The United States of Validation Addicts

The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack.

This post is not about AI.

Large language models (LLMs) have a lot of problems, but none is a better symbol of 21st-century culture than their habit for sycophancy. They function as personal validation machines in a society seemingly hellbent on validating everyone, about everything, all the time. But this is one place where I’m happy to exonerate the AI companies.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the fact that popular LLM systems tend to flatter their users to an absurd degree. Search around a little and you can find dozens of examples of ChatGPT in particular ladling hyperbolic praise onto users who have made banal observations or asked basic questions. And, yes, I do think there are reasons to worry about the kind of obsessive and delusional behaviors LLMs might engender; this story in the New York Times is absolutely chilling. But I kind of think blaming AI for a culture of thoughtless validation is both identifying the wrong culprit and complaining about the barn door being open when the horse has already escaped. The truth is that we’ve been advancing a culture of limitless validation for everyone for several decades now, which in practice looks little different from a concerted effort to make everyone more narcissistic. We’ve built this vast cultural architecture dedicated to telling people that they’re valid, delivering no-strings-attached affirmation in a way that’s totally disconnected from virtuous behavior. Then we celebrate their arrogant expressions of their own greatness as a form of healthy self-respect.

Though they’re more correlate than cause, I myself blame inspirational Instagram memes, or as I like to call them, sociopath instructions. They’re Ayn Rand’s final revenge; they are the ephemera of a broken culture. Observe.

I could go on. And on and on and on. If you’re worried that this is a gendered analysis, please understand that men have their own version, and they’re just as bizarre and shameless.

There’s seemingly an insatiable appetite for this stuff; I’ve written about the phenomenon before. Just scroll through Instagram for 10 minutes. You will be assaulted by the same deranged ideology again and again: I am the center of the universe; I both deserve and absolutely will receive everything I’ve ever desired; anything that risks obstructing my pursuit of my desires is the hand of political oppression and will be righteously destroyed. This is the water in which our young people now swim, and I truly despair for how it’s going to shake out when today’s adolescents become tomorrow’s leaders. Is the concept of values that are greater than one’s self-interest, that in fact sometimes cut directly against one’s self-interest, even going to survive? Not when they have helicopter parents telling them they’re the center of the universe every day, TikTok telling them their first priority is always and only themselves, and our weird brand of modern progressive ideology suggesting that justice happens when they get what they want. What is happening to people’s brains when they suck all this up through their endlessly scrolling feeds?

We are living through an age where affirmation and validation have become not just expected but demanded. The problem isn’t just that people want to be validated, but that validation has been divorced from accomplishment, character or effort. It’s been commodified into something to be handed out reflexively, like candy, to anyone who demands it loudly enough. And, as is inevitable now, validation has been medicalized, thoroughly integrated into therapy culture, which means that among a certain influential strata of people, the concept and how it’s used can’t be criticized. All of this isn’t just a passing trend or a glitch in the digital matrix. It’s a cultural condition that was already well underway before LLMs entered our lives. AI sycophancy underscores the problem, but the problem itself is older and bigger.

We’ve built a society awash in narcissistic validation loops. These forces don’t just encourage narcissism but normalize it as the default mode of social interaction. People have become habituated to living inside echo chambers of praise, where questioning or contradiction is seen as an act of hostility or oppression. The quest for self-esteem has become less about actual achievement or growth and more about crafting a narrative of victimhood, entitlement or exceptionalism. A friend’s wife is a teacher at a pricey private middle school. She offhandedly said to her class last year, “A big part of life is doing things you don’t want to do, guys.” Instead of taking this for the banal truism it should be, she said they looked aghast, and she said a parent complained to the principal.

Look, validation and affirmation are human needs. We thrive when our efforts are recognized and when we feel seen by others. But when validation is severed from merit, when it’s given as a matter of course rather than as a reward for worthy actions, it loses its meaning and power. Imagine a child who has been told that they’re amazing, brilliant and special, every day of their life, regardless of their behavior or effort. That child learns to expect praise as a baseline, not as a recognition of hard work or kindness. When they eventually face real-world challenges or criticism, they’ll crumble; their self-worth was never grounded in reality. Worse, they may lash out at anyone who dares to challenge their fragile self-image, perceiving dissent as personal attack. I’ve got a 20-week-old baby. I am certainly going to shower him with love and affection. But I’m going to do my very best to establish limits to that affirmation, to become more appropriately critical as he ages, and to tie verbal reward to doing good things. I’m not going to be cruel or cold or distant. But I’m going to try (I emphasize, try) to always remember that what’s actually best for him is to make personal validation a valuable reward for kindness and effort, not a cheap currency that means nothing to him because he’s received so much of it.

I mean, look at so-called “gentle parenting.” The practice, seemingly spreading quickly, risks creating a confusing separation between being treated kindly and actually demonstrating responsible, constructive behavior. By emphasizing validation of a child’s feelings above clear boundaries and accountability, these approaches to parenting that fixate on the constant emotional servicing of the child can inadvertently teach children that their emotions alone justify any action, without cultivating the discipline needed to navigate real-world challenges. Over time, this can (and usually will) foster fragility, with children unable to handle discomfort or criticism because they’ve never encountered it before, and narcissism, as they come to expect continual affirmation without developing resilience or empathy for others. In this way, gentle parenting may not only produce a set of selfish children who don’t know how to behave and act like what they want is more important than anything else, but also leave you with miserable kids, precisely the opposite of the intended goal.

Multiply the condition of the kid who gets nothing but validation all the time across millions of people in a society, and you end up with a culture where genuine competence, accountability, and humility become scarce. You get fragile egos that demand constant feeding. You get entitlement that fuels resentment and division. You get ideological battles fought less over truth or values and more over who can shout the loudest for validation.

The architecture of social media platforms is perfectly designed to exploit and exacerbate this craving for affirmation. Likes, retweets and comments all function as digital dopamine hits that reinforce a user’s sense of importance and belonging. But the system has no built-in filter for merit or substance; it rewards whatever gets the most immediate emotional reaction. As we’ve seen for a couple of decades now, this kind of setup encourages performative outrage, identity signaling and virtue posturing. Social media encourages users to craft narratives that maximize sympathy, grievance, or admiration rather than truth or complexity. And since the platforms prioritize engagement over accuracy, they reward content that flatters the audience’s biases and insecurities.

The result is a feedback loop of narcissism: the more you’re validated online for a particular identity or grievance, the more you seek to express and amplify it, regardless of whether it’s grounded in reality or constructive values, and the more other people see that behavior and emulate it out of a desire to receive the same social reward. It’s no surprise that many people feel trapped in echo chambers or become hypersensitive to disagreement.

Another vector for this phenomenon is the widespread influence of therapy speak and the self-help industrial complex. Concepts like “radical self-love,” “emotional validation” and “safe spaces” may help some people heal, though I have my doubts. But when taken to extremes or stripped of context, they definitely risk infantilizing individuals by making emotional comfort the highest good, above truth, accountability or growth. Therapeutic language often insists that everyone’s feelings are equally valid and deserving of respect, no matter how unproductive, irrational or harmful those feelings might be. This insistence on universal affirmation can discourage difficult conversations and the kinds of self-reflection necessary for genuine change. And this is part-and-parcel with the larger critique of the spread of therapy culture: therapy is a tool, and its various elements were designed for the specific context of an actual therapeutic process inside an actual therapeutic space. Nobody intended for all of the lingo and attitudes of psychotherapy to be applicable to all parts of adult life. But they’ve been violently wrenched from their appropriate context and deployed wherever the individual would like to use them.

All of this is not to say that we don’t all deserve kindness, respect or support. Obviously, we all should receive basic care from others. But you see, kindness and respect are very different from validation; they operate based on an assumption of mutual humanity and are preconditional elements of interpersonal interaction. Validation, affirmation, praise; those things are built on top of a foundation of kindness and respect, but require more before they’re handed out. Respect and kindness should be the starting point, not the finish line. True validation — the kind that fosters strength, growth, responsibility and community — should be reserved for actions, behaviors and achievements that merit it. Validation should be something you earn through effort, kindness, courage, integrity and contribution, not something you assume or demand simply by existing or asserting identity. Human existence is pretty heavy, I grant you. But just existing doesn’t deserve praise, I’m afraid. Just existing is our cross to bear.

This all might sound harsh or old-fashioned in today’s climate. But a corrective is necessary if we want to cultivate a society where people develop resilience, accountability and a sense of purpose beyond themselves. When praise is given for genuine achievement, it becomes a powerful motivator and a meaningful reward rather than a hollow echo. And, yeah, sometimes we all need to be given a little sugar to get through a rough patch, whether it’s a rough patch of our day or a rough patch of our lives. That’s what friends are for. But even friends know to balance necessary emotional support with the effort to inspire the best in those around us. And if you want true unconditional love, you’re only going to get it from your mother.

Which brings me back to the original point about LLMs and AI sycophancy: these tools reflect the culture that built them. If they’re trained on data saturated with narcissistic validation and performative affirmation, that is what they will reproduce. The problem isn’t the technology itself; it’s the culture it mirrors. Of course, I don’t doubt that the AI firms that built the LLMs are designing them to be flattering because they want to attract users. But again, that people have been trained to expect such over-the-top validation from a set of algorithms speaks to a deeper problem. Recognizing that problem and the way modern technologies replicate and reinforce bad social trends places the responsibility back on us, not just as users of technology but as a society shaping values and norms. We have to ask ourselves what kind of interactions and affirmations we want to cultivate, both online and offline. Do we want to live in echo chambers of unearned praise? Or do we want to reclaim validation as a meaningful social currency tied to real achievement and character?

The insatiable appetite for validation isn’t a new problem created by AI or social media but rather a symptom of a deeper cultural malaise: a society that has increasingly prioritized feeling good about oneself over being good, that has confused entitlement with justice, and affirmation with accomplishment. If we want to change the trajectory of our culture, we need to reclaim validation as something precious and hard-earned, not freely given to anyone with the loudest voice or the most fragile ego. And then we can raise generations of kids who understand the value of humility, courage, and community. It’s not too late!

Well, it is too late for Gen Z. They’ll have to go live in the off-world colonies.