500 Words a Week - The Altar of Approval
How much of yourself are you sacrificing at the altar of approval?
The need to be liked, wanted, to seem important and powerful to others. How much of your current life is defined by chasing these aspects of life?
In trying to conform ourselves to what's expected of us, we dampen our creativity. We close off that little voice or calling inside, that’s showing us the way forward.
Approval is something we crave. In our prehistoric years, to be ostracised from the group meant certain death as we wouldn’t be able to survive for long alone. We still carry with us this need to be part of a group, this need to be liked and approved of. Yet now the need to be part of a group no longer means life or death for us, but sometimes we find ourselves treating it that way.
The Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue makes an interesting comment about guilt and shame. How certain religions and cultures remained in power and thrived off of making their members feel intensely guilty and shameful if they went off the chosen path.
“When god and the system were harsh and culture was more uniform, good and innocent people felt scrupulously guilty about nothing.” - John O’Donohue
Upon reading and thinking about this, I can’t help thinking about the Irish souls of the past made to feel confined at the behest of the culture they were living in at a time. And how maybe we are still facing some of the runoff from this, being afraid to stand out, to go against the grain, to be different in any way. We are scared to reach for something more, as we can already hear in our minds the catalogue of whispers spoken behind our backs.
How many lives had to hide who they were and what called to them due to a culture ruled by fear? Who had to quell their desires and dreams at the altar of approval?
We have now simply traded one altar for another. The trappings of modern society revolve around our image, our wealth, our status. We feel obliged to do all we can to maximise these. No wonder we can feel lost and disengaged with the world as we have forsaken all that calls to us.
The prisons that hold onto us now are much subtler than those experienced before us. They make it seem like we have more independence, more control, while they have firmly planted their roots in our subconscious. The modern altar spreads its message through social media. The algorithm moulds beauty, success and a well lived life into an objectified metric. Despite however many times we hear that people are only sharing the best of themselves, we can’t help feeling an element of comparison. That we must also devote ourselves to these objectified metrics to have any worth and value in the world. This is our modern altar of approval.
