I don't need validation

Right???

Hello Maker,

Making Time comes out in 13 days, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the quiet, universal tug between wanting to create something meaningful and resisting the urge to chase validation. It’s complicated, isn’t it?

But before we get too deep, allow me to present:

The inner monologue of an adult who is a grown-up, a creative professional and therefore over it so don’t worry about me

I would never seek validation in the metrics our technocratic overlords have tossed to the masses like crumbs from their spaceships.

As a savvy adult, I get that shares, comments, likes, mentions, boops, and re-twoops are a distraction from the real work, which is creating content to appear between sponsored posts, for free, thereby amassing enough people to look at that content so I can move them off that page to somewhere else that pays me, so I can create something else.

I am not naive.

You think the algorithm can hurt my feelings? Grow up. Only I can hurt my feelings, as I read a glowing review of a peer’s work who I am super, duper happy for. I am leaving congratulatory remarks on the post about his haunting necessary genius — with an exclamation mark. He probably needs the pat on the back and I am fine.

I am fine. I am so fine that I have now muted him, not out of envy, which is for teenagers, but because I need to stay focused on my own work. I am so focused. I am a beacon of discipline, untouched by petty comparisons.

Because I don’t need validation. I understand that the work speaks for itself. And if it doesn’t, that’s just part of the creative journey. Probably. I mean, how often do you have to speak for the work before it starts speaking for itself?

I like to think have evolved. After all, success is fleeting. Success is subjective. Success is...having my work quietly respected by the right peers. Or maybe having it whispered about in hushed tones at industry events? Or…success is a New York Times profile where they describe my aesthetic as 'unexpectedly raw but deceptively polished’, which I will not read.

Right? Stop it. I refuse to spiral into this. I reject the cheap dopamine hit of approval. I exist on a higher plane, untethered from the shallow metrics of a system designed to keep us all performing like trained seals for a smattering of digital fish.

Validation is for amateurs. Real creatives create for the love of the process. And I love the process. I love it so much I’m thinking of proposing. Just a simple ceremony — me, the process, and a judge who gets it.

— End scene —

It’s a familiar inner voice (isn’t it? Maybe yours is nicer) — the one that mocks our craving for likes, downplays our “petty” comparisons.

But I’m interested in our need for validation stripped of all judgment. Perhaps it’s not that we’re shallow for wanting recognition; it’s that we’ve confused two very different things: validation and significance.

We know outsourcing our sense of okay-ness won’t satisfy us, so we roll our eyes at ourselves when the nagging hunger for… something arises. Like hunger, significance is a basic, orienting human need. (Thank you Alana Schramm, for bringing this up to me recently.)

Seeking significance is not a cheap performance for likes or shares; it’s the deep pull to connect with life’s rich well of meaning. Meaning is revealed relationally, which means we find it when we’re in relationship to our vast, complex self, other people, and the world. It’s not a pathology.

Seeking validation is what we do when we don’t have the capacity to trust our significance, and that happens for all kinds of reasons: creative injury, a dark night of the soul, or just living in a culture of alienation.

So what do we do with this? How do we untangle the elegant knot of needing to matter and trying not to care that we do?

Let’s acknowledge the obvious: we’re not going to stop caring. Thank God. If we stopped caring, we’d be dead or close to it. People want to connect, to resonate, to know that their existence has pressed, however lightly, into the fabric of reality. That’s not vanity.

We’re living in a culture that dangles validation like a carrot, calls it a reward for good behavior, then judging us for running after it.

But what if we didn’t wait for the carrot?

Here are some prompts:

1. What makes your friends, your pet, your favorite place significant to you? Is it something they “earned” or… not?

2. How would you create if you knew you were already significant? What would you let yourself explore or risk?
   

3. What relationship do you want to deepen in your creative life? With the work, the world, yourself? How can you start listening to that relationship differently, letting it guide you toward meaning?
   

With love,

Maria

P.S. You’re invited to a special event: Creating in the Face of Chaos: A Maker’s Guide to Change. I can’t wait to hang out with you there. All it takes to join is ordering the book Making Time, out in two weeks! That sounds like a very wise decision to me.