We are taught early that approval is survival. It’s no surprise that everyone is in survival mode.
We become conditioned to believe that warmth from others is oxygen. No wonder so many of us are struggling to breathe.
We think if we can just secure enough applause, enough validation, enough proof that we are seen and celebrated, then we have successfully built a life worth living. And so many have given up hope.
Some still manage to neatly organize themselves around what lands well, smoothing edges and performing the version that earns the positive response.
We live in a constant self-monitoring, ever adjusting and micromanaging every expression, collecting fleeting crumbs of approval, ever starving for the momentary rush of aliveness that comes from feeling like we are “good” enough to belong.
But the moment never lasts and soon we are on the hunt again.
What if it was all a beautiful lie, innocently inherited by well-intentioned people who contort themselves so twistedly in a false tension to secure it that they themselves forgot their original state of existence?
You don’t NEED it, you just LIKE it.
It’s a subtle shift that brings fundamental change because once you believe this, you are simply here, moving from what feels true.
You’re not outside it, but you’re not exclusively of it, and though applause and silence alike affect you differently, your attachment to what that means about you no longer applies.
It’s the difference between performing for a life and presence with one.
I understand the release you are pointing toward: applause does not have to become the condition under which someone grants themselves permission to exist.
But I think the argument becomes too clean when approval is reduced to a beautiful lie and the alternative becomes an “original state of existence” beneath conditioning. There may be no untouched self beneath relationship, performance, adaptation, and longing. We are formed there.
A child does not mistake warmth for oxygen out of vanity. Warmth, attunement, response, and belonging are part of the ground from which a self becomes possible at all. The adult task is not to discover that we never needed anyone. It is to stop making another person’s applause the final verdict on our worth.
“You don’t need it, you just like it” risks confusing freedom with emotional self-sufficiency. We can be affected by recognition without being owned by it. We can need relationship without turning approval into proof that we deserve to exist.
That, to me, is the difference: not independence from others, but no longer outsourcing the meaning of oneself to them.
The body keeps the score long before the mind agrees to read it. What strikes me most here is the gap between those two timings is years, for most people and all the energy spent managing that distance rather than closing it.
This is a really good point - thank you. In most of my recent writing, I am exploring something to this idea but hadn't named it so clearly. I think we end up spending more time and energy in that distance because so many rush to resolve and collapse into wisdom or some other neat conclusion what historically, demands time care attention presence etc - all the things we've lost in our instant-culture. We don't know how to sit in the threshold so we carry that space into the next thing because we haven't allowed the space to exist and so it doesn't close. Thanks for adding this layer!!!
Totally agree. That threshold is the part nobody designs for. Everything in the culture is built to move you through it faster. Sitting in it looks like stalling from the outside, and that's enough pressure for most people to collapse it into a resolution before they've actually crossed it.
YES! I was just discussing this on a different thread on the tension of human existence - the reality we live in versus the one we inhabit - aka the fusion between the brain interpreting and giving meaning and expectation with the body interpreting the world in sensory contact. Sometimes I wonder how much of modern struggle (mentally) comes from the decrease of physical struggle? As we adopted more conveniences and comforts, did this proclivity to live inside imaginary worlds intensify and to what measure?
Yes, it more than just sitting in the discomfort but now for many, even ALLOWING it to exist, where there’s increasing opportunity not to. Very grateful to connect- thank you
THat physicality is a super interesting point. The physical struggle had a body to discharge into. Remove it and the discomfort doesn't go anywhere, it just loses its container.
Comfort didn't solve the tension. It made it invisible and then wondered why so many people feel it more.
Your strongest line is not “my body always knew.” It is that the performed version of you was “not not me, but also not all of me.”
That leaves room for something more difficult and more true: performance is not necessarily a lie. It can be a real adaptation, a form of survival, belonging, discipline, or desire that eventually becomes too small.
I think the essay becomes less precise when the body is made into the untouched witness of truth and the mind into the thing that refused to listen. The body can register pressure before we have language for it, certainly. But it does not automatically tell us what that pressure means. The same history that taught us to perform also lives in the body.
There may be no pure self beneath the script, waiting in the wilderness. There may only be the ongoing work of noticing when a form of life has become too narrow, without turning “freedom” into the next performance.
I oscillate on this musing ALL THE TIME (singular/pure self). Brilliant articulation though, much stronger and more clear to anything I’ve been able to hobble around my understanding of it. Thank you first and foremost for the feedback + insights.
I do make perhaps a slightly too clean/aggressive divide between brain and body here which presents a bit as if they are two parts of a separate system instead of overlapping, cooperating ones inside the same one.
My only ‘understanding’ of any of it thus far is that in certain times and places, one expression is more dominant, perhaps it feels more true for what is here now, but language limits me here greatly for I don’t believe, as you mentioned, in one final or arrived true state that ‘never performs’ but maybe just one that can surrender to flow in this expression of the performance now. Thank you truly!
Yes, I think that is the more honest place to leave it. Not body versus mind, and not a final self waiting beneath performance, but one living system in which both carry history, adaptation, memory, and possibility.
Perhaps what feels “truer” is not a state that no longer performs, but an expression that currently asks for less self-abandonment to sustain. And even that has to remain revisable. Surrender can be a form of freedom, but it can also become the next demand we place on ourselves.
Maybe the task is not to arrive at the real self, but to remain able to notice when a way of being has become too narrow.
Hello human reading this - I am a NEW writer and I want to get better at writing. If you actually read this and made it to the end ANY FEEDBACK - no matter how blunt or hard- is genuinely and truly appreciated.
I’m a professional bodybuilder so studying our weaknesses and working to make them strengths through specific criticism is my jam. I really want to improve my studying human impressions before asking the dreaded AI-bots. THANK YOU. 🙏🏻
We are taught early that approval is survival. It’s no surprise that everyone is in survival mode.
We become conditioned to believe that warmth from others is oxygen. No wonder so many of us are struggling to breathe.
We think if we can just secure enough applause, enough validation, enough proof that we are seen and celebrated, then we have successfully built a life worth living. And so many have given up hope.
Some still manage to neatly organize themselves around what lands well, smoothing edges and performing the version that earns the positive response.
We live in a constant self-monitoring, ever adjusting and micromanaging every expression, collecting fleeting crumbs of approval, ever starving for the momentary rush of aliveness that comes from feeling like we are “good” enough to belong.
But the moment never lasts and soon we are on the hunt again.
What if it was all a beautiful lie, innocently inherited by well-intentioned people who contort themselves so twistedly in a false tension to secure it that they themselves forgot their original state of existence?
You don’t NEED it, you just LIKE it.
It’s a subtle shift that brings fundamental change because once you believe this, you are simply here, moving from what feels true.
You’re not outside it, but you’re not exclusively of it, and though applause and silence alike affect you differently, your attachment to what that means about you no longer applies.
It’s the difference between performing for a life and presence with one.
I understand the release you are pointing toward: applause does not have to become the condition under which someone grants themselves permission to exist.
But I think the argument becomes too clean when approval is reduced to a beautiful lie and the alternative becomes an “original state of existence” beneath conditioning. There may be no untouched self beneath relationship, performance, adaptation, and longing. We are formed there.
A child does not mistake warmth for oxygen out of vanity. Warmth, attunement, response, and belonging are part of the ground from which a self becomes possible at all. The adult task is not to discover that we never needed anyone. It is to stop making another person’s applause the final verdict on our worth.
“You don’t need it, you just like it” risks confusing freedom with emotional self-sufficiency. We can be affected by recognition without being owned by it. We can need relationship without turning approval into proof that we deserve to exist.
That, to me, is the difference: not independence from others, but no longer outsourcing the meaning of oneself to them.
The body keeps the score long before the mind agrees to read it. What strikes me most here is the gap between those two timings is years, for most people and all the energy spent managing that distance rather than closing it.
This is a really good point - thank you. In most of my recent writing, I am exploring something to this idea but hadn't named it so clearly. I think we end up spending more time and energy in that distance because so many rush to resolve and collapse into wisdom or some other neat conclusion what historically, demands time care attention presence etc - all the things we've lost in our instant-culture. We don't know how to sit in the threshold so we carry that space into the next thing because we haven't allowed the space to exist and so it doesn't close. Thanks for adding this layer!!!
Totally agree. That threshold is the part nobody designs for. Everything in the culture is built to move you through it faster. Sitting in it looks like stalling from the outside, and that's enough pressure for most people to collapse it into a resolution before they've actually crossed it.
YES! I was just discussing this on a different thread on the tension of human existence - the reality we live in versus the one we inhabit - aka the fusion between the brain interpreting and giving meaning and expectation with the body interpreting the world in sensory contact. Sometimes I wonder how much of modern struggle (mentally) comes from the decrease of physical struggle? As we adopted more conveniences and comforts, did this proclivity to live inside imaginary worlds intensify and to what measure?
Yes, it more than just sitting in the discomfort but now for many, even ALLOWING it to exist, where there’s increasing opportunity not to. Very grateful to connect- thank you
THat physicality is a super interesting point. The physical struggle had a body to discharge into. Remove it and the discomfort doesn't go anywhere, it just loses its container.
Comfort didn't solve the tension. It made it invisible and then wondered why so many people feel it more.
Your strongest line is not “my body always knew.” It is that the performed version of you was “not not me, but also not all of me.”
That leaves room for something more difficult and more true: performance is not necessarily a lie. It can be a real adaptation, a form of survival, belonging, discipline, or desire that eventually becomes too small.
I think the essay becomes less precise when the body is made into the untouched witness of truth and the mind into the thing that refused to listen. The body can register pressure before we have language for it, certainly. But it does not automatically tell us what that pressure means. The same history that taught us to perform also lives in the body.
There may be no pure self beneath the script, waiting in the wilderness. There may only be the ongoing work of noticing when a form of life has become too narrow, without turning “freedom” into the next performance.
I oscillate on this musing ALL THE TIME (singular/pure self). Brilliant articulation though, much stronger and more clear to anything I’ve been able to hobble around my understanding of it. Thank you first and foremost for the feedback + insights.
I do make perhaps a slightly too clean/aggressive divide between brain and body here which presents a bit as if they are two parts of a separate system instead of overlapping, cooperating ones inside the same one.
My only ‘understanding’ of any of it thus far is that in certain times and places, one expression is more dominant, perhaps it feels more true for what is here now, but language limits me here greatly for I don’t believe, as you mentioned, in one final or arrived true state that ‘never performs’ but maybe just one that can surrender to flow in this expression of the performance now. Thank you truly!
Yes, I think that is the more honest place to leave it. Not body versus mind, and not a final self waiting beneath performance, but one living system in which both carry history, adaptation, memory, and possibility.
Perhaps what feels “truer” is not a state that no longer performs, but an expression that currently asks for less self-abandonment to sustain. And even that has to remain revisable. Surrender can be a form of freedom, but it can also become the next demand we place on ourselves.
Maybe the task is not to arrive at the real self, but to remain able to notice when a way of being has become too narrow.
Hello human reading this - I am a NEW writer and I want to get better at writing. If you actually read this and made it to the end ANY FEEDBACK - no matter how blunt or hard- is genuinely and truly appreciated.
I’m a professional bodybuilder so studying our weaknesses and working to make them strengths through specific criticism is my jam. I really want to improve my studying human impressions before asking the dreaded AI-bots. THANK YOU. 🙏🏻