Please Tell Me I’m Good: Humanity’s Need for External Validation

By: Ben Bielert

It doesn’t matter what other people think. This is a lie we tell ourselves daily, while we scramble to find some semblance of meaning in this life. They say that you shouldn’t care what other people think. But isn’t this just a strange dichotomy of life? We all care what other people think, even those who insist that they don’t. Don’t be fooled by the quacks and the self-help gurus who will lie to you and say that you shouldn’t need this. It’s natural to want external validation, but I think that we should be conscientious about how we get it and what we get it for. If we do these things, then we can harness this need to the benefit of ourselves and others, and turn something that can be toxic into something that has the capacity for much good.

Our society today is so performative and so interconnected. We put so many of the things we do on display and look for external validation. It almost makes the very notion that we shouldn’t care what other people think seem laughable. Maybe we shouldn’t care. Maybe we should move to the beat of our own drums and follow our judgement and hearts. One could make an argument for that. But whether we should or we shouldn’t, whether there’s a virtue to being a freethinker or not, the truth is that the majority of us care about what others think. We care big time.

For many of us at one point or another in our lives, removing ourselves from society has seemed very appealing. I know it certainly has to me, and I’m sure many of you reading have felt the same at one point or another. How nice it would be to just disappear into the hills or the woods and build a cabin. How nice it would be to be free of so many of our society’s pressures.

This doesn’t mean we don’t care about what others think though, it is a symptom of it. The largest hermits in the world, they care. Isn’t that part of why they’re hermits and avoiding the world? Sure, part of it is that they might see how sick our society is and just want to wash their hands of it, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, no? We’re social animals by nature, and even the most antisocial of us hope to find those that they resonate with. I posit that the rare few who actually remove themselves from the populace were judged or mistreated by people. They remove themselves from that pressure, and in doing so they reveal how important it is to satisfy that need or to be rid of it. Make no mistake either, you can’t be rid of it while living in a society. People will approve or disprove of your actions whether you like it or not.

I don’t believe that there’s anything inherently wrong with caring about what others think. Caring what others think and striving to be respected and liked holds our society together, it pushes us to achieve, and it is integral to the very fabric of civilization. The problem comes in how that manifests. I do think we run into some issues when our values become skewed or when false beliefs are held collectively and influence our goals.

Currently, in my opinion, our values are skewed, and we are operating under many false beliefs. We lack a cohesive direction as a society, and our capacity for communication has advanced to the point where we can seek validation immediately, thus turning our need for approval into a form of immediate gratification. Flashy, visual things receive more praise, and acts of substance or that require more effort receive less praise. This is making us a vapid, vain, materialistic, and self-centered society. It’s keeping up with the Joneses on steroids.

Things are currently not where we need them to be, but that doesn’t mean this can’t be fixed. Any issue that we can create, we too can correct. We need a paradigm shift, and badly.

Let me ask you this: what makes a life worth living?

At the end of it all, when you look back on your days, what is it that is going to make you think that you spent your relatively short time in this world well?

I can tell you what I think. What makes a life well-lived and worth living is adding value to the lives of others. Oh sure, being happy and finding enjoyment and meaning are crucial, but for many of us, these things and long-lasting versions of these things can be found in satisfying this single condition. Does your life contribute something to the lives of others? Has it contributed to the lives of others in a meaningful way? If it does or has, then you likely feel fairly satisfied with your life. If you do not feel this way, then you are likely grappling with what it’s all for. You are more likely to feel lonely and listless.

We are sitting here, on this little ball of rock, orbiting a fairly unexceptional yellow dwarf of a sun. We are these intelligent apes, with these more developed prefrontal cortexes. We can think ahead, we can plan, we can conceive of ideas that are far more complex than the other members of the animal kingdom, and for that, we are something special. I believe that we have a purpose in this vast cosmos, but it extends so far beyond just ourselves. We could be more, we could do more, but we need to expand our view. We need to begin looking beyond these short windows and our anthropocentric view. If our values centred on the good we could do for this world, and on improving things for not only our species but others, if we started caring about the long-game and not of the approval of just our contemporaries but our descendants, then we could take this inherent need and instinct of ours and harness it as a force for greatness. Who cares what your contemporaries are going to think anyway? They will be dead around the time when you will be dead. If you want to create a lasting impact, shouldn’t you strive for the approval of those who will come after you? You may never actually hear it, but it will echo for far longer.

© Benjamin Bielert, all rights reserved