# Key points of this article #
People often seek recognition from people who don't value them, and even people who will never value them in the future.
We often fail to fully value those who give us companionship and love.
The key to friendship is how good our relationship is with another person, not how hard it is to get their attention.
Sometimes we do not value the love and friendship given by those who value us, but instead seek recognition from those who do not value us or even care about us in the future.
This tendency is particularly pronounced in teens — who often try to seek the approval of popular teen peers under pressure — but the tendency doesn't completely disappear with age. This trait of adolescence is preserved in most of us.
I was curious about the reasons for this.
I had a pattern of behavior in mind, but it only made sense in the teenage group. Teens often live in a small, hierarchical world in which their place depends on the opinions of peer groups who are seen as cool, fashionable, trendsetters.
The adult world is much more complicated. Adults participate in many different social circles, and their status will hardly depend on the opinion of one person. So, compared to teenagers, adults don't seem to have as many reasons to worry about being accepted or respected by another person.
So, how do you explain this tendency in adults?
Here, I put aside some of the scenarios that I don't consider, such as seeking parental approval, where parental love and acceptance are crucial to us, or someone we want to emulate, or the leader of our workplace, and the reasons for seeking recognition in these scenarios are not difficult to understand.
The scenario that interests me is different.
The difference between this scenario is that when good friends lend a helping hand, we cannot cherish it, but instead pay attention to the opinions of people who are not interested in us, even though their opinions have no practical impact on our lives.
Perhaps, the roots of this tendency can be traced back to the mechanisms of evolution. The mechanisms of evolution make us think that what we have already received is not worth pursuing, at least not as important as what has not yet been obtained. Related to this, we tend to measure the importance of a thing by the difficulty of obtaining it, so what we find easy to get will not be valued.
I call this mechanism the Groucho Marx tendency. Graujo Max is a comedian, screenwriter, and director who won the 1974 Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. His representative works include "Duck Soup", "Singing Li Shadow", "A Day at the Racecourse" and so on. He famously said, somewhat ironically, "I will never join a club that accepts me as a member." Like Groucho Max, the companionship given by people who care about us is often not cherished too much.
From a collectivist perspective, perhaps this mechanism is good for all of us. Because without this mechanism, we may lose the motivation to continue to pursue progress. But let's look at the consequences of this mechanism for individual happiness.
Speaking of which, I think we should document some of the costs. What I mean by Groucho Max's propensity may be used to explain the hedonistic treadmill effect:
A seemingly perpetually stagnant state in the pursuit of happiness, where more and more achievements are made but happiness cannot be sustained.
One caveat is that Groucho Max's tendencies don't work at times. There are several reasons for this.
First, the amount of hard work put into it is not always a good indicator of the value of a thing. Diving to the bottom of the sea to retrieve large piles of Fool's Gold (pyrite, a golden mineral that resembles gold but has little value) is dangerous and hard, but Fool's Gold is not worth the hard work.
Related to this, Groucho Max's tendencies may be used by egoists to hurt us. In the commodity market, some sellers believe that inflating the price of goods will mislead customers into thinking that these goods are worth more. This strategy does work sometimes. Obviously, the same pot of wine people will believe that the expensive one is better.
The same is true in the dating world, where some people will have a limited supply of their approvals and compliments. There is a practice called "suppression" that stems from negative feedback. This practice raises the "price" of one's own approval by belittling others, i.e., making one's own approval a scarce commodity and thus appearing more valuable. But the crackdown does not mean that the recognition of such people is more worth pursuing. And the truth may be the opposite, which only shows that such people lack courtesy. As a result, some people's company is also overrated like wine and handbags.
In the Peking University BaoLi case that triggered a hot discussion on the Internet a few years ago, according to the WeChat chat records exposed afterwards, during the two people's love, Mu Linhan used a lot of insulting words against Bao Li, asking Bao Li to call herself "master", and even asking her to tattoo "Mu Linhan's dog" on her body, and recording the whole process of tattooing; in addition, Mou further asked Bao Li to "conceive a child for me, and then go and beat him up, I left a medical record sheet" or let Bao Li "do sterilization surgery, and then give me the medical record sheet". This is the typical "crackdown".
I must also point out that there are some people whose tendencies are contrary to the direction of my discussions.
Some people do cherish what they have, including friendships. They don't care much what other people think. There are also people who are very risk-averse and don't want to meet new people or make new friends because it requires them to step out of their comfort zone.
A more interesting example is narcissists who express positive views about others out of narcissistic motivations. The novelist George Meredith, in Egoism, opportunistically depicts a self-absorbed man who is convinced that the woman he wants to marry is extraordinary, arguing that it is not because of his infatuation (he loves himself too much to love anyone else), but because he has a grand self-image, so that the person he is interested in must also be exquisite.
But let's go back to Groucho Max's tendencies. The truth is that some of us, perhaps many, do not fully appreciate our friends who value them. Easily accessible friendships may be seen as less precious because of the lack of a process of conquest.
One might wonder how Groucho Max would look at him if he was convinced that no club was worth joining.
Narcissists believe that the club's interest in them shows that the club has insight and taste, as a way to highlight the loftiness of self-image. But it's not the narcissist who has problems, we have to admit that sometimes we overlook those who cherish us, and there are also problems with self-image.
But the most important point I want to make is this: when it comes to talking about others and whether friendships with them are desirable, the key question is how good our relationships are with each other, not whether it is difficult or easy to gain their interest in interacting with us.
This is because we do not get a deep sense of satisfaction from people who cannot maintain a deep relationship, nor from those who cannot produce understanding and tacit understanding, this slight mysterious feeling is an ability to feel the other person, to reach the other person, and to make the other party treat us the same way, this feeling exists between good friends.
With the right person, this understanding is not difficult to achieve, and sometimes even arises instantaneously, which is why it seems a bit mysterious. It's fair to say that instead of cherishing the deep intimacy with good friends, it's not an ordinary oversight to spend energy on superficial communication with unfriendly people. True friendship is a precious gift and a miracle, and ignoring it is a mistake.