The only person authorized to tell us that we are enough is the God who gave us our lives in the first place. Right at the heart of the gospel is the promise that God already sees us as righteous because of Jesus’s righteousness received through faith. 

Are You Enough?

I don’t know where it came from, but now it seems to be everywhere. I hear it on podcasts and TV shows. I’ve seen it on T-shirts and social media graphics. A quick search for it on Amazon brings up hundreds of results, ranging from books for kids and adults to silver charm bracelets to hoodies of many colors to embroidered makeup cases to wall hangings and throw pillows and stickers to place on your rearview mirror. I’m talking about the simple, uplifting mantra for our times: “You Are Enough.”

Surely you’ve seen this too. But have you stopped to consider why this phrase, in these settings, is this popular? I see at least two implications.

For one thing, it means that insecurity about our worth is a massive problem in our culture. I’m not just talking about how wide the problem must reach if this phrase is popping up all over the place. I’m talking about how deep the problem must go. Just how low must my self-view be if I get a boost from a statement made by who knows who, about no one in particular, and mass-produced for sale at suburban homegoods megastores?

The popularity of this phrase fits perfectly with what French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg argues in The Weariness of the Self, his history of depression among contemporary Western people. It’s not a book about how to cope with depression, all the mysterious factors that cause it, or how to get rid of it. It’s a book about what depressed people are saying about themselves, about how they are describing their experience.

He believes depression has spread the way it has, when and where it has, because of the cultural expectation that it’s up to each individual to define the meaning and value of his own life. The defining feature of modern depression, based on interviews of those who are suffering, is a suffocating sense of inadequacy. Here’s how Ehrenberg puts it: “Depression presents itself as an illness of responsibility in which the dominant feeling is that of failure.”

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