Approval

Yesterday I posted a picture on Facebook.

Not a truly staggering accomplishment, I know, but it opened the floodgates. I started reading posts and the old feelings started flowing. The anger at injustices and the sheer rage and joy and all of the noise I had been quitting in this experiment on essay writing came flooding in.

If I am honest, I have been on Facebook before this, obviously, but. This time it was "like" hunting. I had posted a picture of my new ink and I wanted to see the people liking it and commenting on it. I was craving the approval of my peers.

I had been missing it. These essays are awesome. I love the long form writing, the adherence to a more formal form even if I do tend to take liberties with tone and they dont always adhere to the strictest of formats. I do read through them and fix my transitions, try to hunt down spelling and grammar errors... I digress.

The essays are awesome, but they aren't filling a need Facebook does. I don't get the likes. It may seem trite, but there's research to back it up. We crave approval, especially when sharing inner turmoil or struggle. We want to know we're doing the right thing.

According to one study,  we spend up to 40% of our time self disclosing in some form or other. We like to talk about ourselves. It's not just the selfie crowd, either, it's everyone. Whether it be privately in journals, in public facing websites or in "water cooler" conversations we tend to want people to know and accept us, especially if we are sharing intimate and slightly scary details. It can lead to some negative brhaviors.

In the seeking of that approval, we can inflate our own sense of worth or even lie about our accomplishments. We have seen it in the news most recently with a politician having misled folks about his education, saying he had graduate management training when he had really just received a certificate from manager school at Sizzlers.

I've done it myself, editing the past in an effort to get people to approve of my actions when the truth either would have or wouldn't have caused them to turn away. I can't really defend those actions, because once I realized the lie was mainly for my benefit, I stopped doing it. The result has been decisively positive. The truth makes me happy with myself.

In the end, I think that's what it's really about. We want to be happy. We're nervous that people won't like what we do, so we post our things, we check our sites and we smile at all the little thumbs, hearts and +1s it brings, but in the end I find it a little hollow.

"How strange we love ourselves so much but care more what others think."

Doesn't mean I'm not trying to find ways to get people to read this, though. Maybe if I only put the links in comments, more people will see it in their feeds...