This is the product of some recent meditation I did in which I attempted to find an answer to the question of “Where do I get my dopamine?” Understanding how validation contributes to our dopamine rushes is essential to learning how to derive purpose from the improvement of ideas, rather than validating them.
I’ve had many, many meaningful conversations with my peers throughout college about many different things. However, none stood out more than when someone first told me the following during freshman year:
“I’m not sure if you realize this or not, but my read is that you desire validation more so than connection throughout your relationships.”
And in the two years since, I’ve been on a mission to find out what validation truly meant. It’s a difficult road to go down; one that’s filled with many twists and turns — almost as if the universe is gatekeeping myself from understand what truly makes me feel vindicated. It is an incredibly frustrating process, but at the same time I am encouraged by stories of people who discover this really niche part about themselves, one in which many people claim they understand but fall into the same trap of desiring validation over connection.
One might argue that validation can be treated with two distinct perspectives: internal and external. Internal validation results from the sense of acknowledgement we feel when considering positive attributes about ourselves — our strengths, our accomplishments, our desirable qualities. External validation, on the other hand, results from the sense of acknowledgement we feel about the positive attributes of ourselves from others.
I’d argue that there is a separate, though related, binary classification for validation: validation that is real, and validation that is fake.
It’s a slippery slope to define the difference between real validation and fake validation: obviously, it’s impossible to read another’s mind (but we can get pretty close to doing so after millennia of human evolution), so how do we distinguish between the two? It’s not a question that I can answer because it’s difficult to elucidate a concrete method for doing so; rather, it manifests itself most often as an intuition.
The relationships present in my life are not ones in which I’d instinctively (and purposefully) search for validation over connection — the issue is that many past relationships have been fraught with fake validation. In order for connection to truly be achieved, one must understand that they first need to receive real, genuine validation in a relationship.
So, searching for what validation truly means is searching for genuine validation. But there arises a paradox: how can one search for genuine validation when they consistently become destroyed over and over again by fake validation?
Fake validation is a phenomenon that causes one to lose trust. Even though someone (or oneself) appears to validate their own qualities and accomplishments, they know for sure that they secretly do not. Instead, they are searching for ways to put you down, to selfishly act in their own interest, to try to cultivate a relationship in which you learn to blindly trust them. Yet, paradoxically, trust is all that is lost.
In my relationships, trust was lost when I encountered fake validation — but in addition in the trust that I have lost in those who have come and gone, I’ve lost faith and trust in myself. Fake validation causes one to question themselves “are you truly worthy? Do you have faith in your own abilities and accomplishments? Do you truly understand who you are as a person?” And in almost all introspection under the guise of fake validation, the answer to all three of these questions is “no.” When one loses trust in themselves and others because of fake validation, they are often blinded so much by this feeling of worthlessness that they cease to realize that the cause of their own predicament is, in fact, a false sense of validation. I’m reminded of Dean Lewis explaining a stanza in Be Alright:
”If you ever have to go looking for something and you don’t trust someone, there’s probably a reason for it. So…maybe don’t in the future.”
There are many examples as to what this “reason” could be: imagine that you are searching for your life partner. They act nice to you and pretend to demonstrate interest, but all along their heart lay in another person. At the end of the process, you — yourself — are stuck in a loop where you lose trust of the people who have entered (and left) your life, and most importantly yourself. One canonical example: you’re searching for validation manifested in the form of another person who is supposed to be your life partner, yet at the end of the day, countless people leave your life one after another, each echoing the promise of a fake, empty dream that you worked so hard to build your self worth and confidence upon.
When these types of people enter and leave my life, I can’t help by reflect on the incongruity of each experience. Each starts seeming with chance — almost as if fate brought myself and the other person together. A starting state on a blank canvas in which I am tasked to choose an optimal course of actions to complete, resulting in genuine validation that leads to connection; a permanent one that I could only hope for.
Yet time and time again, I find that these experiences converge on an undesirable state — one of false validation: no matter the sequence of actions previously taken, I’d find myself lying in bed at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling, doing nothing but listening to “Wedding Dress” by Taeyang on repeat pondering how just how cliché the love stories presented in the entertainment world are, and just how common it is for every single validation seeker who hopes to discover connection realizes that what they’ve found instead is the fool’s paradise of false validation. As DramaRambles summarizes in a review of Wedding Dress:
Person A is in love with Person B, but they are in love with Person C and B and C get married. Meanwhile, Person A is sad and thinks Person B should have chosen them instead, but acts happy for the pair anyway.
The act of happiness presented is nothing but a reflection of false validation: one in which we are forced to act out a falsehood of our own internal representation as a direct response to a projection of a false expression of understanding and affirmation projected on the self. An inevitable spiral thus ensues: a trap that’s difficult for one to recover from unless they realize that all along, false validation is not what they were searching for.
And so the search for true validation begins.