Approval Addiction - An Analysis

I went malling last Sunday and as usual, I spend the entire afternoon leisurely walking in between the aisle scouring the books. And in my “drunken” wander, I noticed a peculiar book nestled among the shelves. The title of that book is “Approval Addiction”. I am tantalized with the book partly because I never heard of the term, “approval addiction” and partly because I seemed to agree with the concept but with reservations. So I read the brief description of the book at the back and I found out that the book is somewhat a religious – psychology – self help book of sort, which is not my kind of book. Even though I didn’t buy the book, I kept on thinking on the concept even on my way home. I was thinking is there approval addiction at all? It seemed to me that there is no such thing. I mean the entire society that we lived in is based on approval and we practically grown up on the system. When we are young, our parents practically cultivated our “addiction”. We are rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad ones and as such, we craved the reward and practically seek their approval every chances possible. As we grow older and gone out in the world, we seek the approval of our bosses, our customers, our friends, our peers, and our relatives and why not? With approval, comes the reward except that candies no longer satisfy our rewards, we seek approval in other form, specifically, psychological. Funny, for in a corporate setting, approval is a complex process. An approval takes time, several signatures and reviews and a lot more people. Could all this whet our appetite all the more? Extending this reasoning further, this cultivation of approval addiction is crucial to the survival of society. Our notion of good and bad, our concept of morality, our thirst for knowledge, and our productive and creative are developed using this addiction. We seek other people’s approval and so we learn and grow. I also remembered my behavioral science class, the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs. Isn’t psychological satisfaction a higher need and hence, a motivational factor? Peer approval is one such motivational factor. Given all of this, I wonder, is approval addiction an issue at all? We encourage it, we cultivate it so why the big fuss? Well, approval addiction is a real issue and important simply because we are humans, reek with emotion however irrational it maybe and not some cold calculating logical machine. We couldn’t control ourselves and we let our emotions, particularly fear gain the better of us at times. It is not just a psychological issue but rather it also a socio – cultural – political and ethical issues as well. Drug dependents craved peer approval and that is why they take drugs. Government nowadays behaved “irrationally” because of approval addiction. In fact, government spent countless sums to finance opinion polls to understand the “will of the people” in the vain hope of maintaining their approval rating. They sacrifice long – term stability in favor of short – term gains. Corporations also do the same with their investor. Great men in history in their moment of truth always think about how history would judge them and in effect seek history’s approval of their action. Approval comes when they are praised, acclaimed, saluted, and remembered in history on their decision or else they are simply vilified. It seems that concept of right and wrong is no longer relevant and even ignored. Approval addicts just simply aim for that psychological satisfaction of approval and they value it so much that everything else is irrelevant. Sometimes, I simply couldn’t understand why. Could it because I’m a loner and I don’t give a damn to what other people say? Maybe, I’m just being practical. I wonder if the approval addict has two different sets of people he or she would want to get approval from, how would he or she choose? My guess is that he or she would to weigh on whose side has the most reward to offer, in materialistic term or in psychological terms. And this is where my conclusion comes in. There is no such thing as an approval addict because even though humans are emotional, we are still logical. The so – called approval addicts simply made a trade off between seeking approvals and the psychological benefits and rewards it could get. If the reward isn’t lucrative enough for them to seek approval, he or she wouldn’t seek their approval at all. In this case, everybody is an approval addict. The only difference is in what they value and how high a premium they placed on in.