Living for Approval vs Living With Purpose

Ndapandula stood outside the graduation hall holding a law degree she had worked six exhausting years to earn, and instead of the relief she expected, she felt an emptiness so heavy it startled her.

Her father, Tate Amutenya, beamed beside her, telling every relative within earshot that his daughter was now an advocate, a title he had wanted for her since she was a small girl trailing him to the magistrate's court where he worked as a clerk. Her mother, Meme Selma, hugged her tightly and whispered that she had made the whole family proud.

Ndapandula smiled, accepted the congratulations, and said nothing about the fact that she had spent every semester of law school quietly dreading the coursework, drawn instead to the community radio station where she volunteered on weekends, writing scripts and interviewing farmers about drought conditions.

She had built an entire career on her father's approval, and standing there in her graduation gown, she realised she had never once asked herself what she actually wanted.

Living for approval means shaping your choices, your career, your relationships, even your personality, around what will earn nods of pride from the people whose opinions matter most to you. Living with purpose means making those same choices based on what genuinely aligns with who you are, even when that path looks messier or less impressive from the outside.

The two aren't always in conflict, and Ndapandula's story there was a version of her life where law and radio coexisted, where she simply hadn't been given permission, by herself or her family, to ask what she truly wanted rather than what would make her father's chest swell with pride.

Six months after graduation, Ndapandula sat her father down in their family kitchen, the same kitchen where she used to do homework while he quizzed her on legal terminology, and told him she wanted to leave the law firm where she'd just started and pursue journalism full time.

Tate Amutenya went quiet for a long stretch, staring at his tea, and Ndapandula braced herself for disappointment.

Instead, he asked her something she hadn't expected: "Have you been unhappy this whole time, and I didn't notice?"

That cracked something open between them, because it revealed that his pride had been about wanting to see her succeed, and he had simply assumed law was the only measure of that success available to her.

This is a crucial distinction for parents to sit with: approval-seeking in children often grows not from parental cruelty, but from children absorbing a narrow definition of success and mistaking it for the only acceptable path.

When children sense that love and pride are conditional on specific achievements, whether academic, financial, or social, they learn to perform rather than to explore who they actually are.

Meme Selma later admitted that she had once told Ndapandula, as a teenager, that a law degree would make the family "respected," a comment she hadn't thought twice about at the time but one Ndapandula had carried as gospel for years afterwards.

Parents rarely intend to trap their children in narrow definitions of worth, but casual comments about respectability, comparison to cousins or neighbours' children, and visible disappointment over unconventional choices all teach children the same lesson: that love is something to be earned through specific accomplishments rather than something already secured by simply being their child.

For young adults and singles building their own lives and relationships, the challenge looks slightly different but shares the same root.

Ndapandula's close friend, Tangeni, had spent years choosing romantic partners based almost entirely on what his mother would approve of, dating women who fit a very specific profile his family found acceptable, regardless of whether he felt genuinely connected to them.

It took a difficult breakup and months of reflection afterwards for Tangeni to realise he had never actually asked himself what he wanted in a partner, only what would generate approving nods at family gatherings.

This pattern extends far beyond career choices into the very relationships people build, the friends they keep, and the values they claim as their own, often without ever pausing to check whether those values were genuinely chosen or simply inherited under pressure.

The difference between these two ways of living becomes clearest in how people respond to setbacks.

Someone living for approval experiences failure as a personal catastrophe, because failure threatens the very love and belonging they believe they've earned through performance. Someone living with purpose experiences failure as information, disappointing but survivable, because their sense of worth was never tied to the outcome in the first place.

Ndapandula noticed this shift in herself directly within her first year at the radio station, when a documentary project she poured months into was rejected by a funding body.

The old version of her would have spiralled into shame, convinced she had failed her family. The version of her building a life on purpose simply felt disappointed, made adjustments, and tried again, because her sense of self no longer depended entirely on external validation.

Closing this gap requires effort from both directions.

Parents can practice separating pride from control, celebrating effort and character rather than only prestigious outcomes, and asking children directly what they want rather than assuming shared goals.

Children and young adults, meanwhile, can practice noticing when a choice is being made from genuine desire versus a need for approval, asking themselves honestly whether they would still want this path if no one were watching or judging the outcome.

Ndapandula and her father eventually built something neither expected: a relationship where his pride no longer depended on her profession, and her choices no longer depended on his applause.

That shift happened gradually, through repeated honesty, and it remains, to this day, the thing she is proudest of building.