I deserve goodwill and sympathy? Am I on track? And, most commonly, the person who first answers  

these questions is a parent. Perhaps this  parent happens to be generous and sympathetic,  

they are warm and understanding of the challenges  of being alive - in which case the child develops  

an easy conscience. In the years to come,  they appraise themselves with benignancy,  

they don’t continuously have to wonder  whether they have a right to exist.  

They are comfortably on their own side. But if the parent is more punitive,  

the picture grows darker: approval is always  uncertain, there is a constant fear of being  

called arrogant or of being upbraided  for something one hadn’t thought about. 

What’s tricky is that consciences don’t  stay neatly identified with those who  

kickstarted them. It’s rare to find an adult who  actively still wonders what their parents think.  

But that isn’t to say that we aren’t wondering  about our value in more general terms. It’s  

just that we may, without noticing, have taken  the question somewhere else - and very often,  

to particularly harsh modern figure  of authority: media and social media. 

To this pitiless arena, the self-doubting person  now directs all their fears of unworthiness  

and panicked desire for reassurance. To a  system set up to reward sadism and malice,  

they constantly raise their  phones and implicitly ask:  

Do I deserve to exist? Am I OK? Am  I beautiful or respectable enough? 

And, because social media is built on  the troubles of the individual soul,  

the verdict is never a reliable yes. One is never  done with cycles of fear and reassurance-seeking.  

Every time their spirits sink (which  is often), the self-doubting sufferer  

picks up their phone and begs to know  whether they have permission to go on. 

If this might be us, we should grow curious about,  and jealous of, people who are free. They are so  

because someone long ago settled the question of  what they were worth and the answer has seemed  

solid ever since. Social media is a roar in  the next valley, not a mob in their own mind. 

Learning from these calm souls won’t  just involve deleting a few apps,  

we will have to go further upstream, back to the  baby self, whose alarmed enquiries we must quiet  

once and for all with ample doses of  soothing, and till-now absent kindness.