The Validation Trap
A personal reckoning with approvals, algorithms, and my self-worth
There was a time I was everywhere. LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Clubhouse… you name the platform, I was on it.
Selfies from airports.
Insights from coaching sessions.
Learnings from books I read.
Learning from my experience.
Moments from events.
Moments from non-events.
I posted because I was genuinely excited about life, about the work, about sharing what I was discovering.
I had my personal pages and my company pages.
Three posts a week, sometimes more.
It felt purposeful. It felt like connection.
Everyone around me appreciated my energy to do so many things and consulted me on this, pretty often.
And then, quietly, something shifted.
I remember posting something I was particularly proud of, something I had thought about deeply, put together carefully, and shared with real excitement.
And then… almost nothing.
A few sporadic likes. Silence where I had expected resonance.
And I won’t dress it up, but it felt like a betrayal.
From my family. From my friends. From the void.
I’m still on most platforms but I started dreading the moment after posting. I began checking, and then hating that I was checking. The phone that used to feel like a microphone started feeling like a mirror I didn’t want to look into.
Slowly, almost without noticing, I withdrew. The posting slowed. Then trickled. Three times a week became once a month.
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And the selfies, something I used to love, I began to detest.
I wasn’t burned out from work. I was burned out from needing the world to tell me I was doing well.
What I didn’t understand then and can see clearly now, is that somewhere along the way, I had quietly handed over my sense of worth to a metric.
Likes. Views. Comments. Reach.
I didn’t decide to do this. It crept in.
And when the metric didn’t deliver, it didn’t just disappoint me. It destabilised me.
Sounds familiar?
Here’s what science tells us about why this happens so easily, and to so many of us.
Social media platforms are engineered around variable reward- the same psychological mechanism behind slot machines. You know this already. When we post and receive a response, dopamine is released. When we don’t, we don’t just feel neutral — we feel a loss.
And here is where it gets more insidious- the same dopamine loop drives doomscrolling.
When the validation of posting doesn’t come, many of us instinctively pick up the phone and scroll- not to find something meaningful, but because the brain is still chasing that hit.
Scroll.
Pause.
Nothing.
Scroll again.
It is mind-numbing by design.
Research from the University of Michigan found that passive social media use — scrolling, checking, waiting — is directly linked to lower self-esteem and increased feelings of loneliness.
We were never just sharing or just scrolling. We are, without realising it, outsourcing our self-evaluation to an algorithm that was never designed to give it back.
There’s more to this story including what science says about why this happens, what doomscrolling has to do with it, and two small practices that actually help.
Read the full piece here on my Substack, This & That
