You Can’t Earn Your Way to Being Loved | (#095) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Welcome to the Beyond Success Podcast: Psychology and Philosophy for Achievers on the Inner Life of Success, and I’m your host, David Tian.

Think of someone that you would find hard to love. I don’t mean a maliciously cruel person or anything, not someone that you would cross the street to avoid. Just someone who’s a little dull, the one who corners you at the party to walk you through his commute in detail while you scan the room for an exit. Someone plain, forgettable, a bit tedious, you know the type.

Now, keep that person in mind for a second. Is he or she less worthy of love than you? Sit with that. Don’t answer too fast. Most people feel a small tug towards yes, not the whole way, just a little bit. Maybe a bit less, you think. You wouldn’t put it that bluntly and you probably wouldn’t say it out loud, but it’s sitting in there, right? He hasn’t done much with himself, you think. He isn’t sharp or smart. He’s not the kind of man that you would notice across a room. So, the answer tilts slightly toward, yeah, worth less, and that tilt is the entire episode. [01:07.0]

If you can feel that, that small lean toward yes, then you already believe when I’m going to spend the next half hour or so taking a part. You believe that a person’s worth tracks his qualities, that the more impressive he is, then the more worthy he is of love, and the less impressive, the less worthy. You believed it before I even said a word, and that flinch is the interesting part. It’s worth slowing down for, not smoothing over.

There’s something almost comic about it. You might argue all day that everyone’s worth is equal, but then a half second of honest reaction says otherwise. You don’t need to apologize for it. Just stay with it. Sit in the discomfort a moment longer than feels comfortable. It’s the most honest thing, because it’s telling you what you actually believe instead of what you’d say at a polite dinner. [01:58.8]

Out loud maybe you’d never say it. Out loud, you would say every person has equal worth, and maybe in the moment, you would mean it. You might say a person’s worth has nothing to do with how smart they are or how far they’ve climbed up the status ladder, or whether he’s any fun at a party. You would defend that dull man without blinking, but you just don’t believe it about yourself. For yourself, the rule reverses. The worth that you hand everyone else out loud for free, you make yourself earn.

So, here’s what this episode won’t do. I’m not going to try to convince you that you are worthy. No speech about how you’re enough, no list of your good qualities, nothing for you to repeat into the mirror. If you came for that, you will be disappointed by this episode and my whole podcast, and you should be. That approach has never actually worked for anyone, least of all on a person sharp enough to see right through it. [02:55.6]

The reason it doesn’t work is simple: you can’t be talked out of a conclusion that you reasoned your way into honestly, and your sense that you fall short isn’t just a mood. It’s in fact a verdict and you arrived at it. There’s an argument supporting it, whether or not you’ve ever said the argument out loud. That’s what we’re going to go after here. Not the feeling, but the actual rational argument, the reason you think you are not worthy of love. We’re going to take it apart and see if it holds.

But before we can take it apart, we have to see it clearly. It goes something like this: “Love is earned. It’s a reward, and you get it for being the kind of person worth loving. You’re smart, so there’s a reason to keep you around. You’ve done well, so you bring something to the table. You’re good-looking or you’re good company, or you’re a good person.”

Each of those is a reason, and if you stack enough reasons together, you’ve made the case for yourself. You’ve earned your place, and the flip side comes just as easily. Strip the reasons away and what’s left has no claim on anyone. So, if you weren’t smart, weren’t successful, weren’t pleasant to be around, why would anyone choose you? On what grounds? [04:12.2]

Love is the prize that you win for being worth it. If you don’t have the qualities, then you don’t get the prize—that’s the deal, right? Some part of you signed that deal a long time ago. Notice that this is the same rule that you used with the dull man, thinking about the dull person. You looked at what he brought and you priced him by it. You’re just running the rule on yourself now, and you’re a tougher customer on yourself.

You know all your own ledgers. You know which columns are thin, and in the daylight, it sounds reasonable if you just say, “Of course, love is earned.” You wouldn’t respect a love that you hadn’t earned, right? You would suspect it. Someone who’s worth loving is someone who’s done the work to be worth loving. [04:58.6]

At 3 a.m., this doesn’t feel like a theory at all. It feels like the plain, obvious shape of things. It might even feel like the mature perspective, like you’ve simply grown up and stopped expecting to be loved for nothing, and I’m not going to tell you that that’s monstrous or anything. It isn’t. It’s the most ordinary belief in the world, but I am going to prove to you that it’s false, and here’s how you do it. We’re not going to argue with that belief. We take the theory at its word and we’re going to walk it out to where it will naturally go, and we’ll see if you will follow it to its natural conclusions.

Yeah, let’s start with intelligence. If love is the reward for being smart, then the smarter that you are, the more of it you’ve earned, right? Fine. Okay, picture identical twins, same face, same childhood, same laugh. One, though, scores a little higher on every intelligence test. He’s sharper, quicker, the one who finishes the crossword first. [06:02.0]

Okay, under this theory, this twin is more worthy of love than his twin, more deserving and earns his place more solidly. Now, do you believe that? Answer it honestly. The idea that the brighter, smarter, more intelligent twin is owed more love as a result than the slower one should strike you as not just morally wrong, but slightly grotesque. You feel it before you can explain it, right?

Okay, let’s take beauty instead. If love is the reward for being physically beautiful, then it tracks beauty up and down the whole way, which means you are more worthy at, let’s say, 25 years old than you’ll be at 65, and every year from here, if you’re in middle age or beyond, by your own theory, you become a little less deserving of love. As your face goes, your claim on love goes with it. Each birthday after the middle is a small demotion and it all adds up. [07:07.8]

Do you believe that one? That a person ages out of being worth loving? Hopefully, you don’t. You can just see it. You can feel it. When you picture someone that you love getting older, do you feel their worth draining off their face? If anything, it deepens, if you actually love the person. The theory actually predicts the opposite of what you actually feel.

Now, sit with that for a second, because here’s what just happened. I didn’t refute your theory. You did. I only pointed it at someone other than you, and the second it landed on the twin or on someone that you love getting older, aging, or on anyone but yourself, you rejected it. You just felt it instantly, the rejection. You wouldn’t apply it to a single person that you’ve ever cared about, which means you don’t actually believe it, not really. [07:58.2]

You believe it in exactly one place, about exactly one person, at exactly one time, at least. You believe it at 3 a.m. about yourself. That’s not a principle that you hold. A principle holds everywhere or it isn’t a real principle. That’s a sentence or a proposition, or a belief that you reserve for yourself in the dark, and you’ve mistaken the ache of it for the truth of it.

Now, if you are smart, you’ve already got an objection ready, and maybe it’s a good one. Maybe it’s this one, maybe you’re thinking, Hold on, there are people that I don’t want and no amount of argument will change that. The woman who’s perfectly decent, but leaves you feeling indifferent, like I feel nothing for her. Are you now telling me that I’m obliged to manufacture desire for her, that something’s wrong with me for not wanting her?

Okay, no, obviously not, and let’s slow down here because the language here smears two different things into one word and the whole confusion lies in that smearing. Okay, there’s wanting someone, and there’s holding someone as mattering fully with no conditions on it. Those two are not the same thing. [09:09.2]

Wanting answers to what’s attractive, sexually, physically, it’s pulled by specific things like a face, a voice, a way of moving through a room or something, and in that case, your theory is true. Desire is earned, in a sense. It’s drawn out by certain qualities and it cannot be forced or commanded, and nobody is owed your desire. You don’t get to require yourself to want a person, and no one gets to require it from you.

Okay, so we’re going to set that down clearly. Attraction is conditional all the way through, and that’s actually fine. That was never the thing in question. The love in question is something else, the positive regard that you’d give someone, whether or not you wanted anything from them, whether or not you could use them for anything. This stance says, “You matter completely, and not because you’ve earned a place in my attraction or desire or wanting.” [10:11.6]

Carl Rogers, a famous psychologist, had a name for it: “unconditional positive regard.” Unconditional positive regard prized without conditions, held as fully worth it, full stop, with nothing riding on what you bring to the table. Okay, that’s the love that we’re talking about. That’s the love that everyone from birth is really after. It’s not the pull of attraction or desire, but the positive regard, and from here on, every time I say worthy of love, that’s the love that I mean. Not who you chase after for sex, but who you hold as worthy of unconditional positive regard.

So, we’re going to set desire, especially sexual desire, aside here. That’s handled. That’s not love. That’s conditional, and that’s fine. The real question is the deeper one and it’s more challenging than it may first appear. Is that person, apart from whether you can get anything from him or her, worthy of being held as mattering? And are you worthy? [11:15.6]

We pushed the theory one way, and it broke. Take a person’s qualities away, and their worth doesn’t drop away. Now let’s push it the other way. Stack every quality that you admire, let’s say, onto one man, max them all out, and let’s see whether the worth climbs up to match. 

Okay, picture Homelander, the voice. Yeah, it’s the famous TV show. Okay, set the TV show aside for a moment with all the details, and just take the man as advertised, okay? Or the Superman as advertised, okay? He’s brilliant. He’s strong. He’s the strongest person alive in that world. He’s good-looking. He’s fearless. He’s magnetic on camera, charismatic guy, the man that every room arranges itself around, and you can run down the list of things that you’ve been quietly grading yourself against for worthiness here, and he’s got all of them turned up past anything that you could reach actually, Superman. [12:09.9]

By your 3a.m. theory. This is a person who has earned love many times over. He’s maxed the whole scorecard. But he’s also vicious, cruel for sport. He’s malicious. He’s evil. He’ll smile into the lens and do something monstrous the second the camera is off. So, he’s got all the qualities that you’re after to the max.

Now, do all those qualities make his maliciousness worth loving? Does all that power earn him your positive regard? Are you sitting there holding him as fully mattering, prizing him without conditions, because he’s handsome and he’s strong and he’s fast? Okay, hopefully you’re not, if you’ve seen Homelander or The Boys? Okay, nobody is. He’s the ultimate villain. [12:55.0]

The qualities are all present, every one of them, and at a level that you and no human can never touch, and they buy him exactly nothing in the column that we’re talking about here, love—and notice what that does to your theory. We already saw that subtracting qualities doesn’t lower a person’s worth. Now we’re seeing that adding them, all of them, max to the hilt, doesn’t earn the positive regard either. Both directions fail.

If having everything doesn’t produce it and lacking everything doesn’t remove it, then the qualities were never producing it in the first place. They are not the factors that matter when it comes to love, and they never were—which leaves a strange hole in the middle of the question, right? If it isn’t the brains and the brawn, and it isn’t the looks and it isn’t the power or status, then what exactly are you grading? What’s left when you take the whole scorecard away? [13:52.8]

Okay, there’s one escape left and this is a good one. This is the one, if you’re smart, you’ll reach for, because it’s the one that feels noble. “Okay, fine,” you say. “It’s not the looks. It’s not the brains. It’s not the power. It’s not the status, not the brawn.” Those are all surface-level, but goodness, moral goodness, virtue, surely, that would earn it. Be compassionate. Be kind. Be a person who shows up for others, and you have earned your place in a way that Homelander never could. Virtue, then, is the real currency, right? That’s the quality that finally buys the positive regard.

Okay, this is the most sophisticated version of your theory, but it’s still the theory. Watch what happens when you run this to its natural conclusion. If you’re compassionate in order to be worth loving, look at what you’ve actually done. You’ve turned your compassion into a payment. You’re being good in order to earn approval, to make yourself worthy, to earn the thing that you’re afraid you don’t deserve. But compassion offered as a down payment isn’t real compassion. It’s a transaction and it’s using the other person instrumentally, and it’s using compassion instrumentally. The person on the other end is merely a means to your worth, not someone you’re actually moved by. [15:11.6]

The genuinely compassionate person is not running that meter, is not tallying what each good act buys him. He or she helps because the other person matters to him or her, full stop, and the question of what it earns you never comes up. The second you start asking what your goodness is worth, what is purchasing, what is getting you. You have stopped being good, and you’ve started, I don’t know, keeping the books.

So, virtue can’t be the price either. The moment you make it the price, it isn’t virtue anymore. It collapses the instant you try to spend it, and this is the one you’ve probably actually been running. You haven’t been naively looksmaxxing or chasing looks. You’re not chasing power or status, hopefully. You’re too smart for that. No, probably you’re trying to be good enough, I don’t know, nice enough, kind enough, generous enough, useful enough to finally earn that positive regard. [16:11.2]

You’ve been making payments your whole life on a debt you assumed was real, but every quality is gone now, looks, brain, power, even moral goodness. All of it is off the table when it comes to earning love. The scorecard now is blank.

Okay, but there’s a finer version of the answer, and maybe you’ll reach for it if you’ve had any philosophy training. You might say, “Fine, not the goodness I perform to be loved. Not interested in that type of goodness. You’ve shown me that that’s just a payment. The goodness that’s worthy is the sincere kind, the kind that isn’t keeping score. So, the worthy thing was never compassion for a prize. It’s compassion that wants nothing back, that’s what earns it. Okay, so whoever has that is worthy of love.”

Okay, so that sounds clever, because it sounds like it’s left the scorecard behind, but it hasn’t. It’s only written a finer line at the top of it. [17:05.0]

Sometimes, the real problem isn’t more effort or more motivation. It’s knowing the right direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are capable and driven. Things still look fine on paper, but life still feels strangely flat. When that happens, more advice usually isn’t the answer. Clarity is.

I’ve put together a short assessment that takes about two minutes. It’s simply a way to see which area deserves your attention most right now, whether that’s relationships, decision-making, or how pressure is being handled day to day. Based on your responses, you’ll be sent a short set of master classes related to that area.

If that sounds useful, you can find it at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”

So, ask the same question that we asked of everything else here. “Why is sincerity so valuable? Why is sincerity worth anything? What earns it its place?” Then you’ll have to answer with another quality. “Because sincerity shows purity of heart,” you might say. “Or depth, or something that makes the sincerity count.” [18:09.5]

Okay, fine, we’ll bank that. Now what earns that its worth? Okay, and then you give another answer, and then the reply will be, “And the thing that backs that one? What makes that valuable? What makes that the thing that finally makes you worthy?” It’s like someone paying a debt with an IOU. You ask what backs it and he hands you a second IOU to run on a third IOU, and he can do that all day long. There’s nothing actually in the account. It’s just an IOU backed by another IOU, backed by another IOU, which in the end is worth nothing, however many of these things he signs.

So, here’s the fork in the road, and there’s no third way through it. There’s no taking the horns of the dilemma and going through. There’s only two choices—either the qualities go on qualifying each other forever, everyone needing a finer, nobler one to back it, and then you never reach the bottom of it, which means there is no bottom, which means none of it was ever worth a thing. Or somewhere along the lines you stop and you admit the worth never resided in any quality at all. It resides in the person, the one holding the qualities. [19:18.7]

Okay, and if that’s true, even once, and it’s true the whole way up the chain, the goodness didn’t make you worthy. You were worthy, and that’s what made the goodness worth doing. The scorecard is blank because it was never about the scorecard.

So, okay, if no quality on the list can earn love, then the thing that you’ve been honoring all along was never the list. It was never the résumé. It was the one holding the résumé. Take a man’s intelligence, his looks, his power, his goodness, and lay them all out on the table in front of him, and there’s still a him standing behind the table. That’s the thing, not the items, but the one that they belong to. [20:01.6]

Immanuel Kant, a renowned philosopher, saw this clearly and he put it into two words: price and dignity. Everything in the world has one or the other, he said, and they work in opposite ways. A thing with a price can be swapped for its equal. If I have something worth $10 and you have something else worth $10, then we trade and nobody’s lost anything. That’s what a price is. It means replaceable by an equivalent.

Your car has a price. Your labor has a price. The qualities on your scorecard, every one of them, has a price, because for each one, there’s something out there with more of it, but a person is not like that. A person has no equivalent. There’s no exchange rate, no other human being that you could swap them for and call it even. That’s irreplaceable worth, the kind that can’t be priced because nothing trades for it. [21:00.4]

Kant called that dignity, and dignity is not earned. It isn’t a wage that you’re paid for being a certain kind of person. It comes with being a person at all. Okay, sit with what that means, because this is the whole thing. If you didn’t earn it, you can’t lose it. That’s not a comfort that I’m trying to offer you. It’s just the logic.

A wage can be docked. A prize can be taken back, but a thing you never won for some performance cannot be lost through failure. It cannot be lost by getting older. It can’t be lost by falling short. It can’t be lost by becoming someone that you’re now ashamed of. The worth was never riding on any of that, so none of that can actually touch it, which finally tells us what to do with the malicious man. Remember him with everything maxed and a heart full of malice? I took the example of Homelander for that. [21:56.9]

Here’s how both things stay true at once—his cruelty earns him nothing, not a scrap, but he’s still a person. Let’s assume Homelander is a real person. He’s still a person, which means the dignity is still there, unearned, untouchable, exactly like yours. There are two different targets here: there’s the person, and then there’s the act. You aim at the act everything that it deserves, but the person keeps the worth he never earned and therefore cannot lose.

There’s a catchy phrase for this. You might have heard of it, but it’s half wrong. “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” The trouble is the hate part. Hate doesn’t stay on the act. It bleeds onto the man every time until you’re not condemning what he did, you’re condemning him. So, drop the hate, and then keep the rest. It comes out simpler and truer: “I will not endorse what you did, but you are still a person.” Both of these things are true at the same time, and if it holds for him, the villain, the worst case that you could picture, then infer what that means, standing over your own blank scorecard. It holds for you, too. [23:09.3]

Right here, with the logic sitting clean in front of you, something in you is going to push back, because there’s a wound that this argument, this logical, rational argument hasn’t affected, and you can probably feel it. You’re thinking, That’s all very nice, but she still doesn’t love me, David.

Okay, you’re right, and I’ll give you that completely. Being worthy of love doesn’t put a single other human being under any obligation to love you. Worth and requital, returning it, right, are two different things. One is what you are. The other is what someone else does about that. You can have the first, the worth, in full, but not get the second, because that’s up to the other person, and nothing I’ve said changes any of that. The dignity is real and she can still walk away under her own free will and her right. Both are true. [24:12.8]

But notice what you just did. Listen to that claim again. “She still doesn’t love me.” You ran the whole question of your worth through one person and let her answer it. You handed her the gavel. You made her the judge, the one whose verdict decides whether you’re worth anything at all, or at least, in terms of being worthy of love. But why her?

Think about it. Out of everyone alive, you appointed this one woman to rule on a worth that, as we just proved, was never hers to grant or deny in the first place. You gave her a power over you that rationality and logic says no one has, and maybe it isn’t her. Maybe it’s further back. Maybe it’s your father or your mother, and her face is just the latest one that you’ve put in the judge’s chair. So, who told you that any of those people get to decide? [25:05.0]

Earlier than you probably remember, you appointed the first judge. More accurately, you allowed the first judge to claim that chair before you could speak in full sentences. Here’s how it likely happened, and it’s happened in a similar way to everyone. A small child has no way of knowing what he’s worth, whether he’s worthy of love. He has no scale of his own, so he reads it off the faces around him, and the first faces that he cares about, the ones that he really reads and takes in, are his parents’.

Those faces are the first mirrors that he ever looks into. He doesn’t see himself in them. He is reading and scanning for what he’s worth, reflected back, and he believes it uncritically, the way he believes the floor will hold him—and if that mirror gave back warmth only when he performed or only when he was good, or quiet, well-behaved or impressive, or easy to take care of, then he learned something beneath the words. [26:03.4]

He learned that his worth is conditional, that it comes and goes with how well he’s doing, and he has been re-auditioning ever since in front of every face that he cared about afterwards, because the first formative ones taught him that positive regard could be switched off.

Now, three things are true at the same time. The first, a judge can be wrong. The face that you read as a child could misjudge the way any mirror can be warped. A warped mirror doesn’t tell you that you are crooked. It tells you the mirror is.

The second, the worth that we proved here is the universal kind. It’s universal, the dignity that comes with being a person. No single verdict grants it and no single verdict revokes it. The judge never had the authority. He was ruling on a thing that was never in his court. [27:03.6]

This third one is the hardest one. Even if that parent turned to you tomorrow and finally said, “Yes, you are worth it. You are worthy of love. I see you and I love you,” and it still wouldn’t land for you. You would hear it through the same filter that’s been running and installed since you were small, and that filter will thin it out to almost nothing. So, the problem was never that the verdict came back “no.” The problem is the filter that every verdict passes through on its way in.

Okay, and look, maybe that parent truly did fail you. Most do, even when they’re trying their best at the time. At some point, they’re going to drop the ball. That’s actually just being human. But there are also parents that are really guilty of true abuse, okay? Real abuse, and that warmth that should have been steady ended up coming with strings attached or didn’t come at all, and those are real wounds. They’re not just some story that you tell to excuse yourself, right? I’m not trying to talk you out of it. [28:12.8]

But notice this: that failure was theirs. That coldness was theirs. Your worth, your worthiness for love, was never theirs to revoke, and they didn’t revoke it. They only convinced you that you had. I know this because I spent years convinced of the opposite.

Let me tell you real quick how I found out. For a long stretch of my life, I was trying to earn my way to being worth loving, of being significant. I didn’t have those words for it back then. Instead, what I had was a plan: become somebody, get significant enough, impressive enough, I don’t know, high-status enough to get sexual pleasure or whatever that I wanted, and then, finally, I would deserve the thing that I was really starving for, unconsciously. [29:03.1]

I ended up building a whole life on that. From the outside it might have looked like success, but from the inside, it was a man paying down a debt that he could never clear, because the harder I worked at the scorecard, the further off the finish line I moved, and then it all came apart. The details don’t matter much for this episode. What matters is where it left me.

Well over a decade ago, I was on a trip through the mountains in Northern Vietnam towards the border of China, riding these narrow mountain roads carved into limestone, drops on one side, and had decided calmly that I didn’t want to keep going, wasn’t worth it for me. Not long before that, a friend had pulled me back from a worse version of the same decision, and he had sat up watching me for nights on my couch on suicide watch. So, this wasn’t just a passing mood. I had run the math on my own worth and concluded the account was empty. [29:56.4]

What I didn’t see coming was this, that what actually finally got through to me wasn’t some argument. It was a baby. A while before all of that, a friend who’d become a single mother needed some help, and I ended up caring for her infant daughter, days at a time, then nights, and this went on for months. I had no idea what I was doing at the time. I helped feed her. I got up with her. I held her until she slept, and the first time I held her, this whole person, no longer than my forearm, at the beginning, something opened in me that I had never felt in all those years of trying to earn it—love.

Love poured out of me toward her and it asked for nothing from her. She couldn’t do a thing for me. She couldn’t make me significant. She couldn’t admire me. Instead, she could spit up on me, poop on me, and it would change nothing about the love that keeps pouring out of me for her. The regard ran one direction, out, and there was no invoice attached. [30:55.7]

I didn’t understand it at the time, until a couple years into that, it was me on those mountain roads with the beautiful gorge below me that it finally hit me and it became clear, my love for her had not been a detour from my crisis. It was the way out of it. I had been drawn to her unconsciously to meet the parts of myself that I had exiled long ago.

The unconditional positive regard I couldn’t find for myself I found flowing through me toward this child, and she was the doorway, the gateway back to the ones in me who’d never been allowed that love. That’s the whole thing, and it’s why no verdict from outside was ever going to fix me. [31:39.7]

Listen closely, because here’s the real solution—the conditions you put on your own worth live inside you. They’re the lens that every incoming love has to pass through. So, when someone finally offers you the real thing, it doesn’t reach you cleanly. It gets read by the lens first, filtered out, thinned, doubted, explained away, and then another person’s regard can’t reach in and edit those conditions. It can only get filtered out by them, which means the one place the conditions can be lifted is the place where they were originally installed. That place is you.

So, it was never a question of finding a face that could love you. It was never about whether some mother could. The question, the only one, is whether you’re worth your own love, and the love that you have been chasing in every other face, all of it, the whole exhausting search was the love of your own Higher Self, waiting right where you left it. [32:54.0]