There’s a photo of me in my early twenties that I keep coming back to.
I’m smiling, but it’s the kind of smile you put on when you’re trying to look like you’ve got it together. I had just finished my psychology degree, I was back living at home, and I was working a warehouse job shifting TVs around Melbourne for minimum wage. Not exactly the plan.
What I remember most about that period isn’t the physical exhaustion, though that was real. It’s the mental noise. The constant low-level hum of needing people to think I was okay. Smart. Going somewhere. Worth something.
I was working myself ragged trying to prove a point to people who weren’t paying attention.
Now that I’m 37, with a bit of distance and a lot of hard-won perspective, I can see it clearly. And if I could sit across from that guy — the one smiling for the photo, quietly falling apart inside — I wouldn’t tell him to enjoy it more. I’d tell him to stop performing for an audience that was never really rooting for him to begin with.
The exhausting game I didn’t know I was playing
Here’s the thing about trying to prove your worth to the wrong people: you don’t even realise you’re doing it. It just feels like ambition. Like drive. Like caring about what people think of you.
But there’s a difference between genuine growth and performance. One comes from a desire to become. The other comes from fear — fear of being seen as less than, as a disappointment, as someone who didn’t live up to expectations.
Back then, I was firmly in the second camp.
I’d go home from the warehouse, tired and a little defeated, and instead of resting I’d be thinking about what my old university friends were doing. Whether people from school had noticed I wasn’t exactly thriving. Whether the people who’d had high hopes for me were quietly revising their opinion.
It’s a miserable way to live, and the worst part is it kept me focused entirely on external validation rather than on actually building a life that made sense for me.
Who exactly was I trying to impress?
When I finally sat down and actually thought about this, the answer was uncomfortable.
I was trying to impress people I didn’t even particularly like. Acquaintances, distant relatives, people from school I’d barely spoken to in years. I was burning energy performing for an imaginary crowd made up largely of people who were too busy worrying about their own lives to think about mine.
I’ve talked about this before, but one of the most quietly devastating traps of early adulthood is mistaking attention for support. People can be interested in your life without actually wanting what’s best for you. Some people are watching to see if you stumble. Some are comparing. A few are genuinely invested.
What Buddhism taught me about seeking approval
During that warehouse period, I was doing a lot of reading on my breaks. Buddhist philosophy mostly — not out of any spiritual awakening, just out of desperation for something that might make the restlessness a bit quieter.
One idea hit me hard and hasn’t left since. The concept that suffering doesn’t come from what happens to us. It comes from our attachment — to outcomes, to identities, to the need for things to look a certain way to other people.
I was attached. Deeply. To the idea of how my life was supposed to look. To what other people thought my trajectory should be. To a version of success that I’d absorbed from somewhere and never actually questioned.
Buddhism doesn’t ask you to stop caring about life. It asks you to examine what you’re clinging to and whether that clinging is actually serving you. In my case, the honest answer was: absolutely not.
The approval I was chasing was never going to come in a form that satisfied me, because the need for it wasn’t rational. No amount of external recognition was going to fill the gap left by genuine self-respect. That’s not something other people can hand you.
When the people you’re performing for aren’t in your corner
Maybe it’s a parent who always framed success in a way that left you feeling like you were perpetually falling short. Maybe it’s a group of friends whose approval you kept chasing even as they consistently undermined you. Maybe it’s a wider cultural script that told you your worth was tied to your productivity, your achievements, your ability to perform adequacy.
Whatever form it takes, there’s a moment where you have to ask yourself: why am I working this hard for this particular audience?
The people who are genuinely in your corner don’t make you feel like you have to earn their belief in you. They extend it. They might challenge you, push back, hold you accountable — but there’s a baseline of warmth underneath all of that. You feel it.
The people who aren’t in your corner often look like supporters on the surface. They show up, they ask questions, they seem interested. But their interest is conditional. Contingent on you performing in the way they expect. And no matter what you do, there’s always another hoop.
My younger self was exhausting himself jumping through hoops for people like that. And the saddest part was that he thought the problem was that he wasn’t jumping high enough.
What actually changes when you stop
When I stopped — gradually, not all at once — something unexpected happened.
The space that opened up was enormous.
Energy I’d been pouring into performance started going into actual work. Into building something real. Into figuring out what I actually valued rather than what I thought I was supposed to value. My first site started as a way to write about what I was learning, to process it, to make it useful. I wasn’t writing for approval. I was writing because I had something to say and a need to say it.
That shift — from performing to creating — changed everything.
I’m not going to pretend I’ve completely kicked the need for external validation. I don’t think most people ever fully do. But there’s a difference between wanting your work to resonate with people and needing specific people to think well of you in order to feel okay. The first is human. The second is a trap.
Learning to distinguish between the two is ongoing. But even partial progress on that distinction is worth more than years of flawlessly jumping through the right hoops for the wrong people.
What I’d actually tell my 25-year-old self
Not “enjoy it more.” That’s the advice people give when they’re being nostalgic, not honest.
Not “it gets easier.” That’s kind but vague.
What I’d actually say is this: look around at who you’re working so hard to impress, and ask yourself honestly whether those people are for you. Whether they’d show up if things got worse before they got better. Whether their approval, if you ever actually got it, would leave you feeling full or just temporarily relieved.
And then I’d tell him to redirect every ounce of energy he’s spending on that performance into something he actually cares about.
Because the version of success you build while trying to prove yourself to the wrong people never really fits. It’s a costume, not a life. And eventually you’ll have to take it off and start from scratch anyway.
Better to start now.
Final words
I’m aware this is easier said than done. When you’re 25 and uncertain, other people’s opinions feel like data. Like evidence about whether you’re on the right track. The urge to use approval as a compass is completely understandable.
But approval from people who aren’t truly invested in you is noise, not signal.
The clearest signal I ever got came from the work itself. From writing something honest and having it land. From building something slowly and watching it matter to people. From making a decision that felt right even when nobody else could see the logic yet.
None of that came from trying to prove anything. It came from finally stopping.
If you’re in that place right now — exhausted, performing, quietly desperate for validation from people who don’t really see you — I hope this lands. Not as a pat on the back, but as a genuine invitation to look honestly at who you’re dancing for.
And whether it’s worth the energy.
