Your Need For Approval Is Ruining Your Life

Cure your addiction to validation

---

Photo by Prateek Katyal: https://www.pexels.com/photo/heart-and-zero-neon-light-signage-2694434/

You’re a cave person afraid to be abandoned by the tribe, beaten up by the leader, or have your status lowered in any way.

Your life is dominated by this “evolutionary mismatch.” Hell, everything in your life is dominated by them — your need for approval, your lusting for sugar and fats, your tribal urges that make you outraged with politics. I could go on here.

The point? You have to find a way to overcome this deep-seated, biological, herd-like way of thinking if you want to live your life on your terms.

Why? Because your fake fear of perceived death and abandonment can cause a real death to the future you want.

You know this, but I want to drill into it a bit because I also know something about you that you think is true but isn’t — you think you’re independent.

Do You Have Free Will?

You genuinely believe you have free will, which is why you have no freedom.

People think they freely chose to do things like:

• Go to college

• Buy a home

• Work a 9 to 5

And even people like me just pretend to be free thinkers. I’m suffering from a different set of status badges:

• Escape the 9 to 5 because ‘the rat race is evil’

• Bow to the altar of creativity and entrepreneurship

• Be a contrarian just to be a contrarian

So while the typical route has its pitfalls, so does mine. The lesson here?

At best, you can figure out how to lessen your need for approval. I doubt you can get rid of it. And the more you lessen it, the closer you get to the ideal, although you’ll never find it.

Also, realizing how little free will you do have, how much of a slave you are to approval, and how much you don’t think for yourself, gives you the foundation you need to even try to think for yourself even a tiny bit.

That’s the goal.

Step 1: Reflexively Abandon Your Ascribed Ideology

People do veer a bit too far when they curse all things conventional, but I still think it’s a good idea to start with. The level of societal conditioning is so deep that you have to fight to unlearn it before you can create anything that comes close to a real belief system.

It’s important to understand how conditioned these beliefs are. You can create visceral snap judgments from people by doing things like:

• Telling your friends and family you’re going to plunk a bunch of money down on starting a business (even though it’s totally fine if you drop that $$ to go to college)

• Say anything negative about buying a house

• Say you don’t vote

• Try to start a real conversation about building wealth

• Questioning any individual piece of their political belief system

• Make a claim that both sides have a good point about any “hot button” topic

You will trigger them emotionally first, and then all the ‘facts’ will come in shortly after to justify those emotions. Emotions are all heavily based on tribe identification and approval. As soon as you say something that sounds like you’re a part of the out-group, you get spanked for it.

Notice a theme with many of the statements that can trigger people emotionally; they go against the dogma that seeks to constrict the individual for the sake of the collective.

To construct a life you see fit, you’re going to have to be a little more aggressive than other people might like. You’re going to have to be a little disagreeable.

You’ll have to risk people not liking you.

Figure out what you’d actually want, do, and believe if you genuinely didn’t care what others thought of you. My answer leans toward this “free thinker” way of living, but as I said, that has pitfalls too.

Step #2 — Settle Into a Happy Medium

I don’t think everybody has to quit their job, become an entrepreneur, travel the world, and live a perfect life every day. I wouldn’t be much of a free thinker if I thought that.

And, again, I’m not a free thinker, because a free thinker wouldn’t even use that sort of label.

Are you starting to see how much of a paradox this all is? How you can never really escape labeling, but kind of have to try to anyway?

In the beginning, I bucked the need for approval from society. I made society my enemy and used it to grow the chip on my shoulder. In many ways, it did work. But I also went too far.

Later, I had to learn to buck the need for approval from this lens of perception too. Part of me writes for the approval of others, no doubt about it. Part of me wants to succeed because I want people to see my success.

The idea of being an entrepreneur is sexy because of the fact other people would know that’s what I do. There are so many people who fall into this bucket of self-help thinking that, even though they think they’re contrarians, they’re followers too. This applies to me as well.

So now, I’m trying to get closer to the real me, even though I don’t know if I’ll ever fully know who that is. I can’t live in a vacuum and seek zero approval at all times. Neither can you.

The Final Step

So what’s the answer?

Have strong belief systems while understanding that your belief system will always be comprised of cobbled-together narratives you’ve heard elsewhere.

Knowing this will help you refine your beliefs over time. Every six months or so, you can look at your beliefs and think:

• Are these all true?

• Which of these do I believe because I want to be in the ‘in-group’?

• How am I being influenced?

Then, you change your mind. You reserve the right to evolve.

This isn’t waffling. This is growth.

Right now I’m at the point where I still do feel that many people are being trapped in a societal prison and suffering from Stockholm syndrome — falling in love with their captor.

But I also think the gears of the world will continue to turn and there’s nothing inherently wrong with people helping to turn them by doing their individual part.

I leave it up to you to choose where you want to be.

But I want you to choose. You.

---

---