Is Self-Esteem a Purchasable Commodity?

Like the changing tide, our self-esteem can ebb and flow with the level of our income. Are there times when your self-esteem inflates because your wallet is full but at other times deflates because it's not? For many of us, the answer is, yes, strongly suggesting that self-esteem, like any other commodity, is purchasable.

However unbecoming this relationship may seem, money and self-worth often covary such that increases in personal wealth directly contribute to increases in self-esteem, and likely, vice versa. And, as might be expected, the relationship between these two variables applies across gender identities.

Strong “Money Emotions" Shape Our Behavior

Surely, money “moves" us, not just in terms of how we spend it or what we spend it on, but we can be profoundly influenced by the significance we attribute to it. Reflect on how you react when your attention turns to money, especially your own. What are your most predominant feelings and what might they reveal about you?

Merely thinking about money can rally intense feelings—often feelings of deprivation—that shape or even contort our behavior. Peculiarly, some acknowledge habits like arranging money from smaller to larger bills in their wallets or even ordering it by serial numbers. Perhaps more eccentrically, some iron their money, presumably to smooth its wrinkles for a crisper, unused, or more “youthful" appearance. Others wash it, giving new meaning to the expression "filthy lucre.“

Do you have any unique money habits, rituals or idiosyncrasies? Perhaps? The personal uses and meanings we impose on money are probably as diverse as we who possess it.

A Powerful Propellant

Money can lift our self-esteem, defying any negative psychological forces that otherwise drag it down, like rocket fuel lifting against the strong force of gravity.

Proverbially, money can burn a hole in our pocket. What’s your appetite for spending? Curiously, the sheer act of spending money—regardless of what its being spent on—can be plump with personal meaning that exceeds the value of what is being purchased. Or does frugality reign supreme where simply the beefed-up possession of money is a desired end in itself? A preserving, unyielding grip on our greenbacks may imply that spending it would strip us of our security or our personal worth.

Further, do you derive a sense of power simply from knowing you are able to purchase something of value whether you buy it or not—another self-esteem issue?

Money-Defined Worth

Regardless of its “customized" personal meanings, for better or worse, money is an indispensable, inescapable feature of social commerce, the dogged currency of our daily subsistence. Certainly, the size of our income can play an outsized role in determining our social status, ranking us within a hierarchy of our fellow wage earners.

Maybe it shouldn't, yet it often plays this de facto, all-too-determining role as the distinguishing attribute or sole criterion of our personal value. Moreover, great wealth can be a perfect cover-up that obscures or blinds us to the less developed or even the repugnant features of the wealth holder, concealing a more complete view of their character.

Love and Money, Never Enough

Not unlike our earliest love relationships, our relationship with money is deeply taprooted in our past when we first experienced its significance or learned its value or the pain of its absence. Do your early experiences with money shape your present-day relationship to it?

Self-Esteem Essential Reads

3 Myths About Self-Compassion

Letting Go of the Chase and Reclaiming Your Self-Worth

Author Sam Keen in his book, The Passionate Life, writes, “None of us escapes childhood unscathed,“ that is, none of us was perfectly raised or loved. Specifically, parental love, as well-intended as it may be, is rarely, if ever, ideally administered in precise dosages that accurately or appropriately target our needs at particular phases of our development. This inevitable misalignment can leave us feeling misunderstood, deprived even undeserving and unworthy.

Money, too, can feel like a shorted, never enough experience because it is a finite, limited resource, particularly when it‘s perceived as bestowing our personal worth.

Compensating for Past Deprivations

Pulitzer Prize winner and American icon William Faulkner wrote, “The past is not dead, it's not even past.“ With this maxim in mind, do you, or someone you know, compensate for the deprivations of the past—which may be very much alive—by subtly or flagrantly flaunting material possessions as if they were redemption from past deficiencies, a here-and-now verification of personal status or worth? To the extent you identify with these not-so-uncommon but questionable tendencies, ask yourself: Does my self-esteem lean too heavily upon these conventional but still dubious emblems of success, as if it had been purchased?

In many cases, this kind of money-flaunting behavior can be understood as a compensatory defense—a rebounding out of past impoverishments into a present-day opposite, the showy, ostentatious display of wealth that appears to vanquish the unpleasantness of the past’s shortfalls and deprivations.

The Past’s Grasp

Does your past set an exacting standard by which you judge the size of your paycheck or your overall financial or personal status? How much do these money-based appraisals affect how you relate to yourself or others?

Money’s Biggest payoff

Should our financial wherewithal serve as an arbitrator of our worth? Before you answer, consider this caveat: Unless we’re a trust-fund baby with a hefty, inherited sum of unearned greenbacks, procuring an income, especially a big one, necessitates its customary or expected prerequisites, namely, the virtual indispensability of sustained, unremitting hard-work, the kind needed to trod the often long, potholed, road to prosperity with its guaranteed disappointments, frustrations and setbacks.

However, en route to monetary security or success and its shiny, showable accoutrements, we acquire along the way the lifelong advantages of “inconspicuous wealth." Meaning, the biggest payoff coming from our pursuit of money is how it promotes or necessitates the development of the very capacitating, enriching traits integral to emotional intelligence—the crown jewels of maturity.

This breed of personal “wealth or worth" isn’t conspicuous or tangible and can only be inferred from our thoughts and actions. It entails a deepening awareness and control of our emotions for the purpose of self-regulation, social skills development, tolerance of uncertainty and frustration, and the ability to delay gratification. Clearly, these qualities are key to a sustainable, successful work ethic, but convincingly of greater importance, they are also the quintessential ingredients of bona fide self-esteem. Moreover, they spawn, support and boost our esteem independent of the transience of money and the other conspicuous symbols of “success.“

Convincingly, the most fulfilling, durable rewards arising from our pursuit of money are best measured intangibly by the self-esteem enhancing effects inherent in the pursuit of money itself and not by any amount of money we might obtain or the things it purchases.

By this reasoning, self-esteem is a purchasable commodity.