A friend asked via DM something like “I noticed that you’ve mentioned ‘neediness’ a few times, what does it mean to you?”

It’s an interesting question, and I think an important one. I’m curious to know too. Some phrases from past tweets:

• 1 “neediness is unsexy”
• 2 “If you can let go of your neediness – which is hard to do – you can get more than you imagined possible. your heroes can become your peers.”
• 3 “I sincerely believe that status anxiety is rooted in neediness and fear. It’s easy to mock people for wanting attention – but why do they want that attention?”
• 4 “Lots of mostly-nice parents pass on all sorts of painful bullshit to their kids. Why? Fear, neediness, insecurity. Unaddressed trauma.”
• 5 For comedy to truly serve its exalted purpose, comedians have to, however briefly, put aside their ego, their neediness, their contempt and tap into a deep love for humanity…
• 6 There’s a difference between embarrassing kids by having fun of your own terms, and embarrassing them by making a fool of yourself when you sincerely try to participate in kidspace, and fail. The variable is your own neediness. Kids prefer adults to be self-assured and not needy.
  • 6b “I need you to like me and you won’t like me unless I play your games”
• 7 “There was a neediness and clinginess to my younger self that I think must’ve been what was deterring some people.”
• 8 “When you approach sex with such an intense neediness, with the belief that you aren’t a man without it – it transmogrifies sex from a shared, intimate exploration of mutual desire, into an act of conquest”
• 8 “I think neediness can be disambiguated. A person can have lots of needs but be patient about having them taken care of, and communicate them clearly, and manage them well. Another might have relatively trivial needs but be a total dick about it.”
• 9 TED from HIMYM is so selfish, solipsistic and needy in his approach to dating
• 10 when you’re weak and low status, saying that you’re sad (and being needy about it) will often make things worse
• 11 Euron asking Cersei “how do I compare” is needy and childish
• 12 I find Tarantino a little juvenile and needy – I feel like it’s a little too important to him that his audience sees him in a certain light
• 13 Neil Strauss’s The Game is really a bout a bunch of needy, broken men who were deeply unhappy and unfulfilled
• 14 it’s normal and even healthy to desire approval – but it’s not necessary to be needy about it. the desire for approval can be expressed in nuanced, subtle and artful ways – and when you do that, you’ll get more about it
• 15 great teachers challenge kids without coming across as needy. complex skillset requiring knowledge + charisma + leadership
• 16 being explicitly socially needy is generally seen as tacky (unless you’re doing it with finesse, like a comedian)
• 17 I used to be v dependent on cigarettes – I do still smoke, but my relationship with cigarettes is far less needy now
• 18 building strong relationships with people who will ugly-cry at your funeral requires the very opposite of chill – but you don’t want to be a clingy, needy, overly-attached, overly-dramatic friend either
• 19 to get people to lower their defenses around you, you kinda have to be respectfully semi-indifferent to their defensiveness […[ you just want to have a good time, you’re not needy or demanding about how other people are. you’re happy to let them be themselves while you be you.

Phew! That was a whole thread.

Now I want to take a moment to think about my own experience of neediness in my life.

I remember when I was 17 – I was really needy about having a girlfriend. I had broken up with my first and longtime girlfriend of 3 years, and I was single for 2 years afterwards. We’d then get back together, and get married. But in those 2 years I was very, very needy. On retrospect, it’s completely unsurprising that, while I talked to lots of girls, none of them seemed interested in having any sort of romantic relationship with me.

Around that time I also remember generally being needy about wanting people to be impressed by me. I don’t think I wanted to be “liked” in a casual sense, though if someone claimed to dislike me, I would happily argue with them extensively about why they ought to reconsider their position. I wanted to be respected as someone who was smart, quick-witted… and while did this make me a bunch of friends (several of whom turned out to be abrasive and disagreeable), it also drove people away from me – which was something I didn’t fully appreciate. By “appreciate” I mean – I didn’t quite realize how that was limiting me and constraining my experience of the world.

there appear to be two kinds of neediness – attachment to outcomes (I really really need this to “work out” and I don’t know what I will do if it doesn’t, I will absolutely lose my shit / be extremely upset/miserable, maybe angry, forlorn, etc), and attachment to people – I need you to like me, I need you to play with me.

To be more precise, I guess you could say that one is a subset of another – attachment to people is still a kind of attachment to outcome, just that the outcomes involve other people. “Just”. It might be the same thing to you, but makes a world of difference to the other person.

There’s a nice line in Finite and Infinite Games about playfulness – “to be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. Rather – when we are playful, we relate to each other as free persons – and the relationship is open to surprise. Seriousness = pressing for a specific conclusion.”

You can’t be truly playful when you’re needy. True playfulness requires a certain confidence, a certain detachment.

I often return to Esther Perel’s TED talk, The secret to desire in a long-term relationship. Here too we find riffs about neediness. She talks about two human needs – security vs adventure, predictability and safety vs novelty, risk, danger, mystery. Both of these are very normal needs, and everybody has them. But it’s possibly to be too needy, which is when you just keep pressing for the outcome – so much so that it stops being fun for other people to play with you. And in the solo sense, being too needy about, say, wanting to play a sport well, might lead to overwork, burnout, and then it stops being fun for you.

“I will lose my freedom in order not to lose connection. And I will learn to love in a certain way that will become burdened with extra worry and extra responsibility and extra protection, and I won’t know how to leave you in order to go play, in order to go experience pleasure, in order to discover, to enter inside myself. .” – Esther Perel, describing a kind of neediness

Ultimately I think neediness is rooted in fear. Fear of being left out. Fear of being screwed over, taken advantage of. Fear of being a sucker. If you want to be less needy, you have to face your fears – and IMO the best way to do that is to do it in small, controlled doses.

“If you try to hold on to life, you lose it. You can’t hold your breath and stay alive; it becomes extremely uncomfortable to hold your breath. And so in exactly the same way, it becomes extremely uncomfortable to spend all your time holding on to your life.” – Alan Watts