Recalibrating expectations of yourself in hard periods, which I wrote about last time, requires knowing who you are independent of performance. But there is an even subtler form of the same test, lived daily without being recognised: who are you when the notifications stop, when no reaction comes, when the screen goes dark and nobody sees you, appreciates you, or confirms you?
The answer to that question says more about you than any public profile.
Digital social validation is a relatively recent phenomenon, but its effects are already deeply embedded. Likes, comments, quick replies to messages, view counts, all of these have come to function as a real-time feedback system about your worth. Not deliberately, not consciously, but effectively. And when that feedback disappears, whether because you put the phone down, nobody responded, or you left the app, something appears that is not easy to name: a void, a mild anxiety, an impulse to check again.
That is not individual weakness. It is a consequence of how these platforms are built, with deliberate variable reward mechanisms that activate the same neural circuits as gambling.
Beyond the technical mechanism, there is a more personal and more important question: how much of your self-esteem depends on what comes from outside? How much of the feeling that you exist, that you matter, that you are valuable, comes from others' confirmation and how much from an internal place that does not depend on external reactions?
People with relatively stable self-esteem can sit with silence. They can post something and not check reactions for stretches of time. They can live an experience without needing to document and share it. Not because they do not care about connection, but because connection is not their only channel for confirming their own existence.
People with more fragile self-esteem cannot sit with silence as easily. Silence feels like rejection. The absence of reactions feels like invisibility. And invisibility, at a neurobiological level, triggers the same alarm as genuine social exclusion.
What happens in relationships when external social validation is the primary source of personal worth? A few direct effects.
The first is that the partner ends up competing with the screen. Not as a metaphor. Literally. Attention split between a real conversation and checking notifications is reduced attention for the other person, felt by them even when not named.
The second is that mood becomes dependent on something uncontrollable. If a post did well, you are better at home. If it got no reactions, you are more withdrawn or more irritable. The partner lives with someone whose emotional tone varies according to algorithms.
The third is that genuine intimacy becomes harder to access. Real intimacy has no likes. There is no external validation for what happens in the private space of a relationship. And if you do not know how to exist without external validation, that private space can feel insufficient or unrewarded.
How do you build a sense of your own worth that does not depend on what comes from outside? Not through a decision to quit social media, which is rarely realistic or sufficient. But through practices of reanchoring internally.
The first is to have experiences you do not post. Deliberately. A good meal, a walk, a deep conversation that remain untold. Not because sharing is bad, but because the unposted experience shows you it can exist without witnesses.
The second is to notice, without judgement, when you check the phone from anxiety rather than curiosity. The difference is felt in the body: anxiety is more tense, more compulsive. Curiosity is more relaxed.
The third is to build sources of satisfaction that have no public distribution channel: a physical practice, a journal, a face-to-face relationship with someone who knows you genuinely.
I believe one of the clearest mirrors of your relationship with your own worth is how you feel when the phone is on silent and a day passes without any external reaction to who you are or what you do. Not panicked or empty, just an ordinary day without feedback.
How do you feel on the days when you receive no external confirmation that you exist and that you matter? And what does that feeling tell you about where you actually hold your sense of your own worth?
