Seeking Attention

 

Photo Credit: Sadhguru Quotes

Seeking Attention

An attention seeker is someone who acts solely in a way that is geared towards garnering the attention of other people. The attention they get makes them feel better about themselves, boosts their self-esteem, and it does not matter if that attention is good or bad.

Today, we see a generation of attention seekers who express their happiness, their sadness, the details of what they did today, the food they ate, and the people whom they met by posting them on WhatsApp, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. Particularly for their problems, rather than seeking a solution or speaking to a friend, they tend to post it and tell the whole world out loud that they are sad.

There is nothing wrong or right in seeking attention, but one should be judicious about what one is posting on social media. Today, one may think it is the thing to do, later you may delete the post, but social media is such an animal that  one really does not know whether the post has been permanently deleted. Someone else may have saved that post, which may come to bite you in the butt when you least expect it to!

Attention has always been a psychological need; it has to be understood. Why do people need so much attention? Why in the first place does everybody want people to pay attention to them? Why does everybody want to be special? Something is missing inside. We do not know who we are. We know ourselves only by others’ recognition. We do not have any direct approach into our own being, we go via others.

We go by what others say about us – if someone says you look good, fantastic, you feel that you are looking great, feeling on top of the world. If someone says that you do not look good, there is something wrong, you immediately feel that you are ill, you feel depressed. We simply live on the opinion of others; we go on collecting opinions. We have no direct or indirect recognition of our own being, our own existence! We accumulate a bunch of opinions in our subconscious and hence keep seeking attention for validation of such impressions for the situations we face in life.

When people pay attention to us, we feel wanted, loved even, because in love we pay attention to each other. When two persons are in deep love, they forget the whole world. They become engaged into each other’s being absolutely. They look into each other’s eyes. For those moments all else disappears, exists not. In those pure moments they are not here.

Love is attentive — and everybody has missed love. Very rare people have attained to love because love is God. Millions live without love because millions live without God. Love has been missed. How to substitute that gap? The easier substitute is to get people’s attention.