It's Okay... To Need Everyone to Like You

In this week’s episode, I’m going to explain why it’s imperative to have everyone like you to ensure you have a happy life! Even if that means changing whom you are… Especially if that means changing whom you are… Why haven’t you started changing yet? 

Who doesn’t like being liked? No one. Popularity is crucial to our very existence because it helps us rise to the top of our various social circles. From the popular Neanderthals depicted on the earliest cave paintings to the Kardashians today we all desire to be liked and loved by everyone.

The more likes and compliments we get the better we feel about ourselves. Why? Well because having people like us is one of the only true ways to recognize our self-worth as well as increase our happiness. Ensuring everyone likes you creates quick hits of artificial positivity that temporarily fill your happiness tank, sure those moments of bliss are fleeting, and the positivity quickly turns sour with anxiety and crushing doubt but the more people you have liking you the more places you can turn to in order to find bumps of diabetic soul candy. Chasing the highs of the popularity dragon is unnecessarily exhausting but worth it mainly because what other choice do we have?

We all yearn for public and peer validation otherwise why put all that effort and time into a selfie? Why would you only be interested in impressing yourself? Where’s the joy in giving your self a compliment? You know it’s coming! That’s like trying to give your self a surprise birthday party. #Lame. Social media likes are a real time popularity contest or better yet a popularity stock exchange. You need followers and likes, like a start up needs investors.

So what are your options? Creating your own inner happiness by recognizing you don’t the validation of others? Good luck with that. Trying to find inner happiness is like trying to find an illusive oasis in the desert of regret that is your soul. Things like gratitude, self-confidence, loving who you are, are all baited lures trying to trick you into believing you can create your own happiness. Spoiler alert … You can’t. Don’t let the gurus of false hope like Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins, or Lewis Howes fool you into thinking you can still be happy by no longer worrying if people like you or not. They seem to believe that what other people think of us is outside of our control and instead what we can do is focus on being a good person and loving ourselves with a foundation of gratitude and self-loving compassion to create a truer sense of our self-worth. People who don’t need validation from others are living in a self-destructive fantasyland and should be avoided at all costs. Their decision to look inwards for personal happiness is like a dog constantly trying to chase its own tail. #Hopeless.

If someone doesn’t like you, for whatever fictional reason, and even if just that’s the only person in your whole life that takes offence to you, means there’s something wrong with you. It only takes one fly to spoil the popularity ointment so it’s imperative to keep everyone liking you. That might even mean its necessary to be a different person to different people. Cater who you are, by sacrificing whom you truly are, to everyone in your life in order to increase your chances of popularity across the board. Let everyone else determine what you need to be or do in order to have their hollow validation.

So remember, there are 2 types of people in this world, people who like you and those that don’t. The people who don’t are the ones you need to spend the most time focusing on. The meaner or more ambivalent the person is, the bigger the validation they represent. So always bend over backwards for these people in order for them to eventually and half heartedly acknowledge your worth, talents, or abilities. The other extreme are the people who just willing give out validation like your friends, family, and significant other, which means they can’t be trusted because they clearly want something. It’s also important to recognize you can’t trust your own view of yourself because you’re too close to the situation. The only way of knowing your true self-worth is having negative and toxic people validate you, there’s no greater sense of accomplishment in life when you can receive the backhanded validation from someone who doesn’t deserve to be in your life.