WHY DO PEOPLE SEEK ATTENTION FROM OTHER PEOPLE?

WHY DO PEOPLE SEEK ATTENTION FROM OTHER PEOPLE?
IT IS BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE COMPLETE THEM.
WITHOUT OTHER PEOPLE YOU WOULD NOT EXIST.

By Ozodi Osuji

I automatically seek the attention of every person around me, men, women, and children, of all races. I would rather I did not do so. In the here and now world, most people mean little or nothing to me; I do not need them to survive, and they do not need me to survive. So why do I still want them to acknowledge my existence?
I would rather not bother with other people at all. But I find myself still seeking the acknowledgement of other people. So, why do I seek other people’s attention?
This afternoon I went on two hours walk. I was relatively in a good mood because I had written a four-page essay in the morning and was pleased with what I wrote. As I walked down the street, I found that I wanted the attention of the very first person I saw. This person has absolutely nothing to do with my life, so why do I obsessively seek other people’s attention?

Then, I did what I do when I wanted to transcend my overly rational explanation: I tried to keep quiet after asking the question. What dawned on my mind is that all of us seek other people’s attention because we are half of other people and need other people, our other half, to complete us.
Think about it; to be born on earth, we need a mother and father contributing their genes, so we need two or more people to exist. Without other people, we cannot and do not exist.
I seek attention because attention from other people makes me feel complete, hence exists; without attention from other people, I am not complete and do not and cannot exist.
It is delusional to think that one can be independent of other people; we are always connected to other people, we are eternally joined and cannot separate from other people, but to be in this world, we want to seem separated from other people and the whole self, aka God.
The world is designed to make us seem separated from each other, but something deep inside us seeks other people’s attention to complete us. If other people do not validate and confirm our existence, we feel like we do not exist; existence is a social, not individual thing.

The choice we have in this matter is to seek other people’s attention lovingly, by loving all people, or to deny our connection to other people and push them away from us.
If we attack people and reject them, we continue the purpose of coming to this world, to seem independent of other people, the part separating from the whole, and living alone.
Living alone makes one feel lonely and fearful, anxious, sad, angry, paranoid, manic, schizophrenic, and personality disordered.
One must find integration into the human community and nature to feel complete; love is the best way to accomplish that goal.
In an ego-separated state, we attack people and push them away; in Christ, we love people and through love feel connected to them, hence feel complete.
Much of what people do in sex is really an attempt to find union with the person one is having sex with. If you think about it, sexual intercourse is an animalistic and disgusting behavior; proud men like me would rather not engage in it, yet we feel drawn to it. Why is it so?
To have sex with the other person is to unify with her, albeit a fleeting union, with her. Helen Schucman, somewhere in her book A Course in Miracles, says that people seek union in physical closeness. However, she goes on to say that the best way to seek union with other people is not through the body (sex) but through forgiving them the wrong they did to us, and in forgiving them, forgive ourselves the wrong we did to other people.
In forgiving people, we remove the veil we placed over love and know love. At root, we are parts of love and cannot separate from it, from one another, but we contrived a universe of space, time, and matter that gives us the impression that we are separated from other people and things; we house our selves in bodies and use bodies as boundaries between us and other people and thus live seeming separate lives; bodies give us the illusions of separated lives.
Dr. Schucman’s philosophy calls for the removal of the blocks to the awareness of the love that is already in us and between us; remove the ego, do not defend your ego, and you know that you are always already connected to other people and do not need physical union to feel one with other people. She has a point.
In this piece, I am talking about seeking attention as a means of obtaining a sense of unity with other people. I assume that we need each other to feel whole; I am not talking about A Course in Miracles type abstract metaphysics.

Without the presence of other human beings, we cannot think or speak because thinking, language, and speech are social variables. We need other people to speak to and other people to stimulate our thinking. It is nonsensical to believe that one can exist alone; we are social animals and are connected and seek ways to affirm that connection.

Note

I am not talking about neurotic attention-seeking behavior. The neurotic is extremely anxious and seeks attention from his significant others and people in general, and in getting attention, reduces his anxiety. Neurotic anxiety is an exaggeration of the normal fear and anxiety that folks feel from existential aloneness and seeking existential connectedness to other people to reduce that anxiety.

From A Course in Miracles, chapter 1, Section 11. Revelation, Time, and Miracles.
1. Revelation induces a complete but temporary suspension of doubt and fear. ²It reflects the original form of communication between God and His creations, involving the extremely personal sense of creation sometimes sought in physical relationships. ³Physical closeness cannot achieve it. ⁴Miracles, however, are genuinely interpersonal and result in true closeness to others. ⁵Revelation unites you directly with God. ⁶Miracles unite you directly with your brother. ⁷Neither emanates from consciousness, but both are experienced there. ⁸Consciousness is the state that induces action, though it does not inspire it. ⁹You are free to believe what you choose, and what you do attests to what you believe.
(ACIM, T-1.II)

Ozodi Osuji
February 25, 2026