but solved nonetheless), then, speaking hedonistically, that is still an improvement over the previous state. So saying that the self-esteem craze "obviously" failed downplays the importance of positive thinking, which is always going to have an impact on people's end-happiness—certainly a few kind words will not bring about a halt to crime worldwide, but they still give people a better existence, and it would be absurd to suggest that that literally enjoying life more counts for nothing.

Perhaps the specific way in which the self-esteem movement manifested over the past few decades would indeed "explain why [millennials] score higher in measures of narcissistic personality traits," but it is challenging to make the argument that living in an environment that is inherently supportive is something we need to look at entirely negatively. We can drop the cheesy slogans and forced sweetness if they don't do anything substantial—personally, I know that I'd rather not be complimented at all than receive one that wasn't genuine. However, we shouldn't take the supposed failure of the self-esteem movement as an indication that positivity as a concept is pointless, which I feel may be an unintended side effect of this article—particularly to an audience that may use it as proof that the "snowflake generation" is the product of pseudoscience, and therefore that all philosophy emanating from it is invalid. I decry any and all subtle movements toward societal cynicism, and would encourage others to analyze "failed" movements as avenues for further learning, not dead ends.