Attention-seeking may seem like a uniquely modern preoccupation, but it derives from an ancient impulse: survival.
Attention-seeking is often the attempt to make up for attention we were denied in childhood. The less we got, the keener the deficit.
The downside of attention-seeking is defining approval as something external to us.
Anything that helps people get to know one another better will help them get and give higher-level attention.
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.
Why is it Always About You?
By Sandy Hotchkiss
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.
Source: psychologytoday.com
About The Author
Gregg Levoy is the author of:
– Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion (Penguin) and,
– Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life (Random House).
Related BLOG:
Transitions and Changes in Your Life by Dr. Shannon Kolakowski, Psychologist and Author
Blog Companion Book
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