Validation Culture: Why Likes Are Becoming Self-Worth

You post a picture, lock your phone, and somehow find yourself unlocking it again within minutes, just to see if the number has moved. Nobody consciously decided to build this habit, it formed slowly, one notification at a time, until a small digital counter started quietly influencing how good or bad the rest of the day feels. According to Dr Chandni Tugnait, MD (A.M), Psychotherapist, Life Alchemist, understanding why this pull of validation culture feels so strong is the first step toward loosening its grip.

The Brain Chases The Uncertainty In Validation Culture

Dr Tugnait explains that every notification delivers a small dose of feel-good brain chemistry, not unlike the reward pattern seen with any small, unpredictable outcome. Because there’s no way to predict exactly how a post will land, the checking behaviour stops being a simple habit and starts resembling something closer to a craving, one that keeps pulling attention back to the screen every few minutes, almost involuntarily.

Self-Worth Gets Reduced To A Number In Validation Culture

According to Dr Tugnait, a person’s sense of worth was traditionally something built internally over time, shaped through relationships and lived experience rather than anything measurable. Social media disrupted that by attaching a literal, visible figure to nearly everything shared online, something that can now be tracked, compared and obsessed over in ways that simply didn’t exist before. Once worth becomes something countable, she notes, it also becomes fragile enough to feel diminished by something as small as a single underperforming post.

Comparing Real Life To Curated Highlights

Dr Tugnait points out that most people’s social feeds are filled with carefully selected, filtered versions of other people’s lives, rarely showing the mundane or difficult moments that make up the bulk of anyone’s actual day. Constant exposure to this curated version of reality naturally invites comparison, and most people end up measuring their unfiltered, complicated lives against everyone else’s polished highlight reel a comparison she stresses was never a fair one to begin with.

A Quiet Post Feels Like a Personal Verdict

When a post underperforms, Dr Tugnait notes that people rarely attribute it to randomness or algorithmic timing. Instead, it tends to get internalised as a reflection of personal worth, subtle proof that someone is somehow less interesting or less liked than usual. In reality, she explains, the cause is often far less personal than it feels, whether that’s poor timing, reduced visibility, or shifts in how a platform’s algorithm happens to be distributing content that day. Dr Tugnait highlights that teenagers and young adults are particularly susceptible to this pattern, largely because their sense of identity is still actively developing. At that stage of life, she explains, external approval can feel far more central to a person’s self-concept than it would for someone whose identity is already more firmly established. This, she adds, is precisely why validation culture tends to affect younger users most intensely and why the habits formed during this period can be especially difficult to unlearn later in life. Dr Tugnait is clear that none of this requires quitting social media altogether or pretending likes don’t matter at all. Her larger point is simply about awareness, recognising the moment a number on a screen has quietly taken over a role that was always meant to belong to a person’s own sense of self.

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