{"id":5384,"date":"2026-04-23T05:10:01","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T05:10:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideaweb.me\/blog\/?p=5384"},"modified":"2026-04-28T08:48:36","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T08:48:36","slug":"parent-approval-ambition-driven-adults","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideaweb.me\/blog\/parent-approval-ambition-driven-adults\/","title":{"rendered":"Most Adults Are Still Working For A Parent’s Approval They’ll Never Get"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You don\u2019t climb the ladder. You drag the child who\u2019s still waiting to be chosen.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A founder I know sold his company last year for enough money that his great-grandchildren will never work a day.
He called me the week the wire cleared. I expected champagne. What I got was a hollowed-out man asking in a meek voice,
whether he should start a new company immediately or wait another six months. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said the floor was giving way underneath him, and a new company was the only thing he could think of that might hold him up.
I asked him the question I’ve learned to ask these guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What did your father say when he heard about the sale?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The line went silent long enough that I checked the signal. Then, flatly:
He said congratulations. Then he changed the subject to my brother’s new house.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sit with that silence. The whole argument of this essay is hiding inside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He didn’t built a company. He built a stadium. 11 years of his life, most of his twenties, his health & a permanent crease between his eyebrows\u2014
all of it poured into constructing something loud enough, bright enough, expensive enough<\/em> that a man who had never turned his head might finally turn it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stadium was finished. It held ninety thousand screaming fans. The one seat he’d built it for was empty, always was going to be empty, and some exhausted corner of him had known that on day one.
He wanted a new company the way a gambler wants one more hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There’s a concept in geopolitics called the proxy war.<\/strong> Two superpowers who cannot punch each other directly will fund smaller conflicts in third countries. Arm a militia. Topple a government. Ship weapons through intermediaries. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The real fight is too expensive to have out loud, so it gets outsourced to a country neither side really cares about. My friend’s company , his eighty-hour weeks, the second company he was circling were a third country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The actual war was taking place in a kitchen in 1989, where a boy stood in a doorway holding a spelling-bee ribbon, waiting for his father to lower the newspaper. The paper never got lowered.<\/strong>
You cannot fight that war directly. You were nine. You lost. So you spend the next forty years funding proxies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is almost every driven adult I’ve ever met. It is, in some arrangement you might prefer not to admit, probably your story too.
Look at the people around you who cannot sit still, who cannot let a compliment land, who answer a promotion with restlessness, who get a five-star review and obsess over the one three-star.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ask yourself whose approval they are actually chasing.
It is almost never the board, the customer, or their own judgment.
Underneath is usually one human being who was supposed to say one sentence at one age and didn’t \u2014 and the grown adult is now running the most sophisticated possible campaign to extract that sentence from anyone who resembles them closely enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I watched my friend audition for his father through almost everyone he met. Investors. Journalists. Reporters. Me. Every milestone was an offering laid at a shrine whose resident god had long ago stopped accepting offerings. He did not know he was auditioning. The rest of us did not know we were casting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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His deeper problem was that his nervous system had nowhere else to anchor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The human nervous system is a boat. A boat needs a harbor. If the harbor you were born into refused to hold you, your boat will tie itself to anything that will \u2014 a football team, a political party, a workout cult, a guru, a brand of watch, a diagnosis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your body is only asking one question. Will this hold me.<\/em> It asks with the desperation of a child who was not held the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have built the most connected and most isolated population of humans who have ever lived. Networked into oblivion, lonelier than any species has been. The usual explanation is that the phones broke us. I don’t think they did. The phones are where we went after the original harbor failed. Billions of boats now tied to billions of phones, waiting for a voice the phone cannot produce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The voice you are waiting for is never going to reach you through a screen. It was supposed to be in your kitchen when you were eight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Which brings me to the hardest thing to write about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You have to grieve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This grief runs differently from the grief we do for the dead. We are theatrical about the dead. Caskets, eulogies, casseroles from neighbors. The grief I’m talking about has no ceremony around it, which is why almost nobody goes through with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is grief for a parent who is still alive but was never really there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The father who signs birthday cards with his first name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mother who shows up every Christmas, talks about her neighbor’s kitchen renovation, and leaves \u2014 and you keep going back year after year, convinced this one will be different<\/em>, and it never is, because the food is different and the china is different but the human across the table is running the same script they were running when you were seven, and they will run it until they die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have watched people spend their entire forties waiting. Waiting for the apology. The acknowledgment. A phone call that opens with I should have done better, I see you now, I’m sorry.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The phone is not going to ring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The human capable of making that call was never installed in the human you are waiting on, and no amount of therapy or success or spiritual work on your end is going to reach into their chest and install it at seventy-three, against their will. That is not cynicism. That is arithmetic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The refusal to do the arithmetic is what keeps the stadium under construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So one afternoon, usually alone, you sit down with a pen and write out, in your own handwriting, what you got and what you did not get. You let yourself see both columns. Then you are sad for a while \u2014 not Instagram sad, not sad for an audience, just sad the way a human is sad when something real has been lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The loss is real. You were entitled to a mother or a father and you did not receive one. Your body has been carrying that loss unprocessed for three or four decades. It weighs exactly what you think it weighs. Which is why you have been so tired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Only after the grief does the next move become possible, and the next move is less glamorous than people want it to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You do not heal this wound by finding yourself. You do not heal it by manifesting abundance, going on a silent retreat, or starting a podcast about the journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You heal it by finding actual humans and letting them do, for your adult life, the small ordinary things that were supposed to be done for you and were not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You do it with one human, and then another, and then maybe another after that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An older man who calls on a Tuesday to ask about what you are working on, and tells you he is proud of you, and means it. An older woman who notices you look tired and tells you to go home. A friend who picks up at eleven at night when your kid has a fever and you cannot think straight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They will never be your mother or your father. That is exactly what makes them useful. You are not nine anymore. You do not need a parent. You need enough hands on the rope that the rope holds when the wind picks up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most adults never do this work. So they try to extract parenting from their partners, their children, their direct reports, their trainers, their Twitter followings. All of those relationships buckle, because none of them were built to carry that weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My friend has not started the second company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He went to therapy, which he had sworn for a decade he never would. He had the long, hard conversation with his father, which went about the way those conversations go \u2014 his father did not suddenly become a different man, but my friend finally stopped needing him to. He wrote the two columns. He was sad for a while. He has two older men in his industry now who actually show up for him, who ask about his kids by name, who told him he had done a good job \u2014 and he let the sentence land instead of deflecting it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last time I saw him, six weeks ago, the crease between his eyebrows had softened. He laughed the old laugh again. I asked him if he was going to build another company. He said he didn’t know yet. But he was no longer asking the question because the floor was falling out. He was asking because he was curious what he’d build if he wasn’t building it for somebody who wasn’t watching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question that unlocked all of it was the one I asked him on the phone the week the wire cleared. It is the one I now ask myself whenever I catch myself grinding a little harder than the grind requires, or building something a little bigger than it needs to be:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who am I actually trying to get on the phone?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the answer is somebody who was never going to pick up, you can put the flare down. The stadium is already loud enough. There are humans already in the stands who came for you, and you can go have dinner with them tonight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A founder I know sold his company last year for enough money that his great-grandchildren will never work a day. He called me the week the wire cleared. I expected champagne. What I got was a hollowed-out man asking in a meek voice, whether he should start a new company immediately or wait another six […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[155,158,154,157,56,118,156,153,36,159],"class_list":{"0":"post-5384","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-life","7":"tag-ambition","8":"tag-career","9":"tag-childhood-trauma","10":"tag-family-dynamics","11":"tag-grief","12":"tag-mental-health","13":"tag-personal-growth","14":"tag-psychology","15":"tag-relationships","16":"tag-self-awareness","17":"entry","18":"has-post-thumbnail"},"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"vasudha","author_link":"https:\/\/ideaweb.me\/blog\/author\/vasudha\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideaweb.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5384"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideaweb.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideaweb.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideaweb.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideaweb.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5384"}],"version-history":[{"count":68,"href":"https:\/\/ideaweb.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5468,"href":"https:\/\/ideaweb.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5384\/revisions\/5468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideaweb.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideaweb.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideaweb.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}