Seeking Approval is Chasing the Dragon’s Tail

a futile game you'll never win

The student: homage to Picasso by David Hockney, 1973

It’s easy to gaze into other people’s eyes to learn who you’re “supposed” to become. We are, after all, social creatures. Validation from peers and group acceptance are not just accouterments to the ego, they are evolutionary prerequisites for survival. The web we call Reality is woven with relational strings. Thus, your life is based on the quality of your relationships—that is, how you relate to your friends, enemies, frenemies, social structures, the world at large, the universe/god, and of course, to yourself.

Conventional wisdom warns that a life chasing validation from others is a recipe for disaster, that approval must first come within. Heal yourself, learn to accept yourself, love yourself—only then will you be able to healthfully pass it on to others.

As is the case with most platitudinous self-help wisdom, this is theoretically correct, but in practice, seemingly impossible to accomplish. Often those who seek approval most desperately are those who have the least clue what it is they actually want—what they truly need.

I spent most of my life obsessively wondering what others thought of me. I was specifically concerned with whether my pipe-toting heroes would approve of how I passed my days. Would Hunter S. and Huxley appreciate my pseudo-philosophical, thrill-seeking antics? What about my Dartmouth peers, would they see me as an equal, despite all my efforts to distance myself from Ivy League Type A Neuroticism? As much as I’d like to claim I found solace in being a bad boy who broke the rules, I didn’t—because no one does.

And like a majority of adolescents, the opinions I obsessed over most belonged to my parents.

I guess I was just another kid who wanted to make mom and dad proud, to be special, to escape the middle class.  

Jungian eco-psychologist Bill Plotkin explains that in lieu of any genuine initiation or rite of passage in early contemporary life, our teens inevitably transfer their dependencies from human parents onto an institutional ‘parent.’ The new parent can be a corporation, church, government, business, military branch, essential oil multi-level marketing scheme, etc. In my case, I sought approval from Big Daddy Tech, boners on the San Francisco skyline.

When you accept certain frameworks for living—whether they be the maximization of productivity, twelve steps, Buddhism on the rocks, or gushy Brené Brown-ian vulnerability—you are gifted with a code of conduct. If you are a man whose only rite of passage was memorizing some lines of Hebrew during a suburbanite Bar Mitzvah, if your only rituals were smoking blunts while listening to jam bands, if your code of conduct was cheating your way into highly-passable report cards—well, then you should probably follow someone else’s framework for living.

I spent so many years as an arrogant rational-materialist trying to make sense of a postmodern, secular meaninglessness. (Say the preceding sentence aloud and you’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about.) Detoxing from my worldview was just as taxing as kicking the dope. How embarrassing it was to admit that, like Socrates and Jon Snow, I knew nothing. But the pain of remaining the same became greater than the fear of changing.

The most miraculous element of recovery from addiction is this moment of surrender, as nebulous as that may sound to the non-initiated. It’s when your attempts at proving your worth have failed so miserably, you admit that you don’t have a fucking clue what you’re doing with your life. This willing abdication grants you the ability to simply receive help from some kindhearted individuals.

I now see that, in a twisted way, this was my dream scenario. Please, for the love of god, just tell me what I am supposed to do, how I am supposed to live. I’m looking you square in the eyes.  

If you’re at all like me, I’d wager that today you look up to people rather different than those you did seven years ago. My admirations have dramatically shifted, mostly away from leaders in the marketplace. Today I look for the slightest gestures of acceptance from the people I respect, since they are all awakened beings who do not harbor any self-doubt, obviously. If these folks grant me recognition, my brain tells me I must be like these neo-bodhisattvas, that my thinning hair and stiffening lower back don’t matter, because I am doing good in the world.

I also suspect that, if you’re like me, you get a little high when you receive a compliment. These days, people reach out to me and tell me they love the work that I do, they often thank me for doing it. When you mostly work on the road, traveling a non-traditional path, this type of endorsement is crucial to maintain motivation, to assure myself that what I’m doing is drenched in meaning. Oftentimes, these notes bring me tears, while sitting alone at my laptop, sipping my tea, and wondering how I’d fooled so many good people.

But every high has a comedown. God damn, I wish that wasn’t the case. You eventually find yourself forgetting or minimizing the nice thing people have said to you, lost in your same old bullshit. I’ve relinquished so many bad habits; I wish I could drop the approval-seeking antics as I did for the uppers and downers, just taper and ween till I never look into someone else’s eyes again to find what I have within. I wish I could always remember that love is an inside job.