Self esteem asks you to win the measuring

The obvious repair is to think better of yourself. Raise your self esteem.

Look at what that actually requires. To feel good about yourself on that model you have to evaluate yourself favourably, which means coming out above average at something, which means you need a measure, which means you have to keep measuring.

That is not only an argument. It is what the research below describes. Self worth is staked on particular domains, and where it is staked it rises and falls with how you do in them, so every event in the domain becomes a test of you.

So self esteem is not the exit from the loop. It is a good round inside the loop, and the next round starts when somebody posts something.