Perhaps There Are Options Other Than "Toxic Confidence" and Insecurity-as-Identity

everything that is not forbidden is compulsory

I’ve told this story a dozen times, and now I’ll tell it again.

In grad school I got along very well with my peers, with one or two notable exceptions. And yet there was one tic that was quite common among them that I found aggravating: they were frequently obsessive about declaring their imposter syndrome. They were, in fact, competitive about it, always wanting to insist they were the ones who felt the very least deserving of their place. It was clearly an in-group signifier, more than anything, a way to show that you had absorbed the norms of self-effacement that had grown in a space filled with people who had spent their lives in books. This wasn’t just a dynamic in my own departments, for the record; even if the ritualistic embrace of the term “imposter syndrome” doesn’t happen everywhere, the performance of insecurity is certainly inescapable in academia. Nobody gave me a particularly hard time about saying that I didn’t feel the same way, but there were plenty of jokes, and sometimes I got a sense of real panic about it, as if my denials risked undermining their own self-declared imposter syndrome. It was almost like they were… insecure about their insecurity.

As I said back then, I wasn’t cartoonishly confident about my strengths as an academic. I just thought, fundamentally, that I belonged in those programs, that I had worked hard in college, that I was a dedicated researcher and an enthusiastic student, and that in general I had what it took to succeed. What imposter syndrome refers to, after all, is the belief that you are an imposter, that your success is not deserved, that you should not actually be involved in whatever professional or academic or creative exploits you’re engaged in because you’re not qualified. And I certainly didn’t feel that way. I didn’t feel extra-super-duper qualified, to be clear, but that certainly doesn’t amount to imposter syndrome. The fact that I completed both my MA and PhD in good standing and with a strong CV certainly lends credence to my belief that I belonged in the program - and, in fact, so did almost all of my peers, given that maybe three or four students I can think of across my MA and PhD experience started programs and didn’t finish them. But then, the whole theatrical embrace of imposter syndrome wasn’t really about a sincere belief that they didn’t belong in the program, that they had gotten in through some mistake. It was, instead, an expression of a very weird element of Millennial culture, which is the embrace of insecurity as a means of belonging.

Which brings me to Savannah Sobrevilla and her recent trend piece, destined to be a New York Times classic, “Toxic Confidence Has Taken Over.” You can already guess the argument here, but I’ll give you the nut anyway:

…it used to be that “impostor syndrome” dominated conversations, the anxious stance of millennials with adult responsibilities and women leading corporate workplaces trying not to rankle. Even if you felt deserving of accolades, the social graces of the time required the expression of modesty.

Now, in an era of aggressively handsome incels and macho political posturing, cultivated humility feels trite. A younger generation, coming out of high school and college in Covid lockdown, feels less beholden to dampening their light. Who has time for affected meekness when playing the braggart not only tickles the soul, but has the potential to convince others of one’s own greatness?

The phrase itself, “toxic confidence,” is doing a lot of work in this essay, and I can just imagine an NYT editor reading the pitch, seeing that phrase, and salivating. But there’s not a lot there, really. Strip away the arch tone and the carefully curated examples (reality-television grifters, Trump-administration blusterers) and what you’re left with is a fairly straightforward complaint: some people believe in themselves too much, and it’s making a certain kind of person uncomfortable. Of course, there’s always been braggarts and narcissists and perennially self-impressed people around us, in any era, and that they’re annoying is not generally considered newsworthy. What makes this a classic NYT trend piece is that it makes an observation that’s comprehensible only to a certain strata of reader - middle aged or younger, culturally savvy, educated, urban in ethos if not necessarily in geography, too online. These people aren’t experiencing the age-old frustration with the conventionally overconfident, but are facing (if Sobrevilla is to be believed) the demise of a recent generational embrace of performative insecurity, which makes them uncomfortable. That discomfort is worth examining, because it reveals less about a cultural pathology than about whose neuroses we’ve decided to normalize.

As usual, I blame my own generation. For roughly fifteen years, Millennial culture ran a remarkable experiment: it rebranded anxiety, self-doubt, and chronic insecurity as virtues. This is certainly connected to the phenomenon of illness as identity and disorder as fashion I’m always complaining about (preorder now!) but is, I think, a distinct phenomenon, the rearrangement of healthy confidence into pathology and pathological self-doubt into virtue. The weird affordances of social media gave certain culturally and socially influential people the ability to imprint their own neuroses onto the wider culture, recasting that neuroses as a sort of down-to-earth norm. In that context, impostor syndrome ceased to be something to overcome and became a membership card. Everybody started bragging about their social anxiety; people gleefully declared their FOGO; “I’m the worst,” said with the right ironic lilt, became fodder for bonding. Vulnerability, performed on cue, was currency. The implicit agreement was powerful and, when you examine it, fairly cruel: if you seemed too assured, too unbothered by your own inadequacy, you were either deluded or dangerous. The rules had been rewritten by indoor kids, the chronic overthinkers, the people who had built entire identities around their relationship with self-doubt, and the rules said confidence was suspect.

What Sobrevilla calls “toxic confidence” is largely just the renegotiation of those rules, an attempt to cast an incipient reclamation of basic, uncomplicated self-assurance as some sort of aggressive masculinist cult. A couple of examples that Sobrevilla calls out specifically include Olympic free skier Eileen Gu and actor Timothée Chalamet; I’m afraid these examples just make Sobrevilla seem afraid of excellence. When Gu - an Olympic gold medalist, a celebrity, a Stanford student, and a burgeoning entrepreneur - says that being inside her own head is “not a bad place to be,” that isn’t pathology; it’s the statement of a young woman who has done the work and is honest about it. (And wouldn’t we prefer for everyone to feel like insider their own head is a nice place to be?) Maybe Gu is a genuinely awful human being, I don’t know, but nothing Sobrevilla references rises to the level of narcissism or whatever other pseudo-medical accusation we’re throwing around these days. I find Chalamet a little aggravating, but when he says that he aspires to be considered among the great actors of his time, when all is said and done, that’s not a statement of Trumpian bellicosity but instead a reflection of honest, healthy ambition. We’ve been so conditioned to expect performative self-deprecation that accurate self-assessment reads as arrogance.

Sobrevilla’s essay conflates real con artistry, those with no qualifications claiming expertise in high-stakes domains, with the altogether different phenomenon of people simply refusing to be coy about their ambitions and abilities. These are not the same thing. One is fraud, while the other is what every self-help book, every therapist, every sports psychologist has been urging people toward for decades: genuine belief in yourself as a precondition for achievement. As you are aware, I am no fan of self-help or therapy culture. But it’s definitely strange to see what would have looked like unexceptional statements of self-belief for much of human history cast as symptoms of a creeping cultural sickness. Sobrevilla even quotes a psychotherapist who claims that looking up to confident people provides “borrowed ego strength,” framing it as a form of regression. But this misreads the dynamic entirely: watching someone operate from a place of real self-belief and emulating them isn’t a symptom of collective helplessness but of simple inspiration, in the most basic, normal, and time-honored sense. It demonstrates that confidence is available, learnable, not the exclusive property of frauds.

The indoor kids built a culture that celebrated their limitations, and I suppoes it’s natural they’d call the exit door out of that culture “toxic,” a beloved Millennial magic word. And if treating confidence as pathological fails to get the job done, there’s always the tactic of insisting that it doesn’t exist at all. Sobrevilla writes,

For those who aren’t multihyphenate Olympians, it’s possible that beneath the slick veneer of seemingly absolute assurance remains the same anxious, uncertain person merely following the new social dictates of the moment.

Well! I’ve never experienced anything close to absolute assurance, personally. I’m afraid that I have to disappoint Ms. Sobrevilla by saying that I have, however, experienced ordinary, healthy assurance. I have felt normal, unobjectionable confidence. I have had the sort of basic, uncomplicated feelings of being more-or-less good enough, interspersed with the usual level of ordinary human self-doubt. Those feelings aren’t fake. They certainly shouldn’t be challenging enough to be called fake. And yet Sobrevilla clearly feels that she has to find some way to undermine them, has to jerry-rig a rationale for suggesting that those feelings can’t be real. This is a psychology I’ve clocked many, many times in my years of doing this: the writer who cannot naturally experience the positive value of something and therefore must insist that no one else can, either. It’s like the recently divorced person, understandably hurt, who insists that everyone is getting divorced these days even though the divorce rate is at a 60-year low. Feeling indicted by other people’s confidence is understandable, to a point. But only to a point. And we can’t pathologize basic self-possession and simple confidence to protect the feelings of the least confident. That way lies madness.

There’s a particular vanity in the person who cannot stop telling you how much they doubt themselves. The theatrically insecure, the performative self-deprecator, the ones who preface every opinion with elaborate disclaimers, those who catastrophizes publicly and often, who makes their anxiety the climate everyone else must dress for…. Such people have simply found a more socially acceptable route to the same destination as the narcissist: all the attention still flows toward them. The room still organizes itself around their needs. The difference is that they’ve disguised bragging as confession. Scratch the surface of Millennial culture and you’ll find this attachment to self-doubt as a virtue - Lena Dunham, Frances Ha, Bo Burnham’s Inside, John Mulaney, Normal People, Tao Lin, Bojack Horseman, Marc Maron’s WTF, Tumblr writ large…. Some of this stuff I like a lot, some I don’t, but this and so much else of Millennial culture relentlessly advanced the message that it was normal to be perpetually anxious and weird to ever feel ordinary human confidence, and this was obviously bad for everyone.

Well, I’m sorry to say that that our time is quickly passing, Millennials, and maybe it’s OK to hand culture off to a new generation and their own curdling neuroses. I have no idea how old Sobrevilla is, but the impression I get reading her piece is one I observe more and more often, which is watching a generation flailing around, realizing that its moment has passed, and not taking it well.

What makes the performatively insecure brand of narcissism more corrosive than its swaggering counterpart is precisely the camouflage, the branding, the “I am just a smol bean” affect that begs you to feel sorry for the people who are busily rewriting culture. The overconfident person at least extends you the basic courtesy of showing their hand. You know what they want, what they think, what they’ll do when threatened; you can push back, disagree, disengage. But theatrical anxiety wraps its self-centeredness in the language of vulnerability, and just to name it is to seem cruel, to seem like you’re punching at someone who is already down. (I promise this piece will get aggrieved reactions of exactly this kind.) The performance of insecurity colonizes the moral high ground while doing the same work as ego - dominating the social space, crowding out other people, demanding accommodation, making the conversation endlessly about the self. Arrogance announces itself, so you can resent it. Performed insecurity demands that you feel sorry for it, which is, when you think about it, a far more shameless ask.