As a devil-may-care type of chick, both in appearance and in attitude, I have, inevitably, attracted many desperate seekers of approval in the course of my life. Some men seek approval as a habit, some it takes the form of a horrific psychosis. Either way, it doesn’t tend to cut a whole lot of ice, since I am a rebellious responsibility freak who doesn’t really care what anybody thinks to a great extent.
Prior to falling stupidly in love with Wolfe, I was a very serious, very shy version who had been severely bullied for years and who wanted to make a genuine contribution to progressive thought. I felt so stupid after this episode, that I am now an artist and fiction writer working on some instructional but fairly pointless computer games. What a waste of a great education and work ethic.
My mother has a kind of cold war going on with her approval seeking children, and a red hot war with me, in which she kindly accepts my endless care and then complains about it. This has led to a wider war of nuclear proportions, in which my allegedly very nice sister feels quite free to phone me the night after my mother’s stroke to advise me that the stroke, which she sat and watched before going shopping, was in fact my fault and that she was entitled to her mother’s property. When she told my brother that I had refused to listen to this, he backed her up on it. It is the family property unless it comes to doing any actual work, that of course is mine all mine.
Since my brother has no hope of ever getting my approval due to this lazy greed, he naturally has to turn to her to get this, and so he and my drunken sister kow tow to a psychopathic narcissist who has pursued her obsession with superiority based on bank account alone for more than twenty years. She is also potentially violent, and so I now live with double doors locked and when they choose to visit my mother, they do so locked in an annex which means that I am safe from their unwanted and very negative attention. The only good thing about my brother is that he is interested only in money, whereas the sisters are incredibly spiteful and try to get more complaints from my mother in order to discredit me, the most educated person out of all four of us.
Desperation for approval may look benign, but it can take extremely vicious forms. Compared with a tiny bit of approval from somebody else, you do not matter at all, and you should identify this trait in the people around you and AVOID IT. There is nothing more depressing than a friend you have had for years turning around and telling you that you do not matter in comparison with them getting some fleeting approval from your aging parent. Desperation for approval, therefore, involves quite a deep level of dishonesty and lack of initiative that is really not worth having in your life. Similar to the recent studies of people who habitually swear, showing them to be more honest and hardworking, approval seekers will happily smile at you and stab you in the back if they think they will get some brownie points from some imaginary authority.
In a working context, whistleblowers are the enemies of the approval seekers, who have kept the economy in a wasteful mess for generations. There was a golden time of growth during which change was desirable and new ideas were welcome. This golden time has been over for nearly forty years, replaced with the desire of fat cats to maintain a level of incompetence in others which is not at all useful or pleasant.
So, to conclude, if you agree to be an approval seeker to pay your mortgage, you are spawning the next generation of useless, facile, greedy backstabbers who will continue to rape the economy until one of the African nations finally grabs the bull by the horns and takes it all away from you. A motivated, honest and non-wasteful workforce will destroy your dreams of your third car, your triple glazing and your bullshit holiday to Cuba so that you can snigger at the poor people you spit on every day.
