Wanting to Be Wanted

The promiscuous gaze and the performance of existing

Attention should be given to you, like respect. Don’t ask for it!

Nobody admits to wanting it, and everyone does, that intoxicating pleasure of being noticed. Not the blunt hunger of vanity, that’s too easy to name and dismiss, but something more atmospheric, more foundational. The panic when a message receives no reply. The small, almost physiological relief when someone across a table really looks at you, really registers your presence, as if your existence were briefly confirmed by an external authority. We move through social life calibrated to these micro-confirmations without knowing we depend on them until the supply runs low and we begin, almost without deciding to, performing.

“The Bride of the Wind”, 1914, by Oskar Kokoschka (en.wikipedia.org) — two figures entangled in a churching, almost violent wild, one awake and searching, one turned inward and unreachable. The painting is about the anguish of wanting to be met by another consciousness and finding the circuit incomplete. It opens the essay on longing before it names it.

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This is not an essay about vanity. It is about something older and more structurally interesting, and that is the human need to be witnessed, and what happens when that need outpaces the available supply.

I want to describe a particular species of modern creature that does not appear in biology textbooks, yet could probably qualify for its own taxonomic classification if someone in the sociology department had enough coffee and insufficient funding. I will call it (and I use the term deliberately, to strip it of its usual moral valence) the “attention-seeking slut”. Not necessarily sexual. Not always seductive. Sometimes posting a “completely spontaneous” photo of their coffee and Pessoa at 7am with natural light that required forty minutes of repositioning and three aperture adjustments. Sometimes male, sometimes female, often professionally self-aware but privately famished. A creature that does not simply want to be seen but wants to be confirmed, stamped, applauded, registered in the psychic ledger of others as real.

Before the moral reflex kicks in, let me clarify the term. “Slut” here is not about bodies moving between beds but about attention moving between faces. A promiscuity of gaze. A scattering of self across rooms, feeds, meetings, dinner tables, comment sections. The person who flirts with everyone without desire but with existential panic. The one who cannot sit still inside their own skin without a mirror held up by another human being. They don’t seduce people. They seduce acknowledgment.

We have all been one. Even the monks who pretend they haven’t.

The phenomenon is not new. Court societies thrived on this creature. Versailles was essentially a theatre of performative importance where proximity to the king replaced oxygen. People fought, literally, over who could hold the candle while Louis XIV undressed. No loyalty there, only oxygen theft disguised as etiquette. Today the king has been diffused into followers, views, blue ticks, invitations, subtle nods across rooms where no one remembers what the conversation was about, but everyone remembers who noticed them noticing.

The difference between healthy recognition and what I am describing is posture. Recognition arrives as consequence. Attention-seeking demands arrival. One walks through a room and is noticed because they are immersed in something real; the other scans the room calculating how to be noticed, adjusting tone, posture, opinions like a social DJ mixing tracks no one asked to hear.

Men do this differently or at least pretend to. Male attention-seeking often disguises itself as competence. The man who must dominate conversations without having knowledge but hunger, who explains topics adjacent to his understanding with such theatrical certainty that everyone silently Googles afterward. He is not arrogant. He is starving. Applause substitutes for affection; authority substitutes for intimacy.

Women, socialised into aesthetic diplomacy, more often seek attention through strategic vulnerability that feels spontaneous but arrives with stage lighting… the overshare calibrated to the emotional frequency guaranteed to produce comfort responses. Not manipulative in a cartoonish sense, but like someone repeatedly knocking on a door hoping eventually someone opens and says, “Come in, you don’t have to perform here!”

The distinction collapses quickly, though, because both operate within the same emotional marketplace where visibility equals value. Masculine achievement displays. Feminine relational displays. Same starvation, different table manners.

There is also a class dimension that no one likes to mention because it disrupts the comforting myth that attention hunger is purely psychological. In cultures where worth is constantly negotiated through presentation, like creative industries, digital entrepreneurship or professional networking, attention becomes structural necessity rather than personal failing. The waitress charming for tips, the junior lawyer volunteering extra anecdotes in meetings, the writer crafting slightly provocative sentences to keep readers from drifting away, the middle manager cc-ing their director on emails that required no oversight, the dinner guest who always insists on bringing something homemade. At some point, survival and attention start sharing a bed, and it becomes difficult to know which instinct you’re obeying when you reach for your phone.

The philosopher René Girard, whose theories about mimetic desire often get diluted into podcast platitudes, observed that humans rarely desire objects directly; we desire what others desire. Attention amplifies this loop. Being wanted signals that one is worth wanting. The attention-seeking slut is, paradoxically, seeking validation of desirability through desirability itself, a hall of mirrors where self-worth becomes derivative, not intrinsic. You can see it play out in rooms where someone laughs slightly too loudly at jokes that are barely jokes, where a person interrupts stories not to contribute but to reposition themselves at the centre of narrative gravity. The conversational eclipse. Not malicious. Just gravitational.

I once attended a dinner in Florence, after the opening of an art exhibition, one of those long tables where wine does most of the emotional labour, and watched a man slowly derail every conversation toward anecdotes featuring himself as protagonist. Not impressive anecdotes. Just persistent ones. At some point, between the dessert and the existential fatigue, I realised he was not boasting. He was searching. Each story a fishing line thrown into the water of other people’s eyes, hoping for a tug. Nobody tugged. He kept casting.

“The Subway”, 1950, by George Tooker (newyork.wordpress.com) — figures trapped in identical compartments, physically proximate and completely unreachable to one another. The bureaucracy of human isolation. It arrives at the exact moment my essay turns from social observation toward something more structurally bleak, the recognition deficit that no amount of performance can fill.

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And there is a cruelty in collective indifference that polite society rarely names. We tell people to stop seeking attention as if attention were not a basic social nutrient. Infants could die without sufficient eye contact; adults simply become performative. The insult “attention seeker” functions as moral shorthand meaning “you are requesting emotional resources without permission”.

But who distributes permission? Who decides which bids for recognition are dignified and which are embarrassing? A grieving friend posting long captions about loss receives empathy. A lonely acquaintance posting similar captions receives eyerolls. Context arbitrates legitimacy, and context is a social power structure dressed that has learned to smile.

Philosopher Axel Honneth’s work on recognition suggests that identity formation depends on being acknowledged across relational contexts. Without recognition, individuals struggle to sustain coherent self-concepts. The attention-seeking person, generously understood, is someone attempting to compensate for recognition deficits through volume rather than depth. Louder bids. More frequent signals. Increasing theatricality, because the previous round didn’t quite land.

Psychology calls what sustains this variable reinforcement. Casinos call it profit. The digital world perfected it. Notifications appear irregularly, unpredictably, intoxicatingly. Each ping a micro-confirmation; each silence a micro-rejection. The person refreshing their feed becomes less a character flaw than a behavioural adaptation to technological ecosystems designed precisely to exploit intermittent reward loops.

We built slot machines for the self, then expressed disappointment that people keep pulling the lever.

My own work exists in that ambiguous terrain where attention is both currency and contamination. Writing publicly means stepping onto a stage while simultaneously pretending you don’t care about applause. And yet you check. Of course you check! The refresh button is the most honest religious ritual of the 21^st century.

Last winter, after publishing an essay I was convinced would vanish silently into the digital fog, I woke up to hundreds of comments. My first emotion was not joy. It was… relief, a small, embarrassing exhale. Ahhh… I am not shouting into a well. I hated that relief. I still do. And a few months ago, after drafting something I felt strangely disconnected from, I closed my laptop and walked for hours without headphones, no content, no spinning around ideas, and stopping to write them in my phone Notes, just footsteps and the occasional intrusive thought about waiting emails and comments. Somewhere between a bakery and a bookstore, it struck me that I had written it for attention rather than truth. The essay was fine. Which was exactly the problem! Fine attracts attention. Truth disrupts it. The essay remained unpublished.

I oscillate. There are days I romanticise invisibility, no notifications, no commentary, no subtle pressure to produce thought on schedule, a calm life with long walks and conversations that evaporate rather than persist as digital artefacts. And then there are days when I publish something and feel the small electric thrill of resonance. The contradiction embarrasses me. I live inside it anyway. Most writers do, whatever they tell you.

I remember meeting a woman once who described herself as “chronically charming”. She could enter any room and generate warmth within minutes. People loved her. Yet during a late conversation she admitted she had no idea how to be loved beyond charm. “If I stop performing”, she said, “I disappear.” That sentence still sits in my mind because the attention-seeking slut is, at core, terrified of social evaporation. Being physically present yet perceptually absent. The meeting where no one references your contribution. The group chat where your message receives silence while others spark conversation. Micro-erasures accumulate until performance feels safer than presence.

Irony complicates matters further because contemporary attention-seeking is frequently disguised as its opposite. The person loudly declaring they “don’t care about attention” while carefully crafting the declaration for maximum visibility. Detachment as aesthetic. Indifference as performance art. A reverse psychology of desirability where not wanting attention becomes the most sophisticated method of obtaining it. The ancient Stoics would be exhausted.

I also have to mention again the gendered moral asymmetry. Women labelled attention-seeking often receive sexualised contempt, while men displaying identical behaviour are framed as ambitious or charismatic. A woman posting frequent selfies risks derogatory labels; a man posting frequent professional updates is “building his brand”.

Language polices attention economies unevenly, which is part of why reclaiming the term “attention-seeking slut” carries some subversive value. Not celebratory. But clarifying. It acknowledges that the desire to be noticed exists across genders and contexts, usually detached from sexuality altogether, and that its moralisation has always served to enforce rather than examine the social hierarchies that distribute recognition so unequally in the first place.

I have watched this dynamic unfold among writers, influencers, academics whose public intellectual presence gradually morphs into continuous performance, or politicians whose original conviction hollows into the habitat of applause, or therapists who began wanting to help and ended up wanting to be known for helping. The original passion that drew attention becomes secondary to sustaining it.

Content replaces thought; output replaces curiosity. One wakes up one morning and realises they are feeding an audience rather than exploring an idea. And then the realisation hurts. The audience was not wrong to want, but somewhere in the negotiation, the self became negotiable.

This is where the conversation tilts from observation into something more like ethics. Attention-seeking becomes problematic and the reason is not that attention is inherently corrupting but truth be told, excessive reliance on external confirmation can distort an internal compass. People start saying what lands rather than what feels accurate, performing reactions rather than experiencing them. And yet moralising the phenomenon entirely misses the structural entanglement between visibility and opportunity: artists require audiences, writers require readers, and condemning attention-seeking wholesale resembles criticising hunger in a food economy.

The question shifts from should we seek attention to what relationship do we cultivate with the attention we receive. Do we absorb it as encouragement or as oxygen? As feedback or as identity? Temporary resonance or permanent definition?

Attention feels different from respect because respect does not require volume. It accumulates through consistency, integrity, presence across time. You don’t demand it mid-conversation; you embody patterns that make disrespect cognitively dissonant for others.

Respect arrives like sediment. Attention arrives like fireworks.

The attention-seeking people often confuse the two, chasing bursts of visibility hoping they translate into enduring regard. Sometimes they do. More often they dissipate, and the persona must escalate to compensate.

Respect, by contrast, emerges from something less theatrical and therefore less intoxicating: showing up, following through, listening when no one is watching.

And yet, here is the uncomfortable admission, respect alone does not satisfy the human desire to be delighted in, to be noticed with spark rather than solemn acknowledgment. Respect nourishes dignity. Attention tickles existence. We may, uncomfortably, need both, not constantly, not compulsively, but as a sustainable mixture rather than an embarrassing secret.

Yesterday, sitting in a café where conversations overlapped like competing radio stations, I watched a young couple take turns showing each other their phones. Each image produced predictable reactions. Look at this! Wow! So funny! So cute! It was banal and intimate simultaneously, attention exchanged in small, ordinary doses, without performance, without calculation, just fragments shared between two people who had apparently decided to witness each other. It struck me that perhaps the antidote to attention-seeking compulsion is not stoic detachment but abundant micro-attention within close relationships. When people feel sufficiently witnessed privately, public attention loses urgency. Or at least some of its desperation.

This thought comforts me, though not entirely, because human beings remain porous creatures, influenced by collective gaze whether we admit it or not. The desire to matter beyond immediate circles persists. To contribute, resonate, ripple outward in some direction.

Attention becomes evidence of impact; silence can feel like negation.

So, we remain, most of us, still oscillating, still refreshing occasionally, still performing slightly more than necessary, but perhaps with greater awareness of the choreography.

The attention-seeking slut, reframed generously, is someone rehearsing existence in public because private certainty feels insufficient. Not a villain, not a hero, just a participant in a culture where being seen often substitutes for being known. The task is not eradicating the desire but integrating it, allowing it to coexist with more discreet forms of self-recognition.

There are days I imagine a version of myself writing entirely offline, essays read by no one, thoughts dissolving after formation. A romantic fantasy of intellectual solitude. Yet the moment I picture it fully, something resists. Writing is dialogue even when asynchronous. Expression anticipates reception. Silence alone does not complete the circuit.

What remains, then, is calibration rather than elimination. Learning to seek attention without selling oneself for it. To accept recognition without orbiting it. To offer attention generously to others, disrupting the scarcity logic that makes visibility feel competitive. And occasionally, gently, without cruelty, to catch oneself mid-performance… the extra anecdote, the carefully phrased post, the moment you glance around a room to confirm someone noticed you arrived.

I still do that.

Less than before.

More than I admit.

Somewhere between invisibility and exhibition, between respect sediment and spotlight flicker, there exists a livable middle ground where attention becomes conversation rather than conquest. I don’t inhabit it consistently. Few people do. But I glimpse it in silent exchanges, unremarkable dinners, messages sent without expectation of response, work produced with no guarantee of applause, and in those glimpses, something resembles sufficiency, which is perhaps the closest most of us will get to peace.

From the stage, where I have been standing the whole time, pretending to address you from somewhere quieter,

Tamara

Not a tip jar. A ledger for what you underlined in your mind.

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“Woman Reading”, 1896, by Édouard Vuillard (gallerix.org) — a figure almost dissolved into the domestic interior around her, pattern merging into the wallpaper, present but unpresented. Not invisible, simply existing without rewiring confirmation. The equilibrium my essay describes but admits it cannot sustain. I chose to close it on an image of sufficiency rather than hunger.

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