Ego and the hungry ghost

I remember reading In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté — a book about drug addicts who can never get past their addiction. The hunger always returns after the fix. They're searching for their next hit for eternity, stuck in limbo like ghosts.

I am the same. Except my drug is validation.

One of the most consistent things I've noticed about myself — through meditation and through everyday observation of my own thoughts — is that I am almost desperate for validation from other people. My mind is almost constantly wanting me to be admired. To be seen as worthy of love and respect.

I suspect every human being seeks validation at some level, purely by virtue of having an ego. There are those rare individuals who truly do not care what others think of them at any point in time. I am certainly not one of them.

It's most acute when I meet an attractive woman. For years I assumed this was straightforwardly sexual. And there is sexual interest, of course. But I now realise that a large part of what I was feeling — that need for her to find me attractive — was just the need to feel validated. I know this because in the instances where I did successfully date and sleep with such a woman, the feeling I got from being with her was never enough. The need for validation from other women persisted. No matter what I got, I wanted more. Never-ending.

It shows up everywhere. At a conference or co-living space, I meet lots of people. And I find myself wanting to get on with every single one of them. To make a good impression. It's not that I immediately start thinking about it, but over time as I'm talking to someone I notice that a part of me is hoping I'm coming across well.

In cases where I already know someone doesn't like me or is indifferent to me for no good reason, I sometimes end up adopting the opposite stance — trying my best to show them I don't care what they think. This is actually hilarious, because it's triggered by the fact that I do care what they think.

If someone initially seems to like me and then later doesn't acknowledge me I feel a sting. My need for external validation has been thwarted, and I don't feel happy about it.

And whilst all of this is going on, a part of my brain is aware that I'm doing it. Yet, like the hungry ghost, I'm forever searching. Condemned to this pursuit for eternity.

The desire for validation extends to my career, the aesthetics of my body, and even the things I put onto the web. If I write a blog post or a tweet, will people like it? I can take criticism and hate, but I still want people to like and share what I write. Perhaps I can be forgiven for wanting that in this context — these systems are designed to get you chasing the dopamine hit. We're running around inside the dopamine maze like mice.

In terms of career and financial success, I want to be above average. Sometimes I tell myself this is just ambition. Me living out my natural drive to achieve big things. But what does it mean to be successful? What do I feel when I reach that success? Validated. What does it mean to have that beautiful woman want to be with you? Validation.

Really, what I'm after is just a feeling. Because that's what validation is.

Career goals, relationships, social status — they're all designed to get me to a point where I'm feeling the way I want to feel. And I realise that pretty much everything I want to do in life maps to this. This is true for other people too. All of us are chasing a feeling, or feelings. We want to feel certain ways about ourselves. This is why we do the things we do.

Is there some way to fix this? Should I fix this?

I think the honest answer is that this is one of those things where you're simply going to be like this throughout your life, and the best you can do is be aware of it so that you lessen its impact. My life experience so far teaches me that it's very, very hard to change your deep thought patterns to such an extent that you completely remove them. The Buddhist concept of tanha — the "thirst" or craving that drives all human suffering — suggests that this isn't a bug in my psychology. It's a feature of being human. The goal was never to eliminate it. It's to stop being enslaved by it.

So perhaps awareness — heightened to its maximum possible extent — is good enough. The question then becomes how.

Meditation. But not just sitting down or standing up in a room. Active meditation throughout the day — active awareness of when you're thinking a certain way. It's easy enough to sit in your room and feel confident, powerful, centred and validated. It's far tougher to maintain that when you're out in the world, surrounded by personalities, with your insecurities simmering under the surface, ready to burst at the right trigger.

But that's the ideal training ground for mental awareness. Much more so than the meditation ashram or retreat. You need the retreat space to fortify your ability. The world is where you test it.

The ghost doesn't go away. You just learn to stop feeding it.