How’s your audition going? Didn’t know you were auditioning? We often are these days.
Let me pick on social media that great punching bag that we both hate and are simultaneously tethered to. I should warn you that the following thoughts are not unique to social media. So, if you’re not on or are only a lurker, please know the ills of social auditioning are not exclusive to Facebook; it’s just easier to make a point with it.
Our desire for social acceptance can lead us to obsessively send out social radar pings to see if we’re okay and if we still matter, at least as much as we did yesterday, but hopefully a little more. We do this with posts, sometimes funny, sometimes ironic, often snarky and dismissive of others, but almost always hopeful of affirmation in some way. What are we lacking that compels us to these time-sucking post-and-check-result cycles of endorphin addiction?
Michael Gervais recently spoke about the phenomenon he has labeled FOPO (Fear of people’s opinion). In our social media friend groups, we’ve likely slowly curated echo chambers for an ‘audience’ that leaves our takes unchallenged, but we are still vying for approval. It might be the weirdest and most undiscussed aspect of social media. We are trying to gain the approval of supposed ‘friends.’ Or check that approval, reaffirm it, and feel established at a deep fundamental level.
Gervais is gracious to us humans. He says we came by this trait honestly. In our early stages as a species, rejection from the group was a death sentence. Survival on the savanna meant we had to be accepted. But today, that instinct still thrives and metastases into unhealthy appetites for approval.
I’ll add to his grace by saying we are skilled in scanning the world and looking for threats of rejection, never more so than if we grew up in a place of scarcity. A scarcity of resources could mean a slip would become an unrecoverable loss. This can be in the form of scarcity of emotional support, where a misstep means rejection. That will plant a seed of relying on approval even deeper than our instinctual wiring.
Having unresolved worth issues will drive us to live off the unreliable fuel (mostly fumes) of distracted social media associations. Even if we ‘win,’ it’s perhaps the most fragile sense of worth one can acquire, maybe second only to basing our worth on our looks. It’s pure folly—diminishing returns on a lousy stock.
Moreover, Dan Harris says:
if we are in the grip of FOPO we play it safe, we resist standing up for ourselves, we value approval over authenticity and often pursue other people’s dreams instead of our own.
So we audition, and when we do, we compete and compare. Even the voices of support in our lives can be informed by this instinct. You or I receive encouragement because we’re better than others doing the same. Why not offer something apart from how we stack up with others? This is nearly unavailable to those who build worth through comparison or competition.
For anyone concerned (or hopeful) that I’m advocating for an extreme, punk rock-like disregard for the thoughts of others, I’m not. To do good work and be a good fellow human, we must care what others think. However, caring about what others think is different from worrying. Our care can’t tip over into rumination or fear. We can note it and check our need to redress things.
We all have seen and likely made posts featuring us on vacation. We circle back (sometimes within the hour) to see how pictures of our smiling family in front of enviable vacation backdrops are performing. Often, folks in the comments will proclaim their love for our locale and even go on about how frequently they go there. Whose audition is this, pal?
What if we had a resolute, unshakable sense of our worth and value? How much would we fall prey to FOPO? How much new energy would we possess by not expending it for the obligatory thumbs up from people we knew in middle school?
That most powerfully comes to us in the tender mercy of God’s grace and love. Neither of these can be learned or increased by our behavior. There is an is-ness to the worth God has placed in us. So, whether the audition we undertake is at the gym or job or under the control of billion-dollar companies who are pitching us products as we seek acceptance, we can step back from the zero-sum game if we remember God sings over us (Zephaniah 3:17) whether we got more likes today than yesterday.
Be well friend.