“When I was a junior in high school, maybe this happened to you. My parents kept coming to me—my mother would keep coming to me and saying, ‘You know, honey, go out for the chess club.’ I said, ‘Mom, I hate chess.’ ‘Yeah, I know,’ she says, ‘but it would look so good on your college application.’ ‘Why don’t you volunteer to do some of that? Don’t they do some—don’t they feed the homeless and the hungry downtown every Saturday morning?’ ‘Yeah, Mom, I don’t want to go there. I hate that.’ She says, ‘I know, but it would look so good on your college application.’ So that my junior in high school, I just did on all kinds of stuff that I had absolutely no interest in doing for themselves, for itself, but I was put together a resume. And that is what your ego is doing all the time. You’re in jobs that you take no pleasure in. You’re having—you’re you’re doing diets that you take no pleasure in. You’re doing all kinds of things that you are not doing for themselves, but you are, by comparing yourself to other people, you’re trying—you’re boasting. The word boasting here means to recommend yourself. It means you are creating a self-esteem resume desperate to fill the sense of inadequacy and emptiness.”
Tim Keller in Blessed Self-Forgetfulness
Surrounding Biblical Exposition: The speaker is unpacking the natural condition of the human ego and explaining how the human heart tries to build its identity, self-worth, and purpose around things other than God through comparison and boasting (pride).
Illustration’s Point: Human beings constantly perform, take on unwanted tasks, and build resume-like achievements not out of genuine interest or joy, but as a desperate mechanism of the ego to combat internal emptiness and prove their worth through comparison.
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