Validation, but for who?

Introduction

Every single person can cast their mind back to when they were a kid; bright eyed and bushy tailed with few external pressures obstructing their purity. Anything seems possible, that’s why when you ask a child their dream or what pet they want, they may respond with astronaut and unicorn, respectively. Only with time, this façade tends to fade. Often, this is put down to aging but in fact, what really makes time the problem? As if you stayed with the same outlook, you could hold onto that mindset well into your early 50's. The issue it seems is how we respond to such realities and how these shape our perspective. There seems to be a massive bridge between an all or nothing, such that if you tell a kid unicorns don’t exist they are extremely deflated and now any other animal now seems inferior. This is because what this child's view of life was did not meet their expectations, and the accumulation of such realities being faced can contribute to this prolonged deflation into adulthood. This comes down to two things: expectations and gratitude.

The danger of expectation

For most people, New Years Eve, birthdays and Christmas are pinnacle points in the year we look forward to. How many of us count down the days until Christmas marked by advent calendars and 1st December decorations? How much emphasis do we put on these not even 24 hour but 12 hour periods to be the highlights of our year, then waking up the next day with a slight dampened feeling that it is all over? You spend so much time hyping up the idea of it that when you look back on it with hindsight, does it match the same level of expectation every year? Similar to nights out, I look forward to New Years Eve parties or friends big events as much as the next person does and even if you have a great night (better than your standard Monday-Thursday work nights, which makes up over 60% of your week) you can often feel a sense of deflation that it wasn’t as incredible as you expected it to be. Although it was great and you had fun, you can feel that you could've had more fun because of the expectation level you had for the evening. This is so common, and is something which stops us from being present and appreciating all we have around us.

The importance of gratitude

How many times do you scroll through social media or hear from friends or relatives about someone you knows passing? When you see it, the shock hits and the sadness and disbelief set it. You start to think, oh he was so young! Too young! How unfair, I'm only x years younger/ older than him. You start to appreciate your life and think you ought to be nicer to your elderly relatives, not to take them for granted as time can be so sparse and at any moment yours or their life could change. You may try and be a bit healthier to prevent the worsening of a heart condition akin to the heart attack which killed your 35 year old friend. You will try and stress less and give leeway to those who usually frustrate you, thus your tolerance goes up. Fast forward 2 weeks: you're back to your same routine. Why are such feelings so transient and why does it take life's biggest downfalls to reflect and practise gratitude?

Losing ourselves to validation

A lot of things people do comes from external validation and how this makes them look from the outside world. We are so busy comparing ourselves to other people we lose sense our ourselves, what we want, what we like and don’t like as our peers are constantly shining the same new adidas sambas in our face that we now feel obliged to get. What do we really gain from comparing ourselves to other people? What do we achieve from this? A desire to one up the next person, a loss of individuality because I know full well if me and my friends all bought the same outfit to fit in I'd subconsciously be thinking who wore it better. But, I set myself up for that so I can't complain about the feeling I have when I've stripped myself of individuality and left myself vulnerable to comparison. This is a more extreme version of people in society. Sad as it sounds, very few people care for what we do- they often see it as a way to one up themselves not as a direct means of how they think of you. If anything, it breeds jealousy that they lack that item in their life which is a 21st century approach to people having nice things in life.

Conclusion

So, why entertain it? Why do people get absorbed into this norm and be faced with the obvious repercussions succeeding this way of life? Everyone is different down to their unique DNA sequences so trying to conform to this societal norm will never align you well enough in which case you're always striving for something you can't achieve. Live life according to your own frequency because not doing so is the only sure fire way to feel alienated from your own self. Fight your battles wisely and embrace individuality as a gift that is the one of few constants in life that unconditionally prevail.