Is "Doing It For You" Still True When You're Also Doing It for the Reaction?
An honest interrogation of the thing we all say but none of us fully mean.
In June I read eleven books. Current total: eighty-nine.
I send this update to my family and friends on the first of every month. I log every book in a notebook, tally the stats, and post. I have been doing it for about a year. This particular morning, I hit post, put my phone down, and turned my attention back to my nine-to-five. Five minutes into my task, I found myself reaching for my phone, itching to check whether anyone had liked the update.
I checked. No one had responded yet.
Did I post too early? Maybe the fact that the first fell on a Wednesday has something to do with it? Wait — why do I care?
Posting was about tracking my reading in an accountable way. Wasn’t it?
But it was also about being seen in something I was proud of. That part is true too.
Can it be both?
The Question, Stated Plainly
Is “doing it for you” still true when you’re also doing it for the reaction?
I want to sit with this honestly, because I think most of us skip past it too quickly — straight to the self-affirming conclusion without doing the uncomfortable work of actually looking. This isn’t a callout. It’s an invitation to get curious about something most of us do every single day without examining it.
Case A: Wanting a Reaction Changes Everything
When I started tracking my reading, it was simple. I wanted to remember the titles, the authors, the ones worth returning to. The satisfaction was in the list itself — watching it grow, comparing this June to last June. The record was the point.
But wanting a reaction fundamentally changes how we approach an action. We look for the best visuals to support our text. We push to finish one extra book so the numbers look more impressive. We hold off on a photo because a friend swears it will perform better at 7 PM on a Thursday. Is the joy of that picture lessened if it doesn’t become a hit?
Building your life around how it looks to other people means you become only what others tell you has value. There is no personal pride in an accomplishment if that pride can only be felt once a certain number of likes is reached. If getting dressed in the morning becomes a monologue of this is more comfortable, but the other outfit will photograph better, something has quietly been eroded. Not all at once, but in increments — your self-expression traded, slowly, for the approval of a screen.
Having this practice marred by waiting for likes brings into question whether the original purpose of posting is still in the room with us at all.
Case B: Wanting to Be Seen Is Just Being Human
And yet.
We are pack animals. We thrive on community and belonging. The desire to be accepted, to be liked, to have someone witness your life — that is not a character flaw. That is the human condition, and it always has been. If you are likable, you get to eat part of the hunt. You have a safe place to sleep. You have someone to share your joy with.
I love when people bring me their joy. A friend recently told me she was excited that the Tartan Army — Scottish soccer fans, full regalia — were coming to her town. Later, when she posted a few photos of celebrating with them, I was overjoyed for her. I felt closer to her because she had shared this moment. She was going to enjoy people in kilts and traffic cones on statues regardless of whether anyone saw it. She was doing it for herself and bringing her people along for a small part of the ride.
That is the distinction worth making: the difference between performing for approval and inviting someone into your joy.
The Thing Nobody Mentions
The either-or framing is the problem.
When we try new things or start sharing more publicly, we get pushed into a binary: either you are doing this to hold yourself accountable, or you are doing it for attention. This argument — often waged entirely inside our own heads — leads many of us to second-guess our joy and edit who we share it with. That’s a loss, and it’s an unnecessary one.
The wanting of a reaction is not the problem. The desperation of it is. There is a meaningful difference between enjoying recognition and requiring it, between sharing your life and curating it entirely for an audience that may not even be paying attention. If you’re holding your breath waiting for a specific person to validate a specific thing — that’s the signal worth examining, not the sharing itself.
Ask yourself: if no one else attended the class, would you still go? If the photo never got a single like, would the moment it captured matter less? For most of us, the honest answer is no. The thing had value before anyone saw it. The reaction was a bonus, not the point.
That’s the line. And most of us are on the right side of it more often than we give ourselves credit for.
Where I Actually Land
I live in the gray, and I’m comfortable there.
I want people to share what brings them joy, what supports their mission, what gives them confidence. When a friend pulls me into her world — the Tartan Army, the new job, the Saturday that surprised her — my delight in it is completely genuine. That’s not performance. That’s connection.
The performance piece is something different and something I know well from the inside. My solo class adventures are entirely about stepping into a more confident version of myself. Am I projecting that confidence into a room full of strangers, hoping they’ll like me? Yes. Am I also trying on this persona to see if it brings me more joy and satisfaction? Also yes. Neither cancels the other out. Doing it for yourself can be its own kind of performance — and that is not automatically a bad thing.
It becomes a problem only when the desire to perform grows so specific that it severs your actual connection to the people you’re in the room with. There is a difference between an audience and an inner circle, and the feedback from each should carry different weight. A stranger on the internet saying you’ve changed shouldn’t register. Your mom or your best friend saying it? That warrants a pause.
So: share the books. Post the photo. Sign up for the class and tell people about it after. Do all of it for yourself — and let yourself also enjoy that someone noticed.
That’s not a contradiction. That’s just being a person.
Think of the last thing you did that you called “just for you.” Now ask honestly: who were you hoping would notice? And does your answer change anything about why you did it?
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