Why we care so much about likes

I’ve been doing that thing again, posting a picture or video on social media and then obsessively checking my notifications for likes.

My need for online validation has become so bad that I’m even refreshing my LinkedIn posts to monitor the number of impressions I’m getting. Do you know how low you have to be to do that for LinkedIn?? 

Over the past decade, the way we value ourselves have been greatly influenced by our interactions with social media. It seems like we all have a sticky note tacked to our foreheads displaying our levels of worth and that worth is often defined by the number of followers we have or the number of engagements we get on our posts.

Evidently, the more followers you have, the more valuable you are – at least to the algorithm and the large corporations who seek to exploit that. But why do we give so much power to them? Why are we so desperate to appeal to the people online?

To quote Victoria Halina in her Medium article, “I believe that first and fore-mostly, our behaviour online all goes back to our sense of worth offline.” In a world that is growing distant (and certainly, some of us are still trying to recover our social skills post-covid), interactions are depleting too. So, it only makes sense for us to seek that interaction somewhere and that somewhere now lives on our phones. 

I could agree to some degree. Sometimes when I want to geek out over my current celebrity crushes or talk about an achievement on something that I know my friends here wouldn’t be as excited about, I find myself posting about it on my ‘Close Friends’ story instead, where I know I can get that validation from friends back home or elsewhere. Similarly, some people have fan accounts to talk about their idols and others have YouTube channels dedicated to their niche hobbies. 

This could stem from our basic need for belonging and self-esteem. If we turn to – and excuse me for getting very psychological here – Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, some of the basic human needs include attaining a sense of connection, recognition and status. Hence, why we crave for validation and compliments, even if means getting it from people online. We quite literally need it to survive, at least according to Maslow.

So, those little hearts floating from the corner of my TikTok videos acts as a form of compliment which in turn, influences the way I perceive my self-worth. If my recent outfit video flopped, then I’m inclined to think that my outfit choices were horrible but if they did really well, than it further solidifies this personality I’ve created for myself that attaches heavily on my love for fashion. 

I don’t have to tell you how unhealthy it can get attaching your self-worth to something volatile like that, especially with algorithms manipulating our feed. What you get online is never a true reflection of who you are as a person and how people perceive you in real life. As much as I get consumed by social media, I am quick to realise that no one of it is real and that I am worth more than the number of likes displayed on my posts. It’s important you realise that too.