The Validation Vacuum

“Grade me! Look at me! Evaluate and rank me! I’m good, good, good and, oh, so smart! GRADE ME!” – Lisa Simpson (The Simpsons, “The PTA Disbands”, Season 6 Episode 21)

I have a few paragraphs of a new essay typed and already the urge to run my draft-in-progress through ChatGPT tugs on my subconscious. It derails me from flow. I try to negotiate with myself: Just get the first pass done. But a page or two in, my brain is screaming. Just a quick hit. Just to see if I’m on the right track. Am I making sense? Is this a complete waste of time? 

Like Lisa Simpson, I need that sweet taste of affirmation. 

Eventually, I cave. I upload my work-in-progress, and within seconds, ChatGPT returns an assessment. The strengths of my argument, points for improvement, and often grating words of encouragement. Sometimes a message that my idea is compelling. Sometimes an acknowledgment of brilliance. 

In an instant my hard wrangled paragraphs are processed. I get my feedback. But I rarely get what I was looking for. I have access to a limitless supply of instantaneous feedback but somehow find myself with an even deeper pit to fill. I’m stuck in a validation vacuum.

I sound so thirsty and honestly I am. But I also understand this need is very human. I imagine a cave-boy just returned from his first hunt, a rabbit, or some other small woodland creature, on the tip of his spear. He presents it to his cave-family. His cave-father grunts approval and gives him a hearty pat on the shoulder. His cave-mother hands him a hot bowl of stew as a reward. Job well done. A place earned. Reward received.

The rabbit is important. But so is the recognition. He’s contributed something to the family. He’s demonstrated his worth. He’s been seen. Validation means belonging and belonging means safety. The need for validation is primal.

For most of our lives, our need is met by the systems and structures we inhabit. Our lives are pre-gamified. Our education system is a series of validation gates. Every test, every graded assignment, every report card is a signal that the student is on track. It shows up in extracurriculars and in the social hierarchies of the lunchroom. We tie good grades, wins on the soccer field, and acceptance into the right crowd to a sign that says, “I’m okay! I’m a good person! I won’t be kicked out of the cave.”

Then we enter adulthood and unlock an entire new set of checkpoints and milestones. At work we have stakeholder readouts, status check-ins, and performance reviews. We share work with our trusted peers and cultivated mentors and get sign offs from our managers. If we’re lucky we get bonuses and awards and a shoutout on the team call. “I’m okay! I’m valuable! I won’t get kicked out of the cave.”

These systems do more than assess the quality of our work. They actually provide a rhythm of acknowledgement. A project is conceived, developed, reviewed, and approved. We move on to the next milestone and have visible markers of progress. There is something reassuring about that process, even when the feedback isn’t particularly positive. We’ve had eyes on the work. It has been considered. Someone has spent their valuable time to tell us what they think. And importantly, we usually know who that someone is.

My body still carries the feelings of dread after a brutal Quarterly Business Review or the elation of a successful stakeholder readout. Good or bad, it was feedback. It was validation. And it provided opportunities for growth. I understood what was needed. I think back to my MFA capstone project. Every couple weeks I’d send drafts of my work to my thesis advisor. He’d take a week and we’d meet for a couple hours to discuss his feedback. Some of it was praise. Some of it was how far I still had to go to get a final piece. Some of it was something I mulled but chose not to act on. All of it was useful. All of it was encouragement to keep going.

When I brought a project to a colleague, a manager, or a professor, I understood the relationship. I knew their expertise. I knew what perspective they brought to the conversation, what their motivation was for providing the feedback, how to process their response. They had earned the right, through experience, authority, or trust, to evaluate my work. Their opinions carried weight because I had reason to value them.

There were also natural checkpoints in the process. An agreement on when and how the work should be shared. I wouldn’t bring a brain dump to my boss. I wouldn’t bring a photo of a whiteboard session and ask if it was any good. I wouldn’t submit the opening paragraph on an essay to a professor and demand an immediate assessment. I would work through the material, wrestle with the ideas, and get to a place where the work was ready for another set of eyes. 

There was a certain amount of uncertainty built into that way of working, too. In the work before seeking feedback, in the time between checkpoints. Sometimes I’d follow an idea down a rabbit hole. Half the time it led nowhere, but sometimes I’d stumble into something unexpected. A new perspective or novel solution emerged. A disconnected thought would find its way into the argument. A seemingly irrelevant observation would become the foundation of an entirely new idea. 

The messiness was a valuable part of the work. 

Now, I have my AI validation engine. Artificial intelligence has changed my relationship with creating something and having it evaluated. I no longer have to wait until an idea is sufficiently developed to share it. I can ask my AI reviewer to look at a sentence, a paragraph, or a barely coherent collection of thoughts. I can request feedback at every stage or even moment of the process, from the first spark of an idea to the neatly packaged final product.

And I appreciate the tremendous value in that. I use AI to help me untangle complicated ideas, see gaps in my thinking. I use it to push projects forward when I’ve felt stuck. It has become an important part of my creative and professional work. I can test a hypothesis, ask vulnerable questions, and get a new perspective by clicking a submit button or simply chatting into the air. No need to coordinate calendars, no waiting with bated breath for an email.

But I see a danger with this mechanism of instant feedback and frequent feedback. When I can seek validation at any moment, I find myself seeking it constantly—compulsively even. The slightest uncertainty becomes a trigger to start another chat thread. Instead of wrangling a difficult paragraph into submission, I ask AI to smooth it out for me. Instead of following a tangent into unfamiliar territory I can ask if it will lead anywhere or simply prune it at the start. There is a lot less fumbling towards the full idea. Fewer false starts. I can interrupt the discomfort of uncertainty, but in doing so, miss out on the chance for discovery. And, unlike those established checkpoints, these instant feedback sessions require little preparation or investment on my part. I haven’t necessarily done the work to get to a place where the feedback feels earned. I haven’t earned my bowl of stew.

There’s a difference between having work evaluated and having work recognized. ChatGPT can tell me that an essay has a strong narrative arc, tell me how much it aligns to my larger body of work, it can identify a paragraph that needs more structure. It can offer useful criticism and sometimes offer a truly insightful critique, but when it tells me I’ve done a good job, I don’t know by what standard and on what authority. Every AI has a disclaimer that it gets things wrong… Maybe it is wrong about my work quality.

There is no real personal investment in my work, growth, or success. Its assessment might be accurate, but the praise doesn’t carry the same emotional weight as acknowledgement from someone whose judgement I’ve come to trust. My AI reviewer doesn’t have any skin in the game. So I can get the feedback without the stakes. I can submit the work without feeling seen.

And that is where the vacuum begins.

More and more work is conducted alongside AI systems that accelerate the process and reduce the need for some of these checkpoints. And that is a good thing. Not every document needs three rounds of stakeholder approval. Not every deck requires a meeting. And not every creative decision needs a manager’s blessing. But those interactions served more than an operational purpose. A manager reviewing a project does more than surface errors; a colleague offering feedback improves more than just the deliverable. They are building a relationship, strengthening a bond.

As we accelerate the work, I wonder if we have stripped away some of the experiences that make the work meaningful. The breakneck speed of production AI enables is incredible, but how do we ensure the team that relentlessly ships work gets acknowledged? If we delegate those checkpoints to AI, where does the human recognition happen?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I’ve removed myself from many of those systems altogether.

A few months ago, I stepped away from corporate America to focus on building my own creative business. After decades of working within large organizations and working towards certificates and degrees, I found myself operating without the structures that defined my professional life. No more weekly team meetings. No QBRs. No performance reviews. No manager waiting for an update. 

The feeling of liberation was palpable. It’s the freedom I’ve craved. The freedom to decide what deserves my attention. I can pursue ideas because they interest me, not because they align to quarterly corporate priorities. I can spend an afternoon writing an essay, developing an app, or wandering through a museum without having to justify it as productivity. But, I’ve also discovered that this freedom comes with complications. The Lisa Simpson in me still needs the validation, still needs to be graded.

I’ve made meaningful progress in building a different kind of professional life. I’ve established a creative studio, formed a business, developed an application, launched a website where I publish my essays, and make strides in my literary work. It feels great. Most of the time.

But there are no promotions attached to those accomplishments. No bonuses. No internal launch email. No pats on the back. The reward for completing something is checking off one to-do and replacing it with three. 

The lack of external signals is daunting. I publish an essay and watch the engagement trickle in. I share something on social media and wonder whether anybody is paying attention. I reach a milestone in my business and realize that outside of my spouse and my mother, no one knows that it happened. 

I wanted to escape the corporate machinery but didn’t realize quite how much I’d come to depend on the feedback for my own self-validation. So, I seek it where I can. And increasingly that is from AI. I’ve come to realize that I’m not always looking for advice or constructive feedback. Sometimes I’m simply asking if the work I’m doing matters. And as much as I try, I don’t think AI can tell me that. 

I’m going to run this essay through ChatGPT and Claude. For sure. I’ll ask: does my argument hold together? Have I made my point? Does it fit with my larger body of work? I’ll take the feedback with a grain of salt as I would feedback from a group of reviewers or a fiction workshop and find some of it useful and set some of it aside. But then I’ll publish it. Do a LinkedIn post and share it on Instagram. Maybe someone will discover it and find something useful. Maybe they’ll recognize their own little Lisa Simpson in themselves. And maybe we’ll both feel a little validated.