On External Validation
“One of the biggest changes I can pinpoint has to do with a quote by Buffett:
Would you rather be the world’s worst lover and known as the best, or the world’s best lover and known as the worst?
I first read that dilemma a decade ago and didn’t think twice about it. No-brainer. You always want to be known as the best, because reputation is all that matters in this world. I had such conviction in that answer that I didn’t even consider the alternative.
I look back and realize how foolish and ignorant I was.
There’s reputation and there’s character, there’s persona and there’s anima, there’s public virtue and private vice, there’s peace with the world and war with yourself, and most importantly, there’s caring more what others think about you than what you think about yourself.
Now, I look at that same dilemma and I see one of the biggest no-brainers ever—except my answer has flipped to the opposite. Yet when I look around to see if others share this view, I still see the vast majority of people acting in a way that shows they care far, far more about the world thinking that they’re the best lover than about what kind of lover they actually are.
External validation is a hell of a drug.”
Here’s a thought experiment.
Visualize a man sitting down in a chair, all alone in a locked room, where you can see him through a viewing glass and can communicate through a loudspeaker — like something out of a sci-fi flick.
Ask him: who are you?
Tell him he is not allowed to use any of the following in his answer: where he works, his job title, the schools he went to, or where he grew up. None of those are who you are. He’s also not allowed to use relationships — I’m so-and-so’s husband, brother, or son — because once again, none of those are who you are.
Without all these egoic identifiers, the way the external world views him, you will find that he is at a loss for words.
“I…I don’t know.”
Take it one step further. Show him pieces of art, and ask him with each one: what do you think, do you like this? Do you consider this to be good art?
His gut reaction will unquestionably default to um…well…what does everyone else think? Men don’t know what to like without being told what to like, and the questioning will leave him yet again at a loss for words.
You are welcome to disagree with my conclusions, but they are simply here to illustrate the powers of external validation.
First, man is a social creature. In the words of Eric Hoffer, when people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Second, men are generally incapable of critical thought. If they tell you they think a piece of art is bad, and then you tell them everyone else loves it and it just sold for $25 million dollars, they’ll tell you that they thought it over and the art is actually good. It doesn’t have to be a piece of art, it could be a book, it could be music, it could even be another human being; it’s just a dynamic that you see over and over again, where a man will withhold his opinion until it’s deemed safe for approval by the crowd. And then he’ll tell you he loved it from the moment he first laid eyes on it.
You could take this whole thought experiment to some dark places if you wanted to — picture the scene from Pulp Fiction with Marcellus Wallace and the Gimp — where you ask him not only who are you, but what do you truly believe? What are you truly loyal to? Once again, you may have your own theory as to what this answer will be, but mine is that once you take away all the forms of external validation, take away all the masks that men put on before they leave the house and the assigned roles they play in this farce we call life, the answer is that they don’t truly believe anything and aren’t truly loyal to anything except themselves. When viewed this way, stripped completely bare, man is at his core a wretched and pathetic being — a view which may strike some as overly pessimistic, but which has been shared by some of the wisest men in history, from Socrates to Buddha to Solomon to Schopenhauer.
“Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the human state vain and ridiculous, never appeared in public except with a mocking and ribald expression. Heraclitus, on the other hand, felt pity and compassion for this state of ours, so his expression was always melancholy and his eyes full of tears.
I prefer the first humour, not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it expresses more contempt and is more condemnatory of us than the other. I do not think we can ever be despised as much as we deserve. Wailing and commiseration imply some valuation of the object bewailed; what we mock at we consider worthless. There is, in my opinion, not so much misery in us as emptiness, not so much malice as folly. We are not so full of evil as of inanity, nor so wretched as we are base. Therefore Diogenes, who played the fool to himself, rolling his tub, and turning up his nose at the great Alexander, esteeming us as flies or bladders puffed up with wind, was a sharper and more biting - and consequently, in my opinion, juster - judge than Timon who was nicknamed the man-hater. For what a man hates, he takes seriously. Timon wished us ill, was passionately desirous of our ruin, and avoided our company, since he considered us wicked and depraved by nature. But Diogenes valued us so little that contact with us could neither disturb nor affect him; he gave up our company, not out of fear but of contempt for our society. He thought us incapable of doing either good or harm.”
As far as relying on external validation, this whole practice is hard-wired in us and despite my best attempts, I still find myself guilty of it sometimes. The first thing I notice when I’m looking at an account on X is how many followers they have. If they have ten followers, I’m less likely to follow them than if they have ten thousand. If I’m going to buy a book, I’m more likely to buy the book with ten thousand reviews instead of the book ten. And, like, I’m 100% wrong for both of those things. It makes me feel like I’m those same two adjectives that I used before: a wretched and pathetic being, incapable of critical thought.
Why do I bring all this up? Aside from that I spend too much time thinking about the duality of man and all its permutations mentioned in the introductory quote — persona and anima, reputation and character, blind spots, the masks men wear in public versus who they are in private — I just feel like the quest for external validation creates more misery in people I know than anything else. The invisible pressure to do what everyone else is doing, to work a job you don’t like, to buy frivolous shit which serves no purpose except to impress others, to marry or stay with the wrong woman, to have kids that you weren’t ready for. The root of all this misery is to conform and to do what society told you to do instead of what you wanted to do.
An author named Bronnie Ware wrote a book titled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, insight she gleaned directly from a career in elderly care. The #1 regret of the dying, above all the others, is this:
I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
For reference, here were the other four:
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Really, numbers one, two, three and five all relate to the same word: courage. The courage to go against the grain, to follow your own spirit and not spend your precious days in a vain and ultimately futile quest for external validation. It all reminds me of the Kierkegaard quote which made it into Blind Spots: The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
These split personae are what create the dynamic where most people you meet are actually not one, but two entirely separate human beings. There’s the public version and then there’s who they are alone in a dark room. Or to put it in a more recognizable way for you, dear reader, it’s the following conversation:
You: “How are you?”
Them: “I’m great, busy, work is good, wife, kids, [bullshit canned answer].”
You: “No, really — HOW ARE YOU?”
Them: “…I’m fucking miserable, man.”
My heart opens when I hear those words, not because I enjoy the misery of others, but because they are speaking the truth. The mask has come off. This is the real person, the man tied to the viewing-room chair who, if he is finally being honest with himself, will tell you flat out: you know what, I don’t have a fucking clue if that art is any good or not.
In the words of Rousseau, such are men:
And in the spirit of duality, while this post began dark, there is a light side to it as well.
All the angry people you see out there, the ones who are constantly attacking others online or gossiping venomously behind another man’s back, there is always something behind it. If you were able to take any of them and sit them in a chair in their proverbial dressing gown — in a polite and non-threatening way this time, no Gimp necessary — and ask them: like, dude, what is REALLY bothering you? They’ll tell you the truth: my wife just left me. Or some shit like that. And they’re reacting the only way they’ve ever known how, by taking it out on others, since it is far easier to bring others down than it is to lift yourself up. Once you accept this constancy of human nature, that hurt people hurt people, you can start training yourself to react the correct way to that type of behavior: with pity, with understanding, with forgiveness and with the mercy of the Godhead.
And so, dear reader, I leave you with the following dilemma:
Would you rather be at peace with the world, and at war with yourself?
Or at war with the world, and at peace with yourself?
Choose wisely,
GB
