45. Pay Me Attention Now Please

As you may be well aware, I’m someone who tends to lean towards the needy end of the life spectrum.

I remember when I was at Uni, someone said to me “How is anyone else supposed to enjoy your company when you can’t enjoy your own?”. Fairly harsh (I know, the cheeky fucker!), but possibly fair.

I actually find that being needy can be quite a nice thing at times, as when you get the attention you so desperately crave, it feels pretty good. However, when you don’t, it really doesn’t. And to state the obvious, that's a fairly emotionally volatile place to be.

I like how Chris Williamson frames neediness (in his excellent weekly newsletter)

“Neediness occurs when you place a higher priority on what others think of you than what you think of yourself.”

I feel that. Despite gradually (very gradually) getting better with age, I still often place a disproportionate amount of value on the thoughts of other people.

This is probably a relatively common thing. From an evolutionary point of view, being liked is good. If we were liked, we'd have been more likely to have been accepted into a tribe. And if we were accepted into a tribe, then we’d have been more likely to survive. As survival and reproduction were basically our 2 main objectives back then, that would have been 50% of our needs taken care of. Winner.

More recently, over the past 15 years or so, I imagine this whole caring what other people think of us has been exacerbated by social media. Our existence now gets broadcasted to incomparably more people than at any time in history, and we get immediate indicative feedback on other people's opinions of us in the form of likes and follows (or a lack of).

Naturally, there’s a clear downside to this.

As the saying goes "if we live for the praise and acceptance of other people, we’ll also die by their criticism”. Our egos can get overly inflated by praise, and overly deflated by criticism.

And as criticism from others is an inevitable (and unfortunately common) part of life, being overly needy probably isn’t the most stable of long-term emotional states. It can come at a cost to things like our long term energy, self-worth, self-esteem and ultimately mental health.

Speaking from vast experience in this particular area of life, it can be a vicious cycle. Let's call it The Neediness Cycle, and it goes something like:

In the long term, we ironically sacrifice the thing we want (self-worth) for the thing which is supposed to get it (validation from others).

And if neediness does indeed come from placing a higher priority on what others think of us than what we think of ourselves, then I’ve found one particular idea to be quite useful in terms of negating this.

The ego crushing thought that no one really cares much about us anyway.

Even if we were to take something that’s supposed to be all about us (like a Birthday, or a Wedding, or this blog hehe), the vast majority of people are too caught up on how it affects them - whether they look any good, whether there’s any free Aperol Spritz, or whether they’re going to ruin the evening with any rogue chat - to give us too much of a second thought.

On this, there’s an excellent quote that goes

“At 20 you care what everyone thinks… at 40 you don’t care what other people think… and at 60 you realise they weren’t thinking about you all along”.

I can’t actually remember where I stole that from, but that aside, I find it quite a liberating idea. It’s a similar thought to Derren Brown’s “you’ll stop caring what other people think of you when you realise how little they do”.

Of course, I appreciate there’s a certain richness that comes with me writing a blog post about neediness, and reducing our levels of it. It’s basically the equivalent of someone who’s just run their first 5km giving advice on how to run an ultra marathon.

Having said that, I have found that a couple of the above ideas have helped shift the neediness needle in a positive direction, so thought I would share.

Not that you really care anyway 🙂