Toxic Confidence Has Taken Over

Everywhere you look these days, the landscape is clogged with confidence men: People with limited experience landing high-ranking government roles. Networks helmed by leaders with scant broadcasting experience. Wellness empires built by entrepreneurs without medical training. An arrogant acquaintance whose presence you find thrilling, maybe.

Perhaps you, too, have noticed the decline in humble brags and performative apologies on social media? A concurrent rise in unshakable self-assurance, unsolicited advice and provocative hot takes? The overqualified don’t hesitate to remind you of their résumé; the underqualified declare themselves authorities; the appropriately qualified claim that their email job is “saving lives.”

If ChatGPT can replace us while insisting that there are only two Rs in the word “strawberry,” it’s no wonder some see the time for a spiky new affect.

“Everyone’s trying influencing; everyone’s paywalling their Substacks,” said Gutes Guterman, 29, a founder of the magazine Byline. “You have to seem like an expert for people to believe in you.”

Amelia Dimoldenberg, a comedian who has made a career out of charming celebrities in her YouTube video series “Chicken Shop Date,” was an early adopter. Deploying the attitude — perhaps the natural register of flirtation — to great effect, she reliably convinces her A-list guests that they are probably a little bit in love with her.

And it has a natural progenitor in drag and hip-hop culture, where reads, diss tracks and storied beefs are founded on inflated egos. It’s the inner voice that drives someone to put out a song titled “I Am a God” and set out to conquer other industries.

Still, 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?

“You’re standing on the ledge, wondering, ‘Should I dive in?’” said the actor and comedian Ivy Wolk on an episode of the popular TikTok show “Subway Takes,” summing up the potential pitfalls of self-doubt. At the same time, she added, other people are coming up behind you “ready to jump.”

Maybe It’s Fun?

It’s partly a product of a new media environment. On platforms like Substack and TikTok, where success relies on convincing others to invest in your singular personality, showing vulnerability or doubt can be risky. Whether it’s posting about a reading series at your local bar or achieving internet notoriety by instructing young men on how to become “gigachads,” these ventures require being bullish on one’s own value.

At its least offensive, toxic confidence is low stakes and entertaining. It’s newsletter writers filling your inbox with unsolicited gift guides and dishy, unedited diary entries. It’s that mediocre actor you barely dated starting a podcast with a paywall and calling herself a political pundit. It is the author Lisa Taddeo directing a post on Instagram to the winners of a fellowship she had been not been granted: “I’ll be watching what you do. I hope it’s better than what I do. But I don’t think it will be. Because what I’m doing is going to be EXCEPTIONAL.”

It’s whatever drives the chaos agents in your orbit to become life coaches.

Perhaps a simple truth is that toxic confidence is charming if you like the person and intolerable if you don’t.

Consider Amanda Frances, a new cast member of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” who has embraced the moniker of “Money Queen” and says she made her fortune selling money manifestation courses.

“I had no formal business experience,” she told her castmate Bozoma Saint John, the first Black C-suite executive at Netflix, over lunch. “I found out I had a gift around, like, the energetic part of money.”

Later, Ms. Saint John gossiped to another castmate, Rachel Zoe, about the interaction: “You’ve never had a job before, so how are you telling people how to get money?”

All of this bravado probably owes something to President Trump, who is known for — among other swaggering displays — using superlatives to boast of his intelligence.

“Nobody knows more about taxes than me, maybe in the history of the world,” he once claimed, for example.

Rarely does Mr. Trump shy from holding forth in speeches and free-associative monologues beyond those typical of presidents. It has become a modus operandi for his administration. Last September, for example, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth summoned hundreds of the U.S. military’s top officials to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., for a widely broadcast, in-person meeting.

Highly decorated admirals and generals sat stone-faced as Mr. Hegseth delivered a nearly hourlong speech. He concluded the address by warning enemies abroad with the acronym “FAFO” — language more commonly found in online circles than in formal military settings, roughly translating to “mess around and find out.”

The proclamation was met with minimal audience response — a lonely woo from the crowd — and the assembly was later described as a “waste of time” by former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. Senate Democrats estimated the event’s cost at roughly $6 million in taxpayer funds.

Borrowed Ego

If we occasionally find ourselves in the thrall to confidence men, it may be because we desire a bit of what they have.

Looking up to someone bold and brash can give one “that feeling of borrowing ego strength,” said Rachel Easterly, a psychotherapist based in Brooklyn. She referred to narcissism in children, an otherwise normal phase of childhood development.

“It’s very frightening to be a small, helpless person — you’re in a world where you don’t have a lot of power, so you compensate with this defense,” Ms. Easterly said. “It can happen on a societal level.” When Freud, Donald Winnicott and others were developing their theories on why people were drawn to cults of personality, she said, it was “in the context of societal collapse and war.”

“We are feeling similar sorts of existential dread as adults now,” she added, “in terms of nihilism in our culture, climate change, income inequality.”

That may be why so many were drawn to “Marty Supreme,” last year’s blockbuster about a striving table tennis wunderkind, and captivated by Timothée Chalamet’s brashness in promoting it.

“This is probably my best performance, you know, and it’s been like seven, eight years that I feel like I’ve been handing in really, really committed, top-of-the-line performances,” Mr. Chalamet, the film’s lead, said in an interview last year.

“This is really some top-level stuff,” he added, using an expletive.

Mr. Chalamet collected a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice Award for his portrayal of Marty. But by the time the Academy Awards rolled around, he had gotten a bit too comfortable in the culture’s embrace of his toxic confidence, and it quickly turned Icarian.

In a sit-down with the actor Matthew McConaughey, Mr. Chalamet claimed that “no one cares about” opera and ballet. It didn’t seem to occur to him to backtrack or to try to reassure members of those communities of his admiration. Instead, he doubled down, taking aim at artists’ lack of income: “I just lost 14 cents in viewership.”

Punching down is one way to make these high levels of confidence less charming. Those who manage to pull it off tend to be those who are not enjoying their success at another’s expense. Light ribbing is passable.

At the Winter Olympics in Milan, the Chinese freestyle skier Eileen Gu exhibited a bubblier version of toxic confidence as she described what it was like to be inside her own head (“not a bad place to be”) and what she would tell her younger self (“I would love me, and that’s the biggest flex of all time”). She was also honest about the intensive routines she maintains so that she can compete in the Olympics, study quantum physics at Stanford and model with IMG — and the enormous pressure she puts on herself to keep it all up.

That makes it difficult to argue that moments like this are unearned: After winning gold in the women’s halfpipe and two additional silver medals this winter, a reporter asked if she considered her achievements “two silvers gained” or “two golds lost.”

She broke into laughter: “I am the most decorated female free skier in history.”

Don’t Be Coy

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.

“I genuinely don’t know if everyone believes in themselves as much as they say they do, but I think it’s sort of the only option,” said Ms. Guterman, the magazine founder, who described herself as “appropriately” confident. “Because if you don’t really believe in yourself right now, you don’t really have anything going for you.”

The mentality seems to have helped Ms. Wolk. After being forced to delete her social media by a cable network as a teenager, she kept posting anyway, quickly gaining half a million followers. Last year, after a turn in the film “Anora,” Ms. Wolk, now 21, portrayed a brutally assertive, pigtailed motel clerk in the A24 mommy-horror flick “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” working alongside ASAP Rocky and Rose Byrne.

If you have a goal, it doesn’t serve you to be coy about it, Ms. Wolk said over the phone. “You can’t lie down and hope that opportunities just come up,” she said. “You have to go out and grab it and say yes.” •

Share this with someone who needs more toxic confidence.

Toxic

Confidence