Validation addiction: When applause becomes oxygen
She has spent an hour on the drape of her saree and the angle of the light. The photograph goes up on Instagram and the phone is placed face down. Three minutes later, it is back in her hand. Ten views. Twenty likes. Decent, but where is his comment?
Across the city, a young professional trudges home after weeks of untangling a difficult project. He feels proud until he remembers that his manager ended the final meeting without a word of thanks.
In a kitchen, a small boy holds up his drawing. His mother calls it beautiful. He studies her face and asks, "Do you really mean it, or are you just saying it?"
Three generations, three ordinary moments, one shared hunger. Somewhere along the way we handed a blinking notification light the authority to decide whether our day was good or bad. Wanting approval is not a flaw. Evolution wired it into us, and it has driven much of what humans have built. The trouble begins when approval stops being a pleasant extra and becomes a condition for feeling okay. Warming your hands at a fire is one thing; needing to inhale its smoke to breathe is another. When appreciation turns from the icing into the cake, we are dealing with something that deserves a blunter name: validation addiction.
Am I Good Enough?
Validation is the world’s way of telling us we are smart, attractive, capable or right. The addicted need it: "Fewer likes than hoped for, and the weekend is spoiled.
"A partner who does not announce the relationship online, and insecurity creeps in.
"A boss who skips the praise, and impostor syndrome takes over.
We have tied our worth so tightly to outside noise that our own voice can no longer be heard above it.
Digital life has changed the nature of approval. Once intimate, slow and uncounted, it now arrives as numbers: likes, views, followers, shares. Human warmth has been converted into a public scoreboard, and once worth can be measured, comparison follows automatically. A stranger collects five thousand reactions while we collect fifty.
We insist we are too grown-up to care about internet points. Our brains disagree. Every refresh of a feed works like a pull on a slot-machine lever, because the payout is unpredictable. Psychologists call this a variable reward schedule, and it is the mechanism that keeps gamblers at the machine. We never know whether the next pull brings a burst of applause or an empty room, and that uncertainty keeps our anticipation, and our dopamine, running hot. The smartphone in our pocket has become a slot machine that also makes calls.
The pleasure of a compliment is not the problem. The sting of its absence is. We tell ourselves we are only checking messages. In truth, we are checking whether we matter.
Meanwhile, we pay a hidden tax, and the currency is authenticity. We soften our opinions, tame our style and polish our joys until they suit what the audience likes to consume. We share what performs, not what is real. The internal question shifts from "What do I actually think?" to "What will they think of me if I say this?" In that shift, we hand strangers the wheel of our emotional lives. The bill arrives as anxiety, burnout and a deep loneliness rooted in never feeling like enough.
Technology, though, is only the amplifier. India has long lived under the gaze of family, neighbours and rigid hierarchies. Log kya kahenge, what will people say, has always been a powerful currency here. Digital platforms did not create our appetite for approval. They gave an old cultural reflex a global microphone, so that five hundred people can weigh in before our morning tea has cooled.
The answer is not to turn cold, withdraw from people or pretend their opinions mean nothing. Sound criticism sharpens our work, and honest warmth builds lasting bonds. What we need is a firm line between feedback and identity. A critique addresses something we did. It does not deliver a verdict on who we are.
That means moving the anchor of self-worth back inside. Before we put the phone down tonight, three uncomfortable questions are worth asking:
"Did I live by my own values today, whether or not anyone noticed?
"Did I put honest effort into the things that matter to me?
"When the screen goes dark and the room falls quiet, am I at peace with the person in the mirror?
Public approval behaves like the weather. The crowd that crowns you today will scroll past you tomorrow, and the post that draws thousands of likes this week will sink beneath the feed by next. So why build self-worth on something so unstable? Surrendering your peace of mind to an audience that barely notices is a poor bargain. Enjoy the applause when it comes, but never lean on it to stay upright. Real self-worth is measured not by how high we rise when the hall roars, but by how steady we stay when the lights dim.
Build self-respect from the inside out, and the world’s applause becomes background music. The lion does not lose sleep over what the sheep think.
And when the phone is off, no one is watching and no notification is waiting, we should still be able to say, calmly and without anyone’s agreement: I am enough. Just enough. For myself.
Dr Nitin Madan Kulkarni is a senior IAS officer who is presently serving as Additional Chief Secretary to Governor of Jharkhand; Views presented are personal.
