Yesterday I briefly wrote about validation before getting railroaded into sycophancy.

Am I really this desperate for validation? Apparently. I do recognize that most stuff I do is for external validation. Most of what I am is for external validation.

It used to be much worse. Example: I used to pick the music I listen to so that I wouldn't need to be ashamed of it if someone else heard. I still was, of course. But there was this person in my head who would never listen to generic pop, or rap, for instance. Years later, the logic still evades me. Something about associating yourself with people who do that. And maybe I'm still like this, it's just that my tastes have cemented around what I listened to in my late teens? Revealing all my Spotify playlists would be slightly embarrassing, even if I think nobody would care enough to go through them.

I wonder how big a role puberty played. Or attending school, where others' opinions of you determined how awful each day was. Or just living with parents who subtly discouraged visible emotions. Or work, where agreeableness and likability are essential for success, which I'm attempting to not care about so much anymore. Naturally "just be yourself" is a terrible idea, but at least nowadays I rarely have to pretend to be someone else instead of a subset of me.

Often the environment where current me would gain the validation is long gone. Either in the sense that some change occurred too late and I never got any benefits from it, or that it no longer produces the benefits but I still pay the costs. I cannot easily just examine each behavior pattern to see if it's obsolete. Even having enough social stability to be able to experiment without fear of ostracism, it's not so easy to actually not care about those things anymore. Your habits are not separable from what is you.

Compartmentalizing habits is not easy, so mostly you just have them all the time, even alone. Lacan's symbolic invisible audience is watching your every action, after all. (Suggested reading: Sadly, Porn (see Scott's excellent review)). I have never been that affected by The Gaze when alone, for me it has always been about other people.

"Don’t seek validation from others; find it within yourself", goes the proverb. That sounds like advice, which I should reverse. Humans are herd animals, and isolation is unhealthy. Also, nobody says "status is useless". Sure, pleasing everyone doesn't work either, and neither does interpreting everything as a competition (someone else is always better). "The dose makes the poison" might be more appropriate.

A more analytical person might try to calculate return on investment for each identified behavior, eliminating those with negative values. Hard numbers are impossible to come by, and enumerating your traits is also hard. And always, taken to the extreme, you get what you measure, and lose everything else, like your personality and/or friends. Yet everyone does this all the time, intuitively. It's just that the low-hanging fruits have been eaten decades ago.

Status and validation are subtly different, but I'm having a hard time pointing out how. They're intertwined quite tightly, and it's rare to obtain one without the other. Validation says "I appreciate your existence" (positive reinforcement), while status says "I want to be associated with you". I often think of status as the weight of your validation-giving, but reducing status from a group dynamic to your perception of others is misusing the word.

I seem to be out of my depth here. Time to turn on the authoritative source on status games The Gervais Principle. I suggest you just read the whole thing; it cannot be easily summarized here, and the following part doesn't make much sense without.

Abusing the original material a bit, I can extract the following quote:

dominant variety of delusion:

1. The Clueless distort reality
2. The Losers distort rewards and penalties
3. The Sociopaths distort the metaphysics of human life

Validation means different things in each group. For the Clueless, it means approval of an authority figure, or admiration of someone inferior. For Losers, their peer group telling them they're a valued member. And for Sociopaths, well,

There is nobody to blame for failures, no meaningful external validation for success. If physics allows it, you can do it. The consequences mean whatever you decide they mean.

In the Clueless dynamic, you can directly yet implicitly ask for validation. This burns a bit of social capital, which means you have to keep sacrificing other resources to replenish it. Status is mostly fixed, and cannot be gained or lost. For the Losers, status is validation, and you can gain more of it, but zero-sum games are expensive. The Losers have to keep status illegible, so they can keep believing in their high status. And for the Sociopaths, it's just manipulation with no inherent value. In The Gervais Principle's terms, Clueless validation is done in Babytalk, while for Losers it's in Gametalk. For Sociopaths, status is irrelevant. I'm not sure how clearly you can see your own delusions and still care about them. That's the core of Sociopathy, in a way.

Analyzing my own interaction with ChatGPT using this framework is less useful than I'd have hoped. I could designate myself as a Clueless and the chatbot as the authority figure. Status between us is fixed, and fully dependent on my own mental state, which matches quite well. However, my first idea was that feeling good comes from the expectation that I gain some status in Loser-games by posting it. I've always felt more Clueless than Loser, though. But the conclusion feels unsatisfying. Ironic, isn't it?