Confidence culture milks a cash cow by Isobella Baggaley

CONFIDENCE CULTURE MILKS A CASH COW

ISOBELLA BAGGALEY wipes the gloss off confidence culture fakery.

Be assertive.

Stand tall. Believe in yourself. Make eye contact. Love your body. Smile more.

How often have we heard these phrases in the media? Or to advertise a product?

There has been a major shift in the promotion of confidence in the media. Parenting articles now tell parents that it is OK to be imperfect, as long as their kids are self-assured.

Beauty companies and clothing brands started telling us to love ourselves the way we are. Self-care has been advocated, and flaws are welcomed. At first glance, we are living at the pinnacle of societal confidence. But how great is the culture surrounding confidence really? Is it all superficial? A significant problem with the culture surrounding confidence to this day is that it is now perceived as an almighty way to solve all your problems.

The majority of the industry built around confidence is a scam. Sure, smiling more often is a nice thing, it is always good to smile, but at the end of the day, smiling more is not going to help a person’s depression or get a person a job.

Buying a new mascara is not going to help someone deal with a stressful situation, despite what marketing teams want you to believe.

This attitude, instead of holding workplaces, schooling systems, the government and many other exterior subjects accountable for issues that are often systemic and not the fault of the individual, shames people for their ‘lack of self-esteem’, and calls on them to change their posture and hold eye contact, internalising the idea that all your problems will just magically vanish with confidence. Confidence has been commercialised, as companies use it for marketing.

The promotion of confidence, particularly for women, has been heavily disseminated across our society through the media, and younger generations are spending more on methods of self-improvement, such as diet plans, life coaching, and workout regimens.

Following this trend, many skincare, makeup and diet companies use confidence to market their products, essentially stating that if you buy and use our products to look a certain way, you will be guaranteed to have genuine confidence and become your ideal self.

The corporations that do so create a direct link between confidence and outward appearance, in a successful attempt to monetize and capitalise on society’s issues with self-esteem.

This link promotes the idea that confidence is synonymous with being conventionally attractive, instead of it being a feeling, and pervades the underlying message, which is that you cannot live your best life unless you meet society’s rigorous and ever-changing beauty standards.

Confidence to the standard portrayed through the media is largely unachievable for the majority of the population.

Having confidence is illustrated as being extremely wealthy, attractive, happy, intelligent, healthy, with consistently trendy clothes and a great partner.

It is conveyed as a lifestyle, and a hard one to reach. This unattainable poster image of confidence becomes internalised as something that must be achieved in order to live a happy life.

These portrayals, often juxtaposing their original purpose of encouraging self-confidence, cause harm to a person’s self-worth, as people assess themselves harshly according to this unachievable expectation.

We hear the phrase ‘fake it till you make it’ far too often in relation to showing confidence. While in theory, the mindset may seem like an effective way of gaining and maintaining a sense of self-worth, the reality is that this method only works for conventionally attractive individuals, and

If you truly want to be something or do something, it must come from your genuine self.

We should not be promoting the idea that to be confident, one must fake things about themselves to ‘fit in’, as it goes against the whole notion of self-confidence.

The relatively new idea of self-care also plays into this concept and is connected to this universal desire to be more confident. The notion of ‘self-care’ first became popular in 2016, with a major spike in Google searches and articles written about the topic.

There were so many guides to self-care written, that guides to the guides had to be created. Nowadays, in lieu of these guides, we have things such as ‘50 self-affirmations to say to yourself in the morning’.

‘Twenty of the best skincare products’ and the ever-growing craze over becoming ‘That Girl’. Ironically, self-care was originally established by black activists as a form of protest, and a method of dealing with systemic oppression.

The concept was less about self-indulToday, the only war self-care is waging is one against frown lines with $200 moisturisers.

The media tells people that in order to properly do self-care and feel confident they have to follow a certain routine, and almost every step of this routine is associated with spending money. Lots of money.

And if you do not have this money, tough luck. You are never going to be confident. The routines encourage things such as buying and using manifestation journals, bath bombs, yoga mats and green smoothies – as if they are the solution to the confidence deficit, which ties back into the monetisation of low self-worth.

The ‘That Girl’ craze revolves around waking up at 5 am to do pilates, drinking green juices, eating only organically, and dressing in beige athleisure.

The trend was falsely overwritten to being the height of confidence, however, it was nearly impossible for most members of the lower and middle class to participate in.

The trend is almost entirely centred on money and consumerism, rather than These are all clear examples of how the standard of confidence portrayed in the media is largely unattainable.

Confidence is viewed as a personality trait – you either have it, or you don’t - and if you don’t, you should strive to gain it.

It’s regarded as a constant state, something fundamental to oneself. But the reality is, confidence is not a lifestyle and it is as fickle as all of our other emotions. It comes from circumstances and changes from moment to moment. The self-esteem deficit is now a systemic issue that our society faces on a daily basis.

The consistent commercialisation of confidence, and the pressing of the notion that you can only be truly confident if you are wealthy and meet society’s beauty standards, has formed this negative culture surrounding the topic.

What the media does not reflect, however, is that the way to raise people’s self-esteem is to focus on fixing structural issues, not by trying out a new eyeliner or smiling more often.

Confidence is about having faith in who you are, not changing yourself to meet an impossible idealistic standard.

‘Buying a new mascara is not going to help someone deal with a stressful situation despite what marketing teams want you to believe.’ ‘. . . you can only be truly confident if you are wealthy and meet society’s beauty standards, has formed this negative culture surrounding the topic.’

‘Confidence is about having faith in who you are, not changing yourself to meet an impossible idealistic standard.’