As a hairstylist, I see dysphoria daily. Clients walk in confessing it without realising they are doing theology in the mirror: “People with curly hair want straight hair, and people with straight hair want curly hair.” Or they sigh, “We want what we don’t have.” These are not just cosmetic preferences, they are micro-liturgies of a culture discipled in dissatisfaction. Beneath them lies an ontological ache: I want another’s image. Self-loathing, disguised as aspiration, is the liturgy of a fallen anthropology.
Theologically, this posture is ancient. It echoes the serpent’s whisper, “you will be like God” (Gen 3:5), the primal dysphoria that desired another’s glory. Humanity’s disease has never been ignorance of purpose, but envy of another’s. The world’s mirrors have become our catechisms, teaching that what God gave is insufficient.
René Girard captures this pathology with surgical precision. He writes that human beings “desire according to the desire of the other,” revealing that our wants are not spontaneous but mimetic, borrowed from another’s longing.¹ Erich Fromm expands this in Escape from Freedom, observing that modern people, unable to tolerate the anxiety of authentic selfhood, flee into conformity, desiring not what is good, but what is approved.² Jean-Paul Sartre calls this self-deception mauvaise foi (bad faith), a refusal to face the truth of one’s givenness by performing an alternate existence.³ Jacques Lacan, through his “mirror stage,” explains how we first mistake our reflection for our self, and spend the rest of our lives chasing that illusion.⁴ Charles Taylor diagnoses this in modernity’s “ethics of authenticity,” where identity becomes an endless project of self-construction detached from any transcendent horizon.⁵
Each of these scholars, from differing vantage points, witnesses the same human crisis: we want to be someone else. We live in mimetic exile, attempting to author what was meant to be received.
John the Baptist stands as an antidote to this contagion. When interrogated by priests and Levites, he confesses plainly, “I am not the Christ” (John 1:20). In a world intoxicated by self-promotion, his declaration of not-being becomes the truest form of identity. He knows who he is by knowing who he is not. The humility of “I am not” prepares the way for the One who alone can say “I AM.”
In contrast, world religions and modern ideologies often elevate humanity toward divinisation; anthropomorphic god-complexes cloaked as enlightenment, self-realisation, or therapeutic wholeness. Yet, their towers always collapse under the weight of self-worship. The imitation of divinity without obedience to it is merely sanctified narcissism.
Then comes Christ. In John 12:27–28, He utters the words that shatter every counterfeit calling:
“Now My soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour. Father, glorify Your name.”
Here stands the only Man who could desire another destiny, yet refuses to. His humanity trembles, but His divinity remains submitted. “For this purpose” (houtos ho skopos) carries the sense of fixed direction, a divine target. The Son does not construct His purpose; He consents to it.
The apostle Paul later names this process of restoration:
“Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires… and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:22–24).
This is not the pursuit of becoming something newer than God intended, but the unbecoming of everything false. As an anonymous writer once said, “Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”⁶
Constructivism tells us to become; Christ calls us to unbecome, to lay down the invented self and receive the conferred one. When Jesus says, “For this purpose I came,” He redeems purpose itself from envy. In Him, dysphoria dies, and givenness lives again.
Practical Application: Reclaiming the Given Life
The world tells us to reinvent ourselves. Scripture calls us to return to ourselves, to the self God authored before comparison corrupted it. Every believer must face the mirror of John 12:27–28: “For this purpose I came to this hour.”
Our first task, then, is not to ask “What is my purpose?” but “Whose purpose defines me?” The modern crisis of identity does not stem from a lack of purpose but from too many counterfeit ones. We try on callings like hairstyles, changing with the trend, forgetting that true purpose is not styled, it is surrendered to.
In practice, this means learning to distinguish between aspiration and assignment.
Aspiration seeks fulfilment through visibility, validation, or comparison. Assignment flows from intimacy with the Father, often hidden, often costly, but always infused with grace.
Christ’s obedience was not glamorous, it was glorious. And those who follow Him must learn the same paradox: that the path to eternal significance often passes through temporary obscurity.
If you find yourself envying another’s calling, pause and ask: What false story about God’s goodness is my envy telling me? Then return to the mirror of grace and hear His voice say, “You are mine. For this purpose, I made you.”
Your freedom is not found in becoming extraordinary, but in being exactly who Heaven had in mind when it knit you together (Psalm 139:13–16).
Prayer
Father God,
Deliver me from the envy of another’s calling. Teach me to see Your glory in the ordinary, and to trust that what You gave is not lacking.
When my soul is troubled and I want another hour, another life, remind me that for this purpose You called me, to glorify Your Name, not my own.
Strip away every false self I’ve worn for love that was never real. Restore to me the joy of being Yours, and let the mirror of my heart reflect not imitation, but incarnation, Christ in me, the hope of glory.
In Your Magnificent, Holy, and Mighty Name King Lord Jesus,
Amen.
Footnotes
1) René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), 15.
2) Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941), 132–33.
3) Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 86–87.
4) Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1–7.
5) Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 28–30.
6) Attributed to Unknown Author; widely cited as an anonymous aphorism.
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