New data sheds light on the problem of food insecurity among military families. Syracuse University researcher provides some insight, and military spouse comedian Ashley Gutermuth shares how she’s using her platform to help.

About the guests:

Colleen Heflin is the chair and professor of public administration and international affairs and associate dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She is also a faculty affiliate at the Center for Policy Research and the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion. As a research and policy scholar for nearly 20 years, Heflin is regarded as a national expert on food insecurity, nutrition and welfare policy, and the well-being of vulnerable populations. Heflin’s research has helped document the causes and consequences of food insecurity, identify the barriers and consequences of participation in nutrition programs and understand the changing role of the public safety net in the lives of low-income Americans. Heflin has published over 70 research articles and her work has appeared in leading journals. Her research is regularly funded by the National Institutes for Health, U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. From 2012-2017, Heflin was supported by a five-year award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service as Family Self-Sufficiency and Stability Research Scholar to explore how multiple program participation affects vulnerable families’ well-being.

Ashley Gutermuth is a New Jersey-based stand-up comedian and actor. She appeared on “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon, where she was chosen by Jerry Seinfeld to win the Seinfeld Challenge. In 2021, she won the headliner category of the U.S. Comedy Contest. Gutermuth has performed for The World Series of Comedy, The New York Underground Comedy Festival and The North Carolina Comedy Festival. She has also appeared on shows with Chris Kattan (SNL), Steve Hytner (Seinfeld) and Michael Winslow (Police Academy, America’s Got Talent), among many others. Gutermuth regularly posts on social media, and her hilarious videos of her stand-up and life as a military spouse have exploded to over 50 million views.

About the podcast:

The Spouse Angle is a podcast breaking down the news for military spouses and their families. Each episode features subject-matter experts and military guests who dive into current events from a military perspective — everything from new policy changes to research on family lifestyle challenges. The podcast is hosted by Natalie Gross, a freelance journalist and former Military Times reporter who grew up in a military family.

Follow The Spouse Angle on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

Subscribe on Spotify.

Subscribe on Stitcher.

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I recently ran across a website called IWannaBeFamous.com, accent on the wannabe. It’s devoted to anyone willing to fill out a form, send in a picture, and tell the world why you want to be famous, at which point they’ll post your plea and your picture for 24 hours. And the reasons people wannabefamous run the gamut:

• Rikki: “I want to be wanted.”
• Amy: “I want to make my ex-boyfriends jealous.”
• Travis: “I’m bored with an ordinary life.”
• Meredith: “I want to prove to my family and friends that I’m more than a high school dropout.”
• Shenan: “I don’t want to have to wait til I’m dead for my art to be valuable.”

Fame-seeking is just an exaggerated form of attention-seeking, which we all do, though it’s gone hyperbolic in the age of social media. But we all jockey for attention and look for the limelight, and we all have our own stages, private and public, on which we play the part, from the fishbowls of family, friends, and jobs, to the coliseums of politics, sports, and entertainment.

“Attention-seeking” sounds a bit judgy, but the truth is we’re wired for it. It may seem like a uniquely modern preoccupation, but it derives from an ancient impulse—survival, the infantile understanding that whatever we need or want can only be got through other people, so we’d better get their attention.

Evolution also bundles into every creature a desire–a drive– to spread our seed: Impressing others is good for our genes.

The need to be seen and heard moves along a continuum from simple attention to recognition to approval to respect to admiration to renown and, ultimately, I believe, to love. But when it’s driven by poor self-esteem, loneliness, jealousy, self-pity, or narcissism, it can take the form of bragging, fishing for compliments, being controversial to provoke a reaction, hijacking conversations, exhibitionism, promiscuity, playing victim, emotional outbursts, and pretending ineptitude so others will help, and constantly taking selfies.

In a sense, these are often cries for help, and as in most emotional matters, compassion is a more useful response than judgment, the understanding that someone isn’t after attention so much as connection–to be seen, heard, known, or loved. At its farther reaches, though, attention-seeking becomes what psychologists call histrionic personality disorder, the overwhelming desire to be noticed and the employment of dramatic and often inappropriate tactics for getting it.

Though there’s some evidence for the hereditary nature of attention-seeking behavior (predispositions like extroversion and thrill-seeking), the usual suspect is conditional or unreliable parental love, and attention-seeking is the attempt to right a wrong to make up for what we were denied. The less attention we got, the keener the deficit. And the appetite. As Madonna said when informed that she was tied with Elvis Presley for having the most top-10 singles, “Me and Elvis? Are you kidding? I’m gonna tell my dad. Maybe that will impress him.”

Like elevator shoes, attention-seeking becomes something we use to make up for what’s lacking, perhaps compensation for a tenuous sense of legitimacy in the world, a wounded sense of belonging here at all. And this is undoubtedly exacerbated by the fact that competition for attention–one of the key contests of social life–follows the same set of rules that money does in the economy: people are hungry for attention and suffer its absence, and unfortunately, it’s distributed like wealth: unevenly. There are those who are rich in it and those who are poor in it, and the poor suffer the hunger pangs of a kind of attention deficit disorder.

Compensation theory, of course, doesn’t explain people who were starved for attention in their formative years and grew up to be accountants and librarians rather than actors and rock singers. Or people who are exhibitionists because they were rewarded for doing their shtick in front of the dinner guests.

And it’s fair to say that the amount of attention available from others isn’t nearly what we imagine. Most people are actually too busy worrying about what we think of them to care all that much about us.

Studies show that people pay about half as much attention to us as we think they do. In one study of the "spotlight effect" (in which you overestimate the amount of attention you’re getting), college students were instructed to attend a large introductory psychology class while wearing a bright yellow T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Barry Manilow. When they were subsequently asked to guess how many of their fellow students had noticed the T-shirt, they figured that twice as many students saw it as actually did.

Nor is attention-seeking behavior all bad. The desire to be seen is part of our motivation to express ourselves, and it’s very effective at prodding our passions. The prospect of attention–if not the granting of large doses of it that we call fame–can be a stimulant to growth, spurring our ambition to create, invent, publish, and perform. And when it’s backed up by a market economy, attention-seeking is adept at exchanging praise and profit for passion and performance.

If we can avoid getting hooked on the dangling carrot of other people’s attention and approval–which is just another kind of materialism–it can benefit not just individuals but the culture, motivating participation in public life, stirring all kinds of achievements in science, business and the arts, and goading people to reach higher and take the kinds of risks that ultimately enrich everybody’s lives.

Consider Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist and father of taxonomy. He helped harness the hunger for attention and renown and turn it to good scientific use by spreading the word that if you discovered a new plant or animal, you could name it after yourself, thus encouraging thousands of amateur sleuths to help add to the store of human knowledge.

But if there’s any tragedy in all this attention-seeking, it’s the danger of defining approval as something external to us, the belief that it’s not how we feel about ourselves that matters, but how other people feel about us; that self-esteem is just unicorns and yetis until it’s authenticated by the greater authority of other people’s recognition, which makes it real.

Thus the flip side of craving people’s attention is living in fear of the power they have over you, though it makes a kind of brutal sense to crave it anyway if you look inside for validation and don’t find any; if you can’t gain what the poet Alexander Pope called “one self-approving hour,” which may arguably be worth all the cheers of the crowd. The question is, which is harder to attain, fame or one self-approving hour?

Attention-seeking also tends to encourage the false self and discourage the true and can be self-destructive. Under its influence, we’re tempted to show only our good side, believing our imperfections won’t help us match the idealized version of ourselves we’re trying to peddle. And we live in dread of exposure.

Ultimately, the approval or adoration of others isn’t capable of affirming you in the way you really want to be affirmed: for being yourself.

People talk about looking for love in all the wrong places, and in a sense, attention-seeking is the materialistic urge applied to popularity. Like any materialistic urge, it’s a compulsion toward getting an external fix. In The High Price of Materialism, Tim Kasser concludes that materialism causes unhappiness, and unhappiness causes materialism, which ripens best among those least secure in matters of love, self-esteem, competence, and a sense of control over their lives.

On the other hand, he equates well-being with non-materialistic goals like personal growth, self-acceptance, service, and intimacy. “If what you’re after is feeling good about yourself,” he says, “figure out more direct paths!” For instance, anything that helps people get to know one another better will help them get (and give) higher-level attention than just acting out or endlessly posting selfies. And ask yourself: Do I feel genuinely seen by the people closest to me, and how do I want to be seen?

Also, begin cultivating a healthy skepticism about the attention-seeking culture that pits you against yourself in a never-ending game of comparison, constantly elbowing you in the ribs to look outward rather than inward for validation because if you understand only that much, you’ll understand what attention-seeking is actually worth in terms of what you truly seek.

-Ranching remains the best solution to herders-farmers clashes-Governor Ganduje

By Taiwo Amodu, Abuja

Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar, has advised the present administration to take urgent steps to mitigate the sufferings of Nigerians.

The Sultan appealed on Monday while speaking at the National Conference on Livestock Reform and Mitigation of Associated Conflicts between Herders and Farmers held in Abuja.

Alluding to the challenges thrown up by the Naira Swap policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria,

Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar said that insurrection against the government should not be dismissed with a wave of the hand.

He said: “Let’s keep politics aside. The issues of development especially for the common man should be prioritised. These people that God Almighty gave leadership over, one day, God forbid, rise up against us.”

Speaking on the subject of the discourse, the growing animosity between farmers and herders, the Sultan of Sokoto advised that both sides of the divide should imbibe the spirit of supply and take for lasting peace.

“I have been to Benue, at least two times as Sultan, to sit with the governors and traditional rulers to discuss peace in the Benue valley. At the end of it, the suggestions, we threw them away. Nothing is done, and we are back to square one.

“Let this conference not be in the same manner, let’s do it and let’s do it well and now.”

Governor of Kano State and initiator of the Conference, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, declared that the best option and lasting peace to the conflict was the adoption of ranching.

He said:” The Rural Grazing Areas (RUGA) or ranching, which has been deliberately politicized, remains the only option that would go a long way in mitigating existential problems, as pastoralists would have lands to graze without cattle encroaching on people’s farmlands. Because herders need fodder for their cattle and promote alternative means of producing feedstock, which reduces the need for grazing land.

“We have gone far in the establishment of Ruga Settlement in Kano. Already, 25 housing units out of the projected 500, situated on 4 413 hectares of land at Dansoshiya Forest in Kiru local government, have been completed and handed over to the herders. The replica of the houses will be displayed during an exhibition planned as part of this conference.

“Modernising the livestock sector is not only key to resolving the herder-farmer conflict but was envisaged that this economic investment pillar will support and strengthen the development of market-driven ranches for improved livestock production through breed improvement and pasture production.

There is, therefore the need for aiding information, education and strategic communication on the development of grazing reserves to mitigate the consequences of these conflicts.

“It is also important that we avoid the dangers of allowing these conflicts to harden to religious or ethnic conflicts. This is the responsibility of political, religious and all other parts our leadership elite in Nigeria.

“We must also intensify existing collaboration with our neighbours especially border communities, to prevent the movement of small arms, and disarming armed pastoralists and bandits who go through our borders day after day.

“Predominantly nomadic pastoralists should be persuaded to move their cattle into established ranches and public grazing reserves, where breeding farms and other mechanized livestock management practices would bolster the sector’s productivity.

“Hand in hand with this, the government should rebuild social capital at the community level to promote mutual trust, confidence building, and consolidate the peace process, while the law and order pillar would support the strengthening of legal frameworks for improving livestock production, peace and harmony.

“It is my hope that this conference will produce a working document that would go a long way in mitigating conflicts between herders and farmers in this country.”

In his welcome address, former INEC Chairman and Chairman Organizing Committee of the National Conference on Livestock Reforms and Mitigation of Associated Conflicts, Professor Attahiru Jega, said the agenda of the conference was “to generate ideas that would contribute to addressing an acute national problem: the relative underdevelopment of the Nigerian Livestock sector and the perpetual crises and conflicts associated with it. “

READ ALSO FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE

—

Mayor Adams’ administration has stiffed thousands of low-income New Yorkers on their food stamps and cash assistance benefits, leaving them in a state of “hunger and immense distress,” sometimes for months on end, according to a lawsuit filed late Friday.

Under federal and state law, the city’s Human Resources Administration must process applications for food benefits and cash aid within 30 days. The food benefits are issued via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as SNAP, and the monetary benefits come from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Safety Net Assistance programs.

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But the Manhattan Federal Court lawsuit charges that as of late last month, roughly 28,000 such aid applications were overdue, some going back as far as September — meaning roughly half of all claims before HRA aren’t being processed on time in alleged violation of the laws.

The suit names Adams’ administration as a whole as well as Social Services Commissioner Gary Jenkins and Human Resources Administrator Lisa Fitzpatrick as defendants.

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The action was brought by four New Yorkers with outstanding welfare claims, but seeks class action status to represent every overdue applicant in the city. Legal Aid Society lawyer Katie Kelleher, who represents the four plaintiffs, said the impetus for that is it could convince the court to force Adams’ administration to come into 100% compliance with the 30-day rule.

Kelleher said the processing delays are the result of steep staffing shortages at HRA and a byzantine application system.

The real-life consequences of the bureaucratic snags are “awful,” Kelleher told the Daily News, describing Legal Aid clients who have had to skip meals, only eat potatoes for days or forgo paying rent in order to afford food.

“I don’t know that this is being treated as the emergency that it is,” she said.

One of Kelleher’s clients is Maria Forest, a 71-year-old retired home care attendant who lives alone in a Brooklyn apartment with a $605 monthly rent, according to a sworn declaration filed in court with the lawsuit. She’s on a fixed Social Security income that clocks in at just over $1,000 per month.

Forest recently told The News her monthly $281 in SNAP food stamps got discontinued without notice in October even though she had mailed paperwork two months earlier to recertify her benefits — using the same form she’s successfully used for years.

She said she has repeatedly tried to contact HRA since her benefits lapsed to no avail. On some days, she said she has called the agency’s welfare hotline 20 times without ever getting through to someone who can help.

Forest, who spoke to The News in Polish via a translator because of her limited English, is diabetic and awaiting surgery for a spinal condition that sharply limits her mobility.

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Because she’s not receiving SNAP, she said she has had to stop buying an over-the-counter painkiller for her spinal condition in order to afford food, worsening her discomfort. She said she has also had to modify her diet to eat cheaper food that is not conducive to her diabetes.

“When I came to America, I didn’t even think a situation like this could happen. I’ve always thought of America as a law abiding country, where rules and laws are respected,” said Forest, who immigrated to the U.S. over two decades ago. “They aren’t just not helping people; they are harming people ... I worked for this country, I paid my taxes, and now they are stealing from me. It makes me feel like nothing makes sense, it makes me feel like I don’t want to live anymore.”

Another plaintiff, Larysa Nazarenko, is a Ukrainian citizen who was paroled into the U.S. in August after fleeing the war in her home country. She’s living in Brooklyn with her son.

Nazarenko, 62, was granted monthly food stamp benefits in December after waiting nearly four months for her application to be processed, she wrote in a sworn declaration appended to the lawsuit.

But she wrote she still hasn’t been approved for cash assistance benefits, even though she applied in September.

“The lack of cash assistance has had a dramatic impact on me. I am from Kiev and had to evacuate quickly. I had recently retired and was Preparing to apply for my pension before fleeing,” she wrote, adding that the only income she currently has is about $380 per month in food stamps. “I have depleted my savings and have no money in my bank account and no way to meet my basic needs.”

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A Law Department spokesman said the Adams administration ”will review the litigation.“

”The city will continue to support New Yorkers in need,” the spokesman added.

The lawsuit comes as Adams is pushing to cut staffing at HRA.

Unveiled earlier this month, Adams’ first budget bid for the 2024 fiscal year proposed permanently eliminating 773 vacant positions at the agency, amounting to a 7.6% agency-wide head count reduction.

“Some will argue that vacancy reduction results in agencies not being able to do their jobs. Don’t believe them,” Adams said at City Hall on Jan. 12.

Kelleher countered that Adams’ suggested cuts would exacerbate the processing delays for the food stamp and cash assistance initiatives.

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The HRA public assistance unit tasked with managing the programs already had a 14.5% staff vacancy rate as of October, according to a report from City Comptroller Brad Lander’s office, and Kelleher said the focus should be on filling empty positions, not eliminating them.

“Any kind of cut can’t be okay,” she said. “Obviously business as usual is not working, and you have an obligation by federal law to abide by these deadlines.”

An Adams administration official said the belt-tightening is justified because of “ongoing fiscal and economic headwinds“ facing the city. The official also said the Department of Social Services, which oversees HRA, still has more than 1,700 budgeted vacancies it “can use to fill critical positions.“

The lawsuit alleges another issue underpinning the dilemma at HRA is a “broken” application system for benefits urgently in need of technological fixes.

The lawsuit alleges the system has terminated benefits for some people without informing them, Forest among them. In other instances, the lawsuit charges clients have gotten important calls about their benefits from HRA phone numbers that are blocked as spam by their cellphone providers.

Kelleher said the city should also petition the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which funds a large chunk of welfare benefits, to provide waivers for how often New Yorkers need to reapply for their food stamps and other assistance. Currently, they generally have to recertify their benefits once a year, but Kelleher said it would become easier for city officials to manage workload if that time period is extended.

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“They are putting us in stressful and dangerous situations,” said Forest. “Someone needs to do something about it.”

Feb 3 (Reuters) - Social media images purported to be of an emaciated jailed Iranian dissident on hunger strike have caused outrage online as supporters warned on Friday he risks death for protesting the compulsory wearing of the hijab.

Farhad Meysami, 53, who has been in jail since 2018 for supporting women activists protesting against Iran's headscarf policy, began his hunger strike on Oct. 7 to protest accurate government killings of demonstrators, the dissident's lawyer said.

The images of Meysami went viral on social media on the same day Iran released award-winning director Jafar Panahi on bail after seven months in jail. Panahi said the images of Meysami reminded him of survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Iran's judiciary denied the hunger strike claim and said the photos were from four years ago when Meysami, a physician, did go on hunger strike.

As evidence, the semi-official YJC news agency posted what it said was Meysami's latest photo, in which he does not look emaciated and is sitting on the floor of his prison cell with a bag of what looks like chips next to him.

Reuters was unable to confirm when the pictures were taken.

Iranian authorities released Panahi on bail after he started a hunger strike this week to demand to be freed pending a retrial, the semi-official ISNA news agency reported, citing the Directors Guild of Iran.

There was no official word from Iran's judiciary on the release, but videos on social media purportedly showed Panahi speaking to well-wishers outside Evin prison.

"The images of Farhad Meysami... remind one of the people in Auschwitz or of (Mahatma) Gandhi, since Meysami has written about non violence," Panahi said. "Many are left behind bars... so how can I say I feel happy?"

Iranian authorities detained Panahi in July to serve a six-year sentence which a court originally ordered in 2010 for "propaganda against the system". In October, the ruling was quashed by Iran's supreme court which ordered a retrial.

Iran has been rocked by nationwide unrest following the death of Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini on Sept. 16 in police custody, one of the strongest challenges to the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution.

Morality police arrested Amini for flouting the hijab policy, which requires women to dress modestly and wear headscarves. Women have played a prominent role in the protests, with many waving or burning their headscarves.

Rights groups say more than 500 protesters have been killed and nearly 20,000 arrested. At least four people have been hanged, according to the Iranian judiciary.

"My client Farhad Meysami’s life is in danger,” tweeted lawyer Mohammad Moghimi. "He went on hunger strike to protest the accurate government killings in the streets." He said Meysami had lost 52 kg (115 lb).

Images show Meysami curled up on what looks like a hospital bed, and another standing, his ribs protruding.

"Shocking images of Dr. Farhad Meysami, a brave advocate for women's rights who has been on hunger strike in prison,” tweeted Robert Malley, Washington's special envoy for Iran.

"Iran's regime has unjustly denied him and thousands of other political prisoners their rights and their freedom. Now it unjustly threatens his life,” he said.

Amnesty International said: "These images (of Meysami) are a shocking reminder of the Iranian authorities’ contempt for human rights."

In a letter published by BBC's Persian Service on Thursday, Meysami made three demands: an end to executions, the release of political-civil prisoners and an end to “forced-hijab harassment”.

"I will continue my impossible mission in the hope that it may become possible later on with a collective effort,” he wrote.

Reporting by Dubai newsroom; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Josie Kao

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

By Leah Douglas

(Reuters) - School meals for millions of children in the United States would include less added sugar, more whole grains, and lower sodium content under new standards proposed by the Biden administration on Friday.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the updated standards, which would be rolled out over the next several years, were essential to tackling health concerns like childhood obesity and to preparing young people for adult life.

"This is a national security imperative. It’s a health care imperative for our children. It’s an equity issue. It’s an educational achievement issue. And it’s an economic competitiveness issue," he said Friday on a livestreamed event announcing the standards.

About 30 million students eat school lunches and 15 million eat school breakfasts each year, according Department of Agriculture data.

The Biden administration committed to updating school meal nutrition standards as part of its strategy laid out at a conference on hunger last year.

Under the proposed standards, by fall 2024, schools would need to offer whole grain products. By fall 2025, there would be limits for high-sugar products like cereals and yogurts, added sugar in flavored milks, and sodium. Future years would see additional limits on added sugar and sodium.

The debate over what school meals should contain has spanned several administrations. The Obama administration hiked standards by requiring schools to serve fruits and vegetables every day and offer more whole grain foods. Under the Trump administration, some of those requirements were rolled back.

The Food Research & Action Center, a leading nutrition and hunger group, cheered Friday's announcement.

"These proposed evidence-based standards will make for a healthier school day," said FRAC president Luis Guardia in a statement.

USDA will collect comments on the proposed rule.

(Reporting by Leah Douglas; Editing by Frances Kerry)

Netflix has revealed the first images from “Hunger,” an upcoming Thai drama film in which a woman in her twenties chases her dreams in the unsavory world of fine dining.

The film stars Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying, locally known as ‘Aokbab’ and internationally recognized as the star of “Bad Genius,” in the lead role. She plays alongside Gunn Svasti Na Ayudhya (“Diary of Tootsies”) as the sous-chef who gives her a break and Nopachai ‘Peter’ Jayanama (“Headshot,” “The Secret Weapon”) as her ingenious and intolerant rival.

Directed by Sitisiri Mongkolsiri (“Sang Krasue,” “Girl From Nowhere”) and produced by Kongdej Jaturanrasame and Soros Sukhum (“Memoria”) through Song Sound Productions, the show is expected to be uploaded in April.

“Hunger” is part of a wider menu of Thai-language films and series content set out by Netflix late last year. Other Thai contnet in the pipeline included writer-director Prueksa Amaruji’s dark comedy film “Lost Lotteries”; veteran director Wisit Sasanatieng (“Tears of the Black Tiger”) directing dark comedy “The Murderer”; director Nonzee Nimibutr (“Jan Dara”) delivering “Mon Rak Nak Pak,” a drama about the good old days of Thai cinema; and “Shutter” director Parkpoom Wongpoom directing and jointly producing series “Delete,” a dark love triangle thriller.

“Delete” also stars Aokbap who was previously named as a former Talent to Watch by Variety and the International Film Festival & Awards Macao.

Thai content, especially comedy and horror, has a track record of doing well overseas. The supernatural thriller “The Whole Truth” spent five weeks in Netflix’s global top 10 list for non-English films and made the top 10 list in 35 countries.

The streamer’s highest-profile Thai original to date remains “Thai Cave Rescue,” a six-part look at the famous underground rescue events of summer 2018 and their impact on a wider group of people. The show was produced for the streamer by SK Global.

I recently ran across a website called IWannaBeFamous.com, accent on the wannabe. It’s devoted to anyone willing to fill out a form, send in a picture, and tell the world why you want to be famous, at which point they’ll post your plea and your picture for 24 hours. And the reasons people wannabefamous run the gamut:

• Rikki: “I want to be wanted.”
• Amy: “I want to make my ex-boyfriends jealous.”
• Travis: “I’m bored with an ordinary life.”
• Meredith: “I want to prove to my family and friends that I’m more than a high school dropout.”
• Shenan: “I don’t want to have to wait til I’m dead for my art to be valuable.”

Fame-seeking is just an exaggerated form of attention-seeking, which we all do, though it’s gone hyperbolic in the age of social media. But we all jockey for attention and look for the limelight, and we all have our own stages, private and public, on which we play the part, from the fishbowls of family, friends, and jobs, to the coliseums of politics, sports, and entertainment.

“Attention-seeking” sounds a bit judgy, but the truth is we’re wired for it. It may seem like a uniquely modern preoccupation, but it derives from an ancient impulse—survival, the infantile understanding that whatever we need or want can only be got through other people, so we’d better get their attention.

Evolution also bundles into every creature a desire–a drive– to spread our seed: Impressing others is good for our genes.

The need to be seen and heard moves along a continuum from simple attention to recognition to approval to respect to admiration to renown and, ultimately, I believe, to love. But when it’s driven by poor self-esteem, loneliness, jealousy, self-pity, or narcissism, it can take the form of bragging, fishing for compliments, being controversial to provoke a reaction, hijacking conversations, exhibitionism, promiscuity, playing victim, emotional outbursts, and pretending ineptitude so others will help, and constantly taking selfies.

In a sense, these are often cries for help, and as in most emotional matters, compassion is a more useful response than judgment, the understanding that someone isn’t after attention so much as connection–to be seen, heard, known, or loved. At its farther reaches, though, attention-seeking becomes what psychologists call histrionic personality disorder, the overwhelming desire to be noticed and the employment of dramatic and often inappropriate tactics for getting it.

Though there’s some evidence for the hereditary nature of attention-seeking behavior (predispositions like extroversion and thrill-seeking), the usual suspect is conditional or unreliable parental love, and attention-seeking is the attempt to right a wrong to make up for what we were denied. The less attention we got, the keener the deficit. And the appetite. As Madonna said when informed that she was tied with Elvis Presley for having the most top-10 singles, “Me and Elvis? Are you kidding? I’m gonna tell my dad. Maybe that will impress him.”

Like elevator shoes, attention-seeking becomes something we use to make up for what’s lacking, perhaps compensation for a tenuous sense of legitimacy in the world, a wounded sense of belonging here at all. And this is undoubtedly exacerbated by the fact that competition for attention–one of the key contests of social life–follows the same set of rules that money does in the economy: people are hungry for attention and suffer its absence, and unfortunately, it’s distributed like wealth: unevenly. There are those who are rich in it and those who are poor in it, and the poor suffer the hunger pangs of a kind of attention deficit disorder.

Compensation theory, of course, doesn’t explain people who were starved for attention in their formative years and grew up to be accountants and librarians rather than actors and rock singers. Or people who are exhibitionists because they were rewarded for doing their shtick in front of the dinner guests.

And it’s fair to say that the amount of attention available from others isn’t nearly what we imagine. Most people are actually too busy worrying about what we think of them to care all that much about us.

Studies show that people pay about half as much attention to us as we think they do. In one study of the "spotlight effect" (in which you overestimate the amount of attention you’re getting), college students were instructed to attend a large introductory psychology class while wearing a bright yellow T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Barry Manilow. When they were subsequently asked to guess how many of their fellow students had noticed the T-shirt, they figured that twice as many students saw it as actually did.

Nor is attention-seeking behavior all bad. The desire to be seen is part of our motivation to express ourselves, and it’s very effective at prodding our passions. The prospect of attention–if not the granting of large doses of it that we call fame–can be a stimulant to growth, spurring our ambition to create, invent, publish, and perform. And when it’s backed up by a market economy, attention-seeking is adept at exchanging praise and profit for passion and performance.

If we can avoid getting hooked on the dangling carrot of other people’s attention and approval–which is just another kind of materialism–it can benefit not just individuals but the culture, motivating participation in public life, stirring all kinds of achievements in science, business and the arts, and goading people to reach higher and take the kinds of risks that ultimately enrich everybody’s lives.

Consider Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist and father of taxonomy. He helped harness the hunger for attention and renown and turn it to good scientific use by spreading the word that if you discovered a new plant or animal, you could name it after yourself, thus encouraging thousands of amateur sleuths to help add to the store of human knowledge.

But if there’s any tragedy in all this attention-seeking, it’s the danger of defining approval as something external to us, the belief that it’s not how we feel about ourselves that matters, but how other people feel about us; that self-esteem is just unicorns and yetis until it’s authenticated by the greater authority of other people’s recognition, which makes it real.

Thus the flip side of craving people’s attention is living in fear of the power they have over you, though it makes a kind of brutal sense to crave it anyway if you look inside for validation and don’t find any; if you can’t gain what the poet Alexander Pope called “one self-approving hour,” which may arguably be worth all the cheers of the crowd. The question is, which is harder to attain, fame or one self-approving hour?

Attention-seeking also tends to encourage the false self and discourage the true and can be self-destructive. Under its influence, we’re tempted to show only our good side, believing our imperfections won’t help us match the idealized version of ourselves we’re trying to peddle. And we live in dread of exposure.

Ultimately, the approval or adoration of others isn’t capable of affirming you in the way you really want to be affirmed: for being yourself.

People talk about looking for love in all the wrong places, and in a sense, attention-seeking is the materialistic urge applied to popularity. Like any materialistic urge, it’s a compulsion toward getting an external fix. In The High Price of Materialism, Tim Kasser concludes that materialism causes unhappiness, and unhappiness causes materialism, which ripens best among those least secure in matters of love, self-esteem, competence, and a sense of control over their lives.

On the other hand, he equates well-being with non-materialistic goals like personal growth, self-acceptance, service, and intimacy. “If what you’re after is feeling good about yourself,” he says, “figure out more direct paths!” For instance, anything that helps people get to know one another better will help them get (and give) higher-level attention than just acting out or endlessly posting selfies. And ask yourself: Do I feel genuinely seen by the people closest to me, and how do I want to be seen?

Also, begin cultivating a healthy skepticism about the attention-seeking culture that pits you against yourself in a never-ending game of comparison, constantly elbowing you in the ribs to look outward rather than inward for validation because if you understand only that much, you’ll understand what attention-seeking is actually worth in terms of what you truly seek.