Why Self-Confidence Might Be Our Most Underrated Climate Strategy

Climate change is usually framed as a problem of emissions, technologies, and policies. And while these aspects are important, we must also confront the question of why we continue to consume more than we need, even when we know it is destroying the conditions for life. As an environmental psychologist, I found one surprisingly simple, but deeply uncomfortable answer: many of our climate-destructive behaviors are rooted in low self-confidence and fragile self-esteem, not in ignorance.

Compensation and real need

People with a stable sense of self are far less susceptible to FOMO-messaging in advertisements and social media. Research in psychology consistently shows that individuals with higher self-esteem are less reactive to social comparison, less vulnerable to status anxiety, and less driven by external validation. If I know who I am and what is enough for me, I do not need the next phone to feel relevant, the next car to feel worthy, the next title to feel safe or the next lifestyle upgrade to feel seen. Much of overconsumption is mostly about psychological compensation, not real need. And compensation thrives where self-doubt lives. This is precisely why FOMO marketing works so well. It quietly says: “You are falling behind. You are not enough if you don’t have....” When self-esteem is fragile, such messaging becomes unbearable.

Childhood, conditional belonging, and the roots of “not enough”

Where does this fragility come from? Trauma research, particularly the work of physician and trauma specialist Gabor Maté, offers a compelling explanation. Maté argues that many children grow up learning that love and safety are conditional: “Be nice, behave, don’t make trouble, or else....” When children’s authentic needs are met with withdrawal, punishment, or emotional unavailability, they face the choice to remain authentic and risk losing care or adapt and survive. Children almost always choose survival.

As Maté puts it, children often trade authenticity for attachment. When caregivers are neglectful or inconsistent, children rarely blame the adults. The possibility that those responsible for their survival could be unsafe or unreliable is too terrifying. Instead, children turn the blame inward: “If I were better, more successful, quieter, smarter, then I would be loved.” This conviction does not disappear with age. It becomes part of what I call the Invisible Backpack: the accumulated experiences, assumptions, and coping strategies we carry into adulthood, often unconsciously shaping how we relate to ourselves, others, and the world.

From classrooms to carbon: how systems reinforce insecurity

One-size-fits-all education systems often reinforce this internalized “not good enough” narrative. When success is narrowly defined through standardized metrics, linear achievement, and constant comparison many children learn early that their value is conditional. Later in life, this translates into credential inflation, performative productivity, status competition, and consumption as self-soothing. In this sense, climate change is foremost a psychological crisis, not an ecological one.

Leadership, power, and the Invisible Backpack

The contents of our Invisible Backpacks do not stay private. They scale. Leaders who carry unresolved insecurity are more likely to seek power, control, and material accumulation as compensation. Research in leadership psychology links low self-esteem and unintegrated trauma to dominance behaviors and short-term decision-making. This matters because systems reflect the inner worlds of those who lead them. Extractive leaders perpetuate extractive systems. Defensive leaders design defensive institutions. Insecure leaders normalize competition, hoarding, and growth at all costs. Climate policy, corporate strategy, and global negotiations do not happen in a vacuum. They are shaped by human nervous systems, regardless of whether they are regulated or not.

To add fuel to the fire, many of the behaviors that drive overconsumption, competition, and environmental destruction are often explained away as “human nature” or justified through simplified appeals to evolution. Humans are portrayed as inherently greedy, status-seeking, and short-term oriented, as if these traits were fixed and biologically inevitable. This framing implies that evolution is something that happened long ago and then stopped. Yet contemporary evolutionary psychology and anthropology emphasize that human behavior is highly plastic and deeply shaped by social and ecological contexts. What we often label as “human nature” is better understood as a set of adaptive responses to particular (often traumatic) environments, many of which are historically recent and socially constructed.

Why redefining business matters

We tend to forget that evolution is an ongoing process. Humans continuously co-evolve with the economic, educational, technological, and cultural systems they create. The problem is that imagining a different evolutionary pathway is difficult if we never had experiences that could fill our Invisible Backpacks with alternative ways of organizing work, value, and success. Many people struggle to choose what they want to evolve into because those possibilities remain abstract or unimaginable within dominant systems, nor have they acquired the self-confidence and self-esteem to do so.

This is where redefining business as an entity that solves social issues and creates social value in a financially sustainable way becomes an evolutionary invitation, more than an economic proposal. Such a definition creates space for reflection, healing, and experimentation, allowing societies to rehearse different ways of meeting human needs without extraction or fear at the center. In doing so, it supports a collective choice to evolve toward well-being, cooperation, and regeneration rather than continuing to reproduce systems shaped primarily by trauma-driven survival strategies. This new definition radically shifts the question from “How much profit can we make?” to “What problem are we here to solve?” It also invites a deeper cultural shift from scarcity to enoughness. Financial sustainability remains an important part, as we all still need to pay rent and put food on the table. But money becomes an enabler, not the goal. Success is no longer measured by endless expansion, but by whether human and more-than-human life can be sustained with dignity.

Self-esteem as climate infrastructure

If we are serious about changing anything, then building self-confidence and self-esteem for everyone is climate infrastructure. People who feel worthy without performing are less likely to overconsume, compete destructively, seek identity through possessions, or equate growth with safety. They are also more likely to accept limits, cooperate, live within planetary boundaries, and support policies that prioritize long-term well-being over short-term gain.

A different starting point

Perhaps solving climate change does not start with asking people to sacrifice more, but with helping them remember that they are already enough. When individuals heal, systems change. When leaders heal, institutions change. And when enough finally feels like enough, sustainability stops being a burden and starts becoming the status-quo.