News: Trap #11: You seek validation through an audience

Saturday, October 31, 2020

Trap #11: You seek validation through an audience

Trap #11: You seek validation through an audience

Do you sometimes remove yourself from the afterglow of a meaningful moment, in order to get to work crafting its narrative for your social media?

Do you end up personally hurt when you don't see the number of likes you were hoping for?

Do you find yourself creating experiences with your followers in mind, stage-managing parts of your day so that they'll be funnier, prettier, or more compelling, because they don't seem "good" enough as they are?

Don't worry, I'm not going to go on some tirade about how no one is enjoying their vacation sunsets anymore because they're looking at them through their phones instead of taking in the real thing. (Though I could.)

But what we are going to ask today is when you might be cutting yourself off from appreciating experiences in their own right, because of an undue emphasis on narrating those experiences to others: needing an audience. Wanting to curate a story about yourself, rather than be yourself and live the life you are supposed to be engaging with.

Of course, there are many positive things about social media, and certainly not everyone uses it in a dysfunctional way. But the traps of it are all too real, and the way it adjusts our thinking can be subtle but toxic. Are you constantly thinking about how you will word the description of what you're doing, when you post about it later on? Do you check back to count your "likes" more often than you want to admit? Do you find your mood depending on how well something on social media was received?

If you don't use social media at all, there may still be ways that you look for validation through others. Bosses, parents, siblings, romantic partners, friends, neighbors, and coworkers can all be people that we overly compare ourselves to, or get into a cycle of needing to find approval from — living our lives for their judgment.

Either way, in order to be free of the toxic thoughts that tell us not to fully engage in the experiences in front of us, we must learn to be fully present for them in their own right, as the experiencer — not the performer in front of an audience.

Take Action:

Think about the most recent occurrence in your life that you found meaningful, for better or for worse. Did you find yourself thinking of how to craft it into a narrative? Did aspects of it feel incomplete until you told someone else about it, or posted it on social media? What might that have robbed you of in terms of your own experience?

If you use social media often, scroll through your feed and look for patterns. What do you include? What do you leave off? What do your posts seem to be looking for? What story are you trying to tell, and does it feel like the real you? Pick a few of your most "liked" posts and think about what they were about. Was there a disconnect between the way you truly experienced the event — or the way you felt about it — versus the image you tried to portray in your post? Did you feel you truly experienced the event at all?

Up next: How selective attention tricks us.

In the meantime, if you have questions or news about your progress in this challenge, I host a live weekly anonymous chat online on Tuesdays at 1 PM EST here. Feel free to drop in! You can also find me on Facebook. —Dr. Andrea Bonior