Stop Checking Your Likes

Lesson 1-  Stop Checking Your Likes and Enter the Real World

The blue thumbs up and the red hearts on social media posts have become the standard of measurements for our self-worth. It signifies our levels of social acceptance and our value. It sounds so absurd, but it is, unfortunately, the absolute truth of modern life. We have naturalised the tendency for external approval, and often it so happens that we do not even realise that we are actually doing it. The need of the hour is to refrain from judging our worth based on the number of likes we get on social media. Freedom lies in realising that approval does not come from outside but from within ourselves. Our inner wisdom should be our guide and not our smartphones. 

Only you need to approve yourself. The stars we see in the night sky are the lights that have travelled for thousands of years in the galaxy. The lights have come from the past into the view of our present. Similarly, we are the products of our past thoughts and actions. The reflection of us in the mirror is of our past selves. So there is a need for us to get to terms with ourselves and go ahead in life. 

We are or have been, at some point in our lives, victims of the approval trap. Whether it is related to our career, personal beliefs, life choices, and partner choices, and so on, we are always made to think of what others will say or think. We are often forced to consider often "what others will think" over what we truly want. We let the pressures of society and family upon us in the decisions we make, and in doing so, we find ourselves in the approval trap. But we are allowed to do, be, and have whatever we want, as long as we do not hinder others from pursuing the same—liberal idea 101. 

We cannot be expected to win every time. Failures are a part of life. Whether it be a marriage, a relationship, a business, a goal, we all experience failures someday and someway. It will be so that our lives will have suffering in one form or the other.. But these should not make us fall into the approval trap or get influenced by external approval. The need for pleasing often plagues us. In this prison of pleasing, we often end up taking actions to please the likes of them. We end up doing stuff that we do not even want to do but do anyway to please others and