The Things We Do For Attention
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." — Oscar Wilde
You see people do things. Sacrificing dignity for clicks on social media, for money; pretending to be someone they're not to impress others; chasing material things and flexing them; or disrupting people's daily lives for no seemingly obvious reason. I try not to judge, especially when you start to realise why people do the things they do—perhaps it's something existential. A void that needs filling by any means necessary. The desire to be seen.
Many of your drives are built on top of behaviours and desires formed in the first eight years of your life—determined genetically and reinforced by parental and social influence. Childhood is when the brain is most plastic, developing and forming concepts that become deeply ingrained—fairness, love, anger, justice—subjective to one's genetics and environment. Something that might seem trivial to one person might be excruciating or even existential to another because of the meaning they've attached to it.
Something as simple as a father coming home late from work once, when he's usually on time every single day, can create an existential craving for attention—an attempt to reclaim something that was once taken away. A child cannot properly reason; their meaning structures are still forming. To one child, this may not be a big deal. To another, it can feel like deep betrayal.
We are not too different from animals in this sense. You see similar behaviours in our evolutionary cousins, apes—you give an ape grapes every day, and then one day you don't. The ape doesn't just accept it; it assumes something is wrong. It thinks you hate it. It tries to find any way to regain that lost sense of consistency. But in reality, that's not actually the truth. It's not about the grape itself but the expectation of the grape. The ape isn't reacting to reality; it's reacting to the break in its expected pattern of reality.
The same happens with people—small moments that disrupt an internalised sense of stability can trigger an outsized emotional response, which, when internalised in childhood, can shape behaviour for life. The rest of their existence may become a task of reclaiming that missed attention, fixing that break in pattern—even in ways that seem irrational to others. A chase that most aren't even consciously aware of.