It happens when we send pictures of ourselves. 

It happens when we dangle a self-effacing comment to our peers and wait for their correction. 

It happens when we #blessed. 

It happens when post our workout stats, our step counts, our calories burned, and our #progresses. 

It happens when we check our post three thousand times to check its ‘like’ status. 

Fam.  I’ve done ’em all.  

We are a people desperate for validation. 

Much of our need for validation is natural.  We were created with a desire to be seen and acknowledged and loved.  The want to know we matter is an inherent part of existing and cannot be erased from our forms like chalk from a board.  To be missed is not a part of the abundant life God desires for us. 

The challenge does not derive from the need for validation in and of itself.  The challenge derives from the source by which we seek to be validated. 

Our violent thirst for approval will not be met easily, so every day, multiple times a day, we beg, borrow, and bow before the Idol of Validation, searching for the thing that will quench our dry throats. 

Our desperation for validation could stem from many things, and I’m sure the theory herein is not comprehensive.  But it is my hope that through the examination of our persistent need to be acknowledged, we may be able to uncover where this idol has a hold on us. 

TECHNOLOGY

There is really only one place we can start with this conversation, and it’s the place y’all know we have to go.  Social media. 

There may not be a more revealing tool for displaying how desperate we are for other people’s validation.  It is the foundation on which social thrives.  We capture ourselves the way we hope to be perceived (regardless of how far it may be from the truth) and then we post it for other people’s reactions.  Perhaps the reason it is so cemented into our culture is because it creates a way for us to receive validation from others.  It’s a tangible way we can feel seen. 

In their article, Research on Social Media Addiction and Dopamine Driven Feedback, Bilal et el. (2018) help us understand what causes socials to thrive and the impacts it has on our culture.

“Narcissism… points to the problematic situation of mythological character, lover of self, falling in love with [one’s] own image. Narcissism culture is spreading in media and popular culture and consumption culture forced by [social] media.  Culture spreading through mass media shines beauty, currency, and fame, and constructs these values as objects of worship.” 

The functions on our social accounts that count our numbers of ‘views’ and ‘likes’ are proof enough of our need to know we’re being observed. Bilal et el. call this narcissism tendency.  Their research explores how each little ‘heart’ or ‘thumbs up’ produces the dopamine we crave.  They state that our brains experience the same chemical reaction to ‘likes’ as we do when we eat sugar, go on a rollercoaster, take pills or opioids, or engage in sexual activity.  It’s what makes us go back for more. 

Chamath Palihapitiya worked on Facebook from 2007 – 2011.  The Bilal et el. article includes a quote from him that exposes the individual and societal problems the team knowingly created when they created Facebook.  Palihapitiya said:  

“I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of our minds, we kind of knew something bad could happen. We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. That is truly where we are. If you feed the beast, that beast will destroy you. If you push back on it, we have a chance to control it and rein it in. It is a point in time where people need a hard break from some of these tools and the things that you rely on. The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.”

I think it should be stated that social media is not the only problem we have.  There are several other players whispering to us about our needs to be validated.  And there are many advantages to social tools too – not just problems.  Marketing, connection to people from around the globe, and flat-world accessibility are great assets to socials that deserve to be celebrated.  But I believe it’s dangerous to pretend as if socials are not ‘feeding the beast’ as Palihapitiya puts it. 

Humans – all humans – have weaknesses in our psyches and social media is a tool that typically brings out the worst in those weaknesses.  The problem with engaging the validation feedback loop from a source like social media is that today’s adoring fan club may be tomorrow’s booing crowd, or worse yet, the ghosts of silence.  

We must consider what we lack that makes us so desperate for others’ approvals, acknowledgements, likes, and applause. 

What is it inside us that requires an audience in order to make us feel as if our lives matter? 

Why is a beautiful moment like a sunrise over the water or a child’s birth no longer beautiful enough unless it is captured and shared? 

What absence in our souls creates this great hunger for validation? 

I wonder how our social habits might change if before we post, we explore our reasons for it. 

Why am I posting this?

Why do I feel the need to share this moment?

Whose approval, applause, or adoration am I seeking?

What am I hoping to receive in response to this post?

Why am I hoping for that?

The Idol of Validation would first convince us that we need to post each moment so we may be affirmed by other people’s approvals of our existences.  Next, the Idol of Validation would have us determine our own intrinsic value based on other people’s responses to our daily post offerings.  And then, perhaps the most damaging of all, the Idol of Validation would tell us that our opinions are able to determine the value of other people based on how we respond to their posts. 

Can I posit a few questions that may be worth both our individual and corporate reflections?

Why do strangers get to determine how much value we hold?

Why do we willingly give them the power to do so?

What response would be enough to satisfy our validation needs through social media?

What would be enough to satisfy our needs for validation in general?

The truth is, that festering under our desperations for validation are the gaping holes of misplaced identities. 

Not mistaken identities.  Not lost identities.  Misplaced ones.  Identities we have misplaced. 

This has been and remains the fatal flaw in placing our identities in temporal things.  Temporal things are temporal.  They change.  They disappear.  They come and they go.  They, not unlike feelings, are fickle. 

Tim Keller does a tremendous job of helping us see where we have misplaced our identities in his book Counterfeit Gods.  He explores the idea that we have mis-ordered our loves to the point that good things like marriage, relationships, children, jobs, hobbies, and successes are so loved by us that they become our idols.  We end up worshiping these things that can be taken away in the blink of eye and when they are taken away, we are devastated.  Because we’ve placed our identities, our loves – our hopes and dreams – in something, or someone, temporal. 

In our day and age we’ve started to put things like pant sizes, half-marathon times, economic status, follower counts, political positions, and advocate passions in these places of worship as well.  If that doesn’t work, we find meaning and purpose in causes or social movements as a way to identify ourselves because we can’t find it anywhere else.  But these things too, will change, as we’ve seen them change over the course of history, and though finding causes to support is wonderful and necessary, it cannot be the place where we define our identities. 

This mass search for meaning is also visible in the volume of podcasts and books on the care of our souls and spirits.  The need for identity through spiritual awakening is on loud display in our search for identity in self-realization or self-actualization.  This practice has begun to replace spirituality, the family unit, and cultures that seek to grow, learn, and work together.  Instead of healthy communities we seek fantasies of individualistic excellence, founded on the idea that all we need can be derived from within us.  Perhaps this chasm is another driver pushing us to socials for some sign that we’re okay.  

At the end of the day what the Idol of Validation teaches us is that we cannot fill our souls with anything but our identities in Christ, and until we find a way to do that, we will not be satisfied.  Our contentment can only come in our empty hands lifted high – in the stark acceptance that we are not enough, we will never be enough, and no amount of people telling us how great we are is going to fix that.  The profundity of Christ is that we are deeply loved while we are deeply broken.  We have nothing to bring to this table.  Our worship of validation would tell us that we are required to bring an offering, but Christ’s sacrifice tells us otherwise.  The more we try to fill our souls with the applause of men the more deaf we will be to the cry from the cross.  That cry was for us.  Because of it, we are already loved and accepted and validated all we need to be.  All we have to do, is believe it.  

This kind of foundation-laying can only come through time in the Word; time with Him; time listening; and time abiding.  It may require reassigning some of those hours currently dedicated to the television or scrolling the feeds.  It may require earlier alarm clocks or the ‘Do Not Disturb’ button.  No one can do it for us.  It’s a choice each one of us will have to make, every day, but it will be well worth the trade.   

If you find yourself in a place where it’s hard to hear the cry from the hill in Golgotha, move closer.  It may be time for you to silence the crowd for the One voice that actually has the power to fill your soul.  

Nic Ford