Your very biology is conspiring against your own value judgments. Why is it that when looking at something we know has value – an invention, an idea, a piece of ourselves – we feel that certainty slip away the moment others question it? Neuroscience suggests our brains are literally wired to seek consensus, to doubt ourselves in the face of social disagreement, which feels both validating and terrifying.
Scientists call it the default mode network – the circuits that light up when we’re not actively doing anything else. And what does this sophisticated piece of neural machinery choose to do with its downtime? It obsesses about our place in the social world. It replays our perceived failures, magnifies our flaws, and constantly monitors the gap between who we are and who we think others want us to be. This constant self-referential thinking was what the ancients observed: roman emperors, Buddhist monks, and Christian ascetics alike.
They all declared war. Self-referential thinking was weakness, delusion, or even sin.
But our brains evolved this way for a reason: in our ancestral environment, being wrong about your social standing could be fatal. Being wrong about your own value, less so. Robert Wright, wrote an entire book about how our genetic destiny is to survive and multiply – not clutivate quiet satisfaction. External validation is so seductive because it is in our nature to crave it. The inner narrative spinning tales of inadequacy is a feature, not a bug, and it in our nature to crave a simple “good job” or a few likes on a post to soothe our inherently dissatisfied nature.
The miracle isn’t that we sometimes fail to maintain our own sense of value in the face of social pressure. The miracle is that we can do it at all. That somewhere in our evolution, alongside this machinery pushing us to constantly seek validation, we developed the ability to sometimes step outside it. To hold onto an assessment of value that comes from somewhere deeper than our chattering social minds.
Maybe that’s why Internet culture seems to understand this better than philosophers or neuroscientists. While Marcus Aurelius wrote about the struggle for virtue, and Robert Wright explains our neural programming, meme culture just… shrugs and makes jokes about it. There’s something weirdly liberating about seeing our deepest insecurities turned into relatable content, our universal human foibles transformed into shareable moments.
Which makes me wonder if maybe the real trick isn’t fighting our validation-seeking nature, or even understanding it, but simply… befriending it? Like looking at that constantly questioning, approval-seeking part of our brain and saying “Yeah, I see you doing your thing. You’re adorable. Keep going.”
After all, if our default mode network is going to keep running its social simulation programs no matter what we do, maybe we can at least learn to find it charming. Like watching a puppy chase its tail – it’s not going to catch it, but that’s not really the point.
a candle, unlit 