When the Lack of "Likes" Makes You Anxious: How Zen's "Emptiness" Frees You From the Hunger for Approval

That Feeling of Re-Opening the App Again and Again

After you post something to social media, you intended to put the phone down and do something else, yet somehow, a little while later, you find yourself opening the app again. You check the number of likes, and if it's lower than expected, the heart sinks just slightly. You pull-to-refresh several times in case a comment came in. Numbers you didn't care about at all before posting now behave, the moment you press send, like a measuring stick for your worth.

This looks like a uniquely modern suffering, but from a Zen perspective, its root is the same as a very old movement of the heart that humanity has always faced: the habit of trying to confirm one's existence through the evaluation of others. Zen shines the light of "emptiness" on this very habit.

Does the Number of Likes Really Represent You?

A core teaching of Zen, found in the Heart Sutra, is shiki soku ze ku: "form is exactly emptiness." What has form does not, in itself, have fixed substance. We tend to mistake the count of likes, followers, or shares for an objective number representing our worth. But through Zen's eyes, none of these has any fixed substance.

The same post, released on a Monday morning, may reach five people; on a Wednesday evening, five hundred. When the algorithm shifts, an account that was popular yesterday becomes invisible today. Which means "the like count" is nothing more than a momentary number that happens to be displayed today, on top of countless coincidences and other people's circumstances. To believe in it as proof of your worth is like measuring the height of a wave to decide your own height for the day.

The Hunger for Approval Is Not "Bad"

An important premise: the wish to be seen and approved is natural to being human. Zen does not deny it. The problem is when we stake the very certainty of our existence on whether approval comes or not. On days someone reacts, you feel valuable; on days reactions are thin, your existence itself feels thinned out. That extreme swing wears the heart down.

Zen's "emptiness" is not the cold idea that approval doesn't matter. It is the teaching that with or without approval, the root of the existence called "you" does not change. No matter how high or low the wave is, the ocean itself remains the ocean. Your existence is, already, somewhere apart from the like count.

Practice 1: Before Posting, Ask Once "Whose Sake Is This For?"

Now into the concrete practices. The first is a brief inner question right before pressing post: "Am I posting because I genuinely want to share this? Or because I want to be approved by someone?"

The honest answer is usually "both." That is fine. What matters is to post while being aware that it is both. Someone who knows, "I am sending this with both a wish to share and a wish to be approved," gets hurt differently when reactions are thin. Instead of "I wasn't approved," they can see, "oh, the wish to be approved didn't get answered first this time," and separate their feeling from the result.

Practice 2: "After Posting, Close That App for Five Minutes"

The second is more bodily. The instant you press post, close the screen and decide not to return to that app for at least five minutes. Thirty if you can. In the meantime, do something else. Drink a glass of water slowly. Step out and look at the sky. Wash a few dishes. Read just one page of a paper book.

Five minutes sounds easy, but it is harder than expected. The dopamine of anticipation pulls the hand back toward the app. Yet when you can hold off for those five minutes, something interesting happens: when you finally return, you can see the number a little more like "someone else's affair." Watching the screen continuously after posting hard-wires the number to your heart. Inserting just a five-minute gap loosens that wiring slightly. There was a night I posted something small, became suddenly sleepy, and fell asleep without checking the screen. The next morning when I opened the app, I noticed I could see the number more calmly than usual. A whole night had been inserted as space between my heart and the number.

Practice 3: Once a Day, Look at "Something That Has No Number"

The third is broader. Our days are surrounded by numbers. Steps, calories, unread counts, likes, followers, unopened mails, salary, savings, age, weight. Without realizing it, we carry a forest of measuring sticks evaluating us simultaneously.

So, just once a day, deliberately set aside time to look at "something that cannot be replaced by a number." The movement of the clouds outside the window. The angle of a leaf on a houseplant. The way steam rises from a coffee. The back of someone walking down the street. The color of evening light. None of these can be turned into "how many" or "how high." Looking at them for five minutes is, in Zen terms, training in "releasing all quantification." It is a moment to remind a heart almost crushed under numbers, "there is also a world that is not made of numbers, and it is right here."

"Emptiness" Is Not "Nothingness"—It Is Freedom

Reading this far, you may wonder if Zen's emptiness is a cold idea like "none of it matters." It is the opposite. Emptiness is the teaching that liberates us from being whipped around by numbers, by seeing through that none of those numbers—likes, followers—are fixed substances in themselves.

There may be days with many likes. Days with few. On both kinds of days, you remain you. You eat your meals, look up at the sky, and have the capacity to do a small kindness for someone. The numbers on social media are like the weather of a particular instant. There are sunny days and rainy days. To bind your worth to each one will exhaust the heart.

A Step Starting Today—Mute Notifications, Look Up at the Ceiling Once

Let me suggest one small step you can begin today. If you haven't yet, mute your social media notifications. If you can't mute them all, just the like notifications will do. Each notification quietly drags the heart back into the world of numbers. Stopping that alone makes the time you spend "as yourself" within a day astonishingly longer.

And, just before sleep, face the screen down, and look up vaguely at the ceiling for a moment. There are no likes there. No shares. No comments. There is you, the ceiling, and your breath. And still, you are, properly, here. What Zen's emptiness points at is that very simple fact. Whatever the numbers of tomorrow's post may be, that fact does not waver.

It is said that Torei Zenji, a disciple of Hakuin, once told a student, "a mirror does not choose what to reflect." Whatever comes—good or bad—it reflects as it is, and lets it disappear as it goes. The mirror does not bind that to "its own worth." A social-media feed is, by nature, the same kind of thing. The reactions flowing through today—receive them as they come, and let them go as they leave. Stop grasping each one and pasting it onto your chest like a certificate of your value. The longer that small letting-go accumulates, the more deeply the heart settles into ease. After all, your existence has been sitting, quietly, in a place that requires no one's approval all along.