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Key points
- With language, humans can idealize, sense their shortcomings, and self-idealize for self-reassurance.
- The universal human need for ego-affirmation is a touchy, taboo, and easily overlooked subject.
- We need to not feel needy, so we tend to treat neediness as pathological.
- Understanding why the human need for affirmation is so strong would help us manage it better.
When we approve of it, we call it love, kindness, caring, bonding, belonging, identity, self-esteem. When we disapprove, we call it ego, narcissism, vanity, self-aggrandizement, delusions of grandeur, virtue-signaling, grandstanding, bragging, showing off.
The common currency of it all is the great undercurrent of the human condition and our ambivalence about it: The human need for self-affirmation, self-reassurance, evidence that we are more than adequate, ways that we can assure ourselves that at least we are or have this and not that.
When someone says “Why don’t you love me?” they mean “affirm me more”. When someone says “Don’t be egotistical,” they mean “don’t be so self-affirming.”
Affirmationomics: The supply of and demand for affirmation explains human behavior better than any other theory. We could call it egonomics, but, again, people tend to shun ego as if it’s beneath them. If you want to understand or predict what people do, just follow the affirmation—what they want to be and are getting affirmed for and where they aim to get more affirmation.
To follow the affirmation, you have to read between the lines. No one says “I’m committed to my beliefs because they affirm me.” No one says “I want a partner because I crave a reliable source of affirmation.” That sounds egotistical (bad) so they’ll call their belief rational (good) and their partnership love (good).
The human need for affirmation isn’t beneath you or any of us. To recognize your appetite for it, try this: You go to a party where you see someone better than you—better looks, smarts, money, charm, whatever. It makes you uncomfortable. Automatically, your intuition claims a good feature you’ve got that they don’t have. Prejudice is that process in bulk, a way to discount and dismiss whole swaths of humanity.
You may not like that you seek affirmation. You may think such self-elevation is lowly. But it’s there. It’s there in all of us. It’s compassionate, not cynical, to recognize that the need for reassurance is central to the human condition.
Still, it’s hard to admit to it. We need to not feel needy. It’s not reassuring to admit that we need reassurance. Admitting that we need to feel adequate makes us feel inadequate.
Why are humans so needy? Was it capitalism or the internet? Were we once different? Did we fall from grace, when we lost the humble harmonious innocence we see in nature?
Yes and no. Biology is cooperative and competitive. All organisms care more about themselves and their offspring than they do about other organisms. All organisms are selves struggling for their own existence and, therefore, selfish to some degree.
Biology is un-moral—neither moral nor immoral. Morality has no relevance in the nonhuman world. That’s why, while we may be shocked at a predator’s ruthless mauling of prey, we don’t blame them.
Morality is a human thing. It has to do with how we fell from grace, not as recently as the internet and social media but way back when we evolved language.
Language makes us radically different from other critters. As with other animals, our priority is comfort in our own skin, but unlike other animals, our feelings are easily triggered by our language-fueled imaginations. We can conceive of anything real or imaginary. No other organism can do that. That’s what makes us the needy creatures we are. We’re more visionary and delusional, anxious and euphoric than any other species. With language, we can idealize and notice how far we fall short of the ideal. To compensate we can self-idealize.
So yes, in a way a fall from grace. In the beginning was the word, not the beginning of the universe or life, and not the word of God, but the beginning of humans. Our acquisition of language is mythologized as Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge and being cast naked, ashamed, out of the Garden of Eden where life, in their un-moral innocence, cooperates and competes.
Humans trudge through a sandstorm of confidence-eroding concepts, all the fictional and nonfictional, past and future threats and missed opportunities that remind us how we fall short of the ideal and threaten, poke, and tear away at our comfort in our own skin.
So of course, we seek conceptual cover, reassurance that we’re OK—more than OK, actually—a buffer of self-reassurance, like money in the bank. We’d want to feel demotion-proof, permaffirmed, protected against all future setbacks. We wouldn’t turn down eternal affirmation any more than we’d turn down infinite money, itself a source of status and self-affirmation. We idolize people who seem permaffirmed, and we self-idealize, as legends in our own minds.
Affirmation is the core currency, but it comes in many denominations. We can get that sense that “at least we have this not that” through what we own, who likes us, our lifestyle, beliefs, experiences, accomplishments, looks, fitness, prospects here or in some imagined afterlife. The list goes on. One way or another, it reassures us.
Humans are to reassurance as hummingbirds are to nectar, needing a sip every few minutes and getting it where we can. But needing to not feel needy, we don’t admit that we’re getting it. We take our sources of reassurance for granted, only noticing when they dry up. A partner departs, a job ends, a loved one dies, and suddenly the thirst for self-affirmation can become unbearable. Jonesing for affirmation, we can always self-affirm with humblebrags, though discrete. We don’t want to expose our neediness.
Sure, we have new sources of reassurance through social media, but the appetite has been there in us since the origin of Homo sapiens, or perhaps FOMO sapiens, sapiens meaning thinking—conceptualizing through language—FOMO meaning fear of missing out on the self-reassuring affirmation we crave. It’s there in our earliest belief in imagined gods, spirits, and forces that reassure us if we’re loyal to them.
You may object to this interpretation of the human condition. It can feel so cold and transactional. Besides if it drives human behavior, why isn’t it the central theory in the social sciences?
I suspect it gets less attention than it should because we need to not feel needy. You’re not going to win affirmation from clients or research colleagues by talking about our neediness. You can talk about the neediness of narcissists, but present company excepted. Cast it instead in neutral or positive terms: People need identity, love, and care but should never be needy greedy, egotistical, or selfish.
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