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Early on in every life, a child will look up and - implicitly - ask the world: Am I OK? Do
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I deserve goodwill and sympathy? Am I on track? And, most commonly, the person who first answers
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these questions is a parent. Perhaps this parent happens to be generous and sympathetic,
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they are warm and understanding of the challenges of being alive - in which case the child develops
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an easy conscience. In the years to come, they appraise themselves with benignancy,
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they don’t continuously have to wonder whether they have a right to exist.
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They are comfortably on their own side. But if the parent is more punitive,
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the picture grows darker: approval is always uncertain, there is a constant fear of being
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called arrogant or of being upbraided for something one hadn’t thought about.
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What’s tricky is that consciences don’t stay neatly identified with those who
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kickstarted them. It’s rare to find an adult who actively still wonders what their parents think.
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But that isn’t to say that we aren’t wondering about our value in more general terms. It’s
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just that we may, without noticing, have taken the question somewhere else - and very often,
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to particularly harsh modern figure of authority: media and social media.
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To this pitiless arena, the self-doubting person now directs all their fears of unworthiness
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and panicked desire for reassurance. To a system set up to reward sadism and malice,
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they constantly raise their phones and implicitly ask:
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Do I deserve to exist? Am I OK? Am I beautiful or respectable enough?
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And, because social media is built on the troubles of the individual soul,
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the verdict is never a reliable yes. One is never done with cycles of fear and reassurance-seeking.
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Every time their spirits sink (which is often), the self-doubting sufferer
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picks up their phone and begs to know whether they have permission to go on.
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If this might be us, we should grow curious about, and jealous of, people who are free. They are so
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because someone long ago settled the question of what they were worth and the answer has seemed
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solid ever since. Social media is a roar in the next valley, not a mob in their own mind.
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Learning from these calm souls won’t just involve deleting a few apps,
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we will have to go further upstream, back to the baby self, whose alarmed enquiries we must quiet
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once and for all with ample doses of soothing, and till-now absent kindness.