The Vortex of Validation

and the impossible escape

“The Night Cafe”, Vincent van Gogh (1888)

“I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.”

- Vincent van Gogh

In a letter to his brother, van Gogh called “the Night Cafe” his ugliest painting. The shades of green and red put together in simultaneous contrast set a dull tone to the painting, adding to the anxiety that the unruly chairs and the tired people in the bar bring to our vision when we look at this. (You can learn more about this painting with this video.)

Already, impressionism and its branches battled with intense criticism from the previously-dominating art scenes. On top of that, van Gogh decided to create a painting that intentionally makes you feel uneasy, over painting something that would be respected as an art piece in that time instead of this one, in this letter. Why do you think he painted it?

To some of us, the answer might come easy - he wanted to make it, so he did. He did not care about any criticism, any repercussions, and just made it. Most famous artists of the world started out like this - their art is beautiful to us now. Degas’s pieces now sit in museums. They sell for millions. Back then, the Degas I’ve put below got thrown out out of its second exhibition because it was “ugly and disgusting”.

“The absinthe drinker”, Edgar Degas (1876)

Did the artists back then know, that the art they created was ahead of their time? Is that why they made these pieces?

Here’s a hypothetical situation. Suppose the internet existed in the 1800s. Degas posts this piece online on Twitter, gets “ratioed” by the general public. He takes it down after promptly getting cancelled.

Sounds... weird, doesn’t it? Not because Degas can’t get “cancelled”, but these artists are such pioneers in their world, that you can’t expect them to fall into the vortex of validation like most of us.

Did these artists paint and paint fearlessly simply because social media didn’t show them exactly how many people are perceiving and judging them at once, or is there something more? Does an artist create for validation? If yes, then validation by whom?

You, my reader. If I asked you this question, most of you would first say no, with pride. You’d insist that the art you make is for yourself... “mostly,” you might add with hesitation. At least that’s what I did when I asked myself this question before writing this.

However, dear reader, if you’re one of those really brave people who admitted to craving validation, how do you think it began? Why do you crave so much validation? If you’ve ever asked this question, here is an answer for you.

The truth is - the yearn for validation is a very common emotion. It begins at home, when we crave it from our parents. It continues in schools, with teachers and friends. You wish you could grow out of it as you grow older, but when you reach that maturity, you get pushed into a vortex of validation by social media, and the climb out of this vortex? Impossible.

It’s not your fault. The temptation of being perceived by multiple people, exactly the way you have always wanted to is too hard to resist. When you can’t find people perceiving you exactly as you want them to in real life (which is almost always the case), you escape online. Here, in the virtual world, you can be anything you want. Why shouldn’t you crave validation?

If the internet is limitless and you can be anything you want to be, surely you must be getting all the validation you want, right? You’re nodding a “no”, aren’t you, reader? Because this is a vortex - you’re constantly being pulled in, and you’ll never be satisfied.

To subject our soul to constant scrutiny should be a crime, but we do it anyway. We put it up for show everyday. We cut a piece of our soul and put it into a poem, a prose, an art, and since we aren’t allowed to put things up in books and museums, we put it on twitter - a place where people consume information only if it lasts 270 characters - and expect it to give us the validation we crave.

Should we stop posting on Twitter? No. Social media is a gift, whether you believe it or not. If it wasn’t for social media, you and I wouldn’t be conversing right now, reader. I am, unfortunately, not your therapist either. I cannot help you control your yearn for validation. Instead, let’s start with this - an acknowledgement of the facts.

Here’s a fact - social media holds people from all over the world. Some of them come to it, seeking art, some don’t. That’s a notion you should start with.

Instead of believing that you don’t get the validation you crave because you don’t have worth at all, let’s flip it around and say - you don’t get the validation you crave because you’re worth so much people don’t know how to express it.

Our souls and their pieces of art are unmeasurable and immeasurable in their worth, dear reader. This is why, even if you got a million likes on your writing, you’d be sad when your next piece wouldn’t get as much.

Monet, Gogh, Shakespeare - they all knew this. A worth of a human soul can’t be measured, and while this truth stuck around with artists before, its value faded when social media stepped into our lives.

The climb outside of this vortex will probably last your whole life. However, acknowledging that your worth is too big to be measured, can probably make this easier for you.

The escape from the vortex of validation is impossible. The least we can do is make the descent easier.

Find me on twitter, and share this letter with your friends (I promise, I will not measure my worth with whether you share this newsletter or not).