The need for validation vs. the need for good feedback

People with an insecure sense of self are outer-directed, they live their lives for the validation of the people around them. Since they felt belittled and neglected when they were too young to do anything but suffer, they take pains to look physically perfect, according to the fashion of the day, they seek praise, status, social position, awards from their peers. All these are part of a lifelong attempt to make themselves feel better, more valuable and worthier of love, than others. They live in a hierarchical world where some people are simply much more important than others, by virtue of working to earn their self-worth in an objectively quantifiable way.

They live in a win/lose competitive world where winners win and are admired by those around them for having the will and talent not to be losers. As far as I can see, that world is the destructive illusion of superficial idiots, but I have always been super-opinionated about things like the justness of rigid social hierarchies and those who conform to social systems without any real questions about their validity. I keep thinking of the billions of people this worldview consigns to inferior, permanent, inter-generational loser status simply as the way things are.

I have always felt a need for the useful feedback I almost never got as a child. What is different about my need for a response and the need for outer validation I’ve sketched above? In both cases we are looking for assurances about the good effect our words and actions have on others. Everyone likes a sincere compliment, it’s always gratifying to be spoken well of by others. In the case of validation-seeking, the thing sought is praise and admiration. That is different, to my mind, than seeking an intelligent critique of your work, sometimes your deeds.

A person writes to convey thoughts, ideas and feelings to others. Writing is an extension of the desire to have a good, mutual conversation, one of the great pleasures of being human, as far as I can see. There is really no better way to gauge how well a piece of writing achieves the goals you intend than by getting good notes from a reader. This feedback allows us to understand what is still unclear to others in our work, or objectionable, or feeble, or unconvincing, and to address ambiguity, sloppiness, or assuming the comprehensibility of complex things we have not sufficiently laid out the context for understanding. With those comments in mind we can fix those things and come closer to our aim. Comments we can mull over keep the conversation moving forward, which is integral to why we communicate in the first place. Silence by way of response is a real conversation stopper, to state the obvious.

Validation-seeking people tend to stay very busy, they are socially active, work hard, program their leisure time down to the minute, consult the clock for when it’s time to end the party and get eight hours of sleep to be up and at ’em full force the next morning. Their every waking effort goes toward earning the self-acceptance and self-admiration they can’t feel except as reflected back to them by others. Sitting quietly by themselves, unless they are exercising their abdominal muscles, burning calories or something useful like that, is unthinkably difficult for them. It is as if they literally can’t see themselves unless they are engaged with others who appreciate them.

Of course, I probably only feel this way because I’ve always spent most of my hours alone. One could make a decent argument that I like nothing better than the company of my own constantly rippling thoughts and ideas. I learned early to soothe myself this way when I felt ignored – learning to play music, drawing, writing, cooking. I am always happy to spend time with other people, or talk to them at length – and I need these contacts as much as anyone does, maybe more – but I also accept myself the way I am and have as much compassion for myself as I do toward anyone else I care about.

Am I a great guitar player or any kind of virtuoso? No, but I am the greatest guitar player I can be at the moment. It means a great deal to me to play every note as cleanly, purposefully and soulfully as I can, to learn new ways to play the same melody, new positions on the neck for chords and little tricks, to become a more fluent improviser. Most people don’t think of any of these things, like the many different ways to play the same note, which I think is a shame.

To those who focus almost entirely on what the outer world says about us, you are either a professional musician getting paid and recognized for your work or an amateur with a slightly obsessive hobby which is nice, but a bit vain, because what does it really say about a person if they waste hours a day playing Beatles tunes?

It would be marginally better to the validation-focused, perhaps, to play sophisticated, challenging jazz tunes, or the best of classical guitar, if they would even notice that difference in material. They’re often not even able to hear any of it very clearly because it is just – they don’t even know what the hell compels someone to do it. Beatles, jazz standards or classical — best, to me, is playing what you love best and can make sound the most beautiful, but, fuck, enough about me.

Trump’s team “respectfully disagrees”

The three (female) judge panel from the DC circuit court of appeals ruled unanimously that an ex-president does not have blanket immunity against criminal prosecution for crimes committed while in office. Not a big surprise. The president’s spokesman, guy named Cheung, said Trump “respectfully disagrees” with the unanimous ruling.

“If immunity is not granted to a president, every future president who leaves office will be immediately indicted by the opposing party,” Mr. Cheung said. “Without complete immunity, a president of the United States would not be able to properly function.”

If he’s a fucking criminal.

Trump’s logic is kind of self-evident, if you love him. Trump was the forty-fifth president. All forty-four presidents before him, on leaving office, immediately pleaded the absolute, blanket immunity that Bill Barr told Trump he had on more than one occasion, until Barr realized he too might die in prison if he kept going forward with the Orange Polyp’s determination to carry out multiple criminal plans to remain in power after losing his re-election bid. If these ex-presidents had not all invoked their lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution, all would have been immediately arrested and locked up, without trial, by their ascendant political enemies!!! And, obviously, their successor would have had each of them killed in prison, having absolute, blanket, lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution, for anything, ever. It’s only common sense … to an insane person.

Here’s the outraged King of MAGA himself, as only he can do it:

A President will be afraid to act for fear of the opposite Party’s Vicious Retribution after leaving OFFICE. I am your retribution, I will take the things the sick, dangerous enemy deliberately weaponized and exact my terrible vengeance with them. The earth will Shake, Rattle and Retribute, universal, mandatory death penalty, Cod Bless these SHAYsssh. Biden grime fambily.

This prick is relentless in his greed

Jeff Bezos only makes $131, 666 a minute, this master of the universe (divide by 60 the $7,900,000 an hour he made last year, per Robert Reich, a reliable source).  I guess the fucking piece of shit really, really, really wants to be the richest man who ever lived and some other super-competitive piles of dreck are giving him a run for his money. What a shamelessly avaricious little scumbag. I wish him an eternal afterlife in the most lavish, exclusive hell imaginable. Fuck this fucking puto.

And why not try to rake in a few more billion from his millions of addicted customers when he has the power and ability to do so? It’s a lot better making a little extra cash than paying a reasonable amount of tax to a government he can’t completely control… worse, a government who only wants to control him, force him to collectively bargain with his underpaid workers, employ fair business practices, tax him for his massive contribution to global warming and unconscionable shit like that. 

Catastrophizing

I wake up with my skin crawling. Can’t sleep anymore because, in addition to all my other troubles at the moment, I have these fucking microscopic devils running around under my skin. Oh, my god… the horror, the fucking horror! I am soon ripping at my own skin.

This hellish looking baby is called a scabie (Sarcoptes scabiei), a parasitic mite that lives, in the millions, under the skin and causes a contagious itch with… exudative crust…

I scratch my skin hopelessly because it itches everywhere, worst in the places I can’t hope to reach. 

Note: there is no evidence that I have scabies. In fact, I don’t have scabies.  A friend in France recently described this nightmare to me, and the wonderful news he had from a doctor — his case is called “clean scabies” which, like “friendly fire”, or “collateral damage”, really doesn’t change the awful outcome, but is supposed to make you feel better since, in your case, the plague that is tormenting you did not result from your own poor hygienic practices.  

I looked up scabies and found this nightmarish image of the tiny fucker who runs in hoards making the skin horripilate and forming crusts over the itchy places where exudation occurs. Naturally the image of this tiny, demonic monster popped into my head when I woke up today itching. Once it was there, I couldn’t get it out. 

Because my new knee is still often immobilizingly painful ten months after replacement surgery, because I can’t exercise, because, after an objectively hellish experience with old friends I am wrestling with a playful anaconda of a manuscript that, while smiling, challenging and fun much of the time, is still a twenty foot long deadly constrictor, because all my eggs are in one basket and that basket is shredding, because I am flesh and must go the way of all such things… because the city cut off the water this morning and I have buckets of water all over for cooking, washing and toilet flushing… because, because, because….

It doesn’t occur to me, or it does but I dismiss the thought, that I am itching because of dry skin, a common malady of winter in temperate zones that gets more demanding with age. Next to the bed I have a pump bottle of moisturizer, placed there for soothing dry, itching skin. Applying it is a much better option than clawing at my own skin and twitching at the thought of parasitic mites doing gleeful gymnastics under my skin, but it seems as hopeless as everything else at the moment, too much skin to moisturize, can’t reach the places it itches most, wah, wah! Catastrophe!

Catastrophizing happens when you are overwhelmed by the challenges you face and are at the end of your ability to objectively weigh your circumstances. You can no longer see them one by one as discrete things to deal with, they have united to destroy you once and for all.  All the afflictions described two paragraphs above are true. Taken one at a time they are all things that can be taken care of, though some take a long time and require a long term perspective. Taken as a whole, as the relentless, million-faced army of the same implacable enemy, they appear in the form of the undefeatable microscopic tormentor pictured above.

The thought of this whole subject makes my goddamned skin crawl.

Winners vs. Losers (chapter 74, work in progress)

We live in an age where indomitable, driven people who can never be wrong – and who accumulate vast amounts of wealth and power – are widely admired as winners. You see these venerated winners everywhere, often sour-faced, whining loudly about how everyone persecutes them and is trying to steal what is rightfully theirs. What is rightfully theirs is everything in the world, because they are winners. Only losers don’t understand this.

Winning and losing, of course, are the outcomes of games, sporting events, individual transactions, negotiations, fights. Winning and losing are transient states, not a final end judgment on a person’s entire being or what they deserve. An insatiable desire to win the game of life is the hallmark of a gigantic, deluded asshole who needs to feel better than others. It’s nice to win a fair contest of skill, it feels great. That it’s possible to win life itself is a ridiculously childish idea.

People do not win or lose in life, as a look in any direction can confirm. Life is change, chance, desire, work, learning, happy accident, or sad one. The idea of dividing the world into winners and losers (more accurately entitled exploiters and the rightfully exploited) was created and popularized by people who can never be wrong, and it appeals to some primitive, wishful part of the human psyche. In their stilted, black and white, zero sum, win-lose worldview people who win are superior to losers and therefore entitled to whatever they can wrest from others. That’s why CEO pay in Fortune 500 companies went from 30 times the median worker pay in the 1970s to 350 times that today. CEOs are winners, clearly, and average workers are fucking losers, and parasites, and jealous losers and parasites at that.

The story of my permanent banishment from a group of old friends, all very accomplished, hard working pillars of their communities, all full of love and loyalty and unappealably harsh, to-the-death judgment toward certain “losers,” shines a light on how foolish the notion of winners and losers is to describe human life, and how destructive it is to us all.

Way to frame the issues, Grey Lady

The trouble, according to New York Times reporting, is that Biden failed on the BORDER CRISIS, and therefore House Republicans are, logically, impeaching the Biden official most directly responsible for that failure.

What the fuck is wrong with the insanely “nuanced” status quo embracing Journal of Record?

On the other hand, along with occasional important investigative reporting, they sometimes present excellent arguments for law and justice, such as Jamelle Bouie’s recent op ed, a short piece I highly recommend:

Chapter 72 Authenticity

We are living in an age when weak, needy, ruthless, vengeful, endlessly covetous men (and a few women) are seen as geniuses, visionaries and strongmen. Acquiring everything possible for themselves while promising horrific retribution for offenses real and imagined is seen as strength and cheered by admiring crowds. We are living, boys and girls, in an Age of Idiocy, more specifically, the Age of Narcissism. It appears to be dawning on us all slowly.

The most searched for word in 2022 was “gaslighting”. This form of psychological manipulation gets its name from a creepy old film, Gaslight, where the wealthy female protagonist is wooed and married by a man who convinces her she is insane, to cover his own criminal activities. He pretends to go out every evening and secretly searches for stolen treasure hidden in the attic of the mansion, under gas light. Because he’s using lights in the attic, the lights in the rest of the house dim. The husband convinces the wife she is going insane when she tells him about the lights, and for a time she believes him. Hence, gaslighting – lying to make you doubt the reality of your own perceptions, feeding you a diet of deliberate falsehoods to make you fear you’re going mad. Any wonder it was Word of the Year in 2022?

In 2023 the Word of the Year was “authenticity”. It means 1: not false or imitation; real, actual 2: true to one’s own personality, spirit or character 3: worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact, conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features, made or done the same way as an original.

This is the essential quality a gaslighting narcissist forces his victims to abandon. They will tell you what is true, what is false, what you should believe, why you are wrong to believe otherwise, how you should act, look, feel. Your feelings and ideas are wrong, they will tell you authoritatively. They demand that others to be as inauthentic as they are.

It is impossible for a “perfect” person to be authentic, to act according to their true character. They never were allowed as children to develop a true character and be loved for it. Their only choices after that damaging deprivation are a grandiose veneer of perfection or utter, humiliating worthlessness. In order to foster a created, performative persona of strength and perfection, very fragile when held up against reality, it is necessary to keep all those around them in a state of inauthenticity. Everybody in their orbit must be true not to their own spirit and character, to what they need in order to feel comfortable, but to the narcissist’s need for unconditional admiration and obedience.

These kinds of sick fucks have always ruled others, it is easily observed turning the pages of any history book. The rule of the select few is always explained and justified by the mores of the time, slavery was for centuries the norm, for example, but over time the same privileges of a tiny, all-powerful minority are maintained the same way, using the leverage of great wealth, intimidation, fear and violence to hoard the wealth of the majoritarian masses.

Parents who can never be wrong teach their children that they’re wrong even when the kid is right. Narcissism is a zero sum game, meaning there is only winning and losing, controlling and being controlled, the image of perfection or terrifying annihilation. This black and white worldview afflicts people who have been crushed in their soul at a very tender age. The abuse and emotional neglect they suffered renders them unable to compromise or even to listen to anything that contradicts their brittle sense of their special wonderfulness. They are the furthest thing from authentic, since they rigidly cling to an unrealistic view of themselves as perfect, the only alternative to feeling hideously, unlovably flawed, none of it having anything to do with authenticity.

It is a terrible constant in human affairs, the outsized influence these inhuman bastards tend to play on the world stage. Scroll from window to window, you will see these very important pricks pontificating on every platform. They simply cannot shut up. The appetite for their brilliant opinions is seemingly endless. We are fascinated by men who acquire 100,000 times more than any wealthy person needs. Accumulating billions in wealth appears to be proof of their indomitable will to have everything, which many reckon the mark of someone to be admired, even idolized.

As for me, I’ll take someone who can look at herself and the world honestly, in all its color, nuance, light and shade, and speak authentically, with humility and openness, about the hellish odds we are all up against, just trying to be authentic, empathetic and offer each other shared things we all value here in this threatened miracle of a world.