Everyone seeks validation
Sadly, most don’t know that they do
Having spent a lot of time switching activities and making larger life changes in the past few months, I keep asking myself what will make me happy.
It’s hard to pin down happiness to a single thing and it certainly changes amongst people and even over you own lifetime. We often confuse happiness with enjoyable things and experiences, like a gourmet dinner or a luxury vacation, but that foie gras or beach in Thailand, while enjoyable, will only provide fleeting pleasure. Straight up dopamine fix. Repeat when it wears off. Pleasure is a drug.
But it’s a hell of a lot easier to talk about long term happiness you realize that everyone seeks validation from EVERYTHING they do and their level of happiness, over the long run, is highly dependent on how close their activities and interactions get them to feeling validated. Some people are considerably better at this than others and have figured out how to spend a majority of their time on activities and interactions that give them validation.
For some, this is starting a business, for others it’s caring for children, for others it’s making a chair or craft, something that you compulsively do and you derive satisfaction without needing to justify or show it off to others. We often rationalize to ourselves and others that we derive validation from our day jobs, especially go-getter professionals, but this is rarely, rarely the case. You show me someone waking up in the middle of the night and banging away on a spreadsheet or planning a meeting and I’ll show you a liar or a sociopath.
There are a ton of people who are constantly seeking approval and validation from others, and it’s a powerful tool, once you understand how to use it. Tell your friend or partner that you enjoy spending time with them and you’ll likely see a huge positive reaction. Conversely, ignoring them, even if it’s unintentional will likely be hugely disappointing. Nobody likes feeling inconsequential.
We don’t talk about it, but validation drives nearly everything we do. You see this with people seeking approval and acceptance in conversations, showing off their wealth and accomplishments, but this seems pretty hollow and most of us can spot it pretty easily as insecurity. They are placing their sense of validation and self-worth in the hands of others, and are beholden to them to feel good about themselves.
This makes you reactive. Extrinsic validation is a bitch.
This doesn’t sound very fun, to have your longer term sense of self-worth tied to the whims and possible manipulation of others. So take things into your own hands. Try doing more things for the sake of your own enjoyment. I’m writing this because I want to. It seems fun and I want to improve my writing skills. Sorry folks, I’m only doing this for myself and I really don’t care if anyone reads it.
This is different than “do things that feel good” — it’s uniquely activities that make you feel like you’re improving or using a skill that requires your unique view and input. It’s the difference between babysitting and “Mom,” the difference between homemade and fast food.
Of course this is all easy to say, but much harder to do. There’s a huge body of work on this is psychological circles, the most famous of which is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. This is basically a categorization of “quality of life” into stages, like adequate food and water, “security” of person and livelihood, love and belonging amongst others and higher stages like esteem, sense of achievement and finally self-actualization. There’s of course a ton of subdivisions, rehashes, criticism and every grad student seems to have taken a crack at defining the “best” hierarchy, but basically self-actualization is something akin to “not giving a fuck” and doing what you want to do, not really answering to anyone else.
Food for thought if you want a good read on personal development and the conversation circling the body of research is just as interesting as the theory itself.
Generally, the more you can spend all of your time on activities that satisfy those higher needs and less time on the lower ones, the better your sense of self worth is going to fare. Old people have figured this out, and generally just do and say what they want, but then the rug is yanked out from under them as basic maintenance activities (walking, concentrating etc.) get harder. So why wait til you’re old to have enough confidence to do stuff you want to do.
Insecurity drives us to seek validation from others, but this doesn’t make us happy until we pin our
happiness to other talents, accomplishments and self-fulfilling activities and the truth to happiness is probably linked to deriving it internally rather than seeking it externally from others.
