Fear of Non-Existence and Validation Seeking

Navigating the Need for Validation: Finding Inner Wholeness

What does it take to overcome the need for validation? What does it take to truthfully not need the validation of others? What does it take to overcome the nice guy personality? The inability to be disagreeable and to pushback agains the energy of other people when you genuinely don’t think that what they’re doing is right?

There is this capacity that we can develop which is the ability feel wholeness in any moment. That no matter what someone says to you, there’s this unfalterable wholeness. This, I believe, is what it takes to not need the validation of others.

Sure, we could follow the thread that 99.999% of people who talk about this subject speak on. That the need for validation is an over-compensation for a feeling of not being good enough. But I’m interested in going deeper than this.

So there’s this feeling of lack. But what is it? And where did it come from?

Some will say childhood trauma, but let’s go deeper than that. What are the existential roots of this not-enoughness — this feeling of being incomplete? I believe it has ontological roots.

Needing Validation = Fear of Not Being Real

David Loy, buddhist ecopsychology writer, states that the fear that drives every single institutional edifice of our culture isn’t the fear of death (as many spiritually-minded people think it is), but rather it’s the fear that we don’t exist in this moment. It’s the instinctual fear that our self isn’t as real as we act like it is.

If this is true, then overcoming the need for validation requires overcoming the fear of being non-existent.

Virtue Signaling and Validation

Trying to get validation from someone overlaps very much with this drive to virtue signal. In molding ourselves in the people we think people like (aka seeking validation), the primary tactic used is virtue signaling. It’s trying to mimic the outer form of someone who’s genuinely coming from a place of virtue — even when we’re not coming from the space place.

Real virtue is being willing to stand for something when it causes a disadvantage to you personally.¹ Therefore not needing validation from others is a prerequisite to living a virtuous life. I may be harsh (on myself especially), but I believe that it’s impossible to both be a people pleaser and to live a virtuous life. By the line of reasoning that I just set forth.

Virtue signaling in the long run does more harm than good. Although it may have short term payoffs, eventually we make enough decisions that involves being out of integrity with ourselves that it becomes more and more difficult to live in a genuinely virtuous life.

Conclusion

Virtue signaling and needing validation are two topics that I’ll continue exploring for years to come, and this is my current line of reasoning on it. I would be very interesting to hear how you relate to this topic. Comment below.

1. War on Sensemaking Part 1