Hungry for Attention?

Is Richard alone in his cravings? I’d vote no, everybody wants attention and some go to extreme lengths to get it. Using Richard as an example, he killed a cat and accidentally set his house on fire, and looking back on it he says he was just a little boy looking for attention. Of course his thoughts were subconscious; he didn’t light the curtains on fire thinking “now mom and dad will really pay attention to me!” he lit them on fire to see them burn; it’s almost as if he’s justifying his actions now. But then there are those who consciously do things for attention, like that one friend that we all have on Facebook that has a new profile picture of just themselves every other day, the one who posts a million statuses, the one who randomly IMs you and says “cmnt the pix! lolz, xox<3*!”, gag. They want the attention in the form of a wallpost or comment or even just a ‘Like’, they want it consciously.

Although attention fuels most of our actions, I think it’s important to differentiate between actions that are truly subconsciously attention driven and those that are using the need for attention as a cop out. But there isn’t a set formula for setting the two apart, it definitely depends on the person and situation. Personally, I think you can’t say that “oh, I acted out as a child because my parents were divorced”, or “because my sister got all the attention” or something of that sort, because when there are a million reasons telling you to do something wrong, there is still that one, simple reason telling you not to.

I think I overcomplicated this, shocker, but to put it simply, everyone needs attention, and if you’re not getting the right kind of attention you may go searching for the wrong kind.