Exiting Validation Loops

If you ever want to understand someone’s life, ask them what they’re optimizing for.

Most people don’t know. They say they want to be successful, or happy, or “make an impact,” but those are abstractions. What they’re actually optimizing for—day to day—is often more specific: getting promoted, getting published, getting likes, gaining followers. And behind these, there’s usually a deeper structure: the loop of institutional validation.

Institutional validation loops are subtle. You start by playing the game to get in—college, jobs, grants, whatever. But once inside, the game plays you. You begin to measure your value by how well you navigate the rules someone else set. The loop rewards compliance dressed as excellence. And for a while, it feels good. You win awards. Your parents are proud. You’re “on track.”

But eventually, if you’re lucky, you notice the trap. That the reward structure you’re optimizing for isn’t aligned with your own sense of meaning. You start to see the difference between being good at school and being good at life. Between being recognized and living with purpose.

Exiting that loop is scary, because institutional validation has a kind of social gravity. It tells you what counts. It offers benchmarks. It defines “legit.” When you leave, you don’t just lose the reward system…you lose the map. You have to invent your own.

This is why people who leave institutional paths often look crazy at first. They take risks that don’t compute to the people still inside. They work on ideas that seem like hobbies, or waste time building things with no obvious market. But from the outside, we’re doing something very different: we’re optimizing for truth instead of approval.

The irony is, a lot of the things we admire—real art, foundational science, great startups—don’t come from within institutional loops. They come from people who stepped out. People who realized that if you want to make something new, you can’t just play the game better. You have to play a different game entirely.

I felt the itch to leave the loop, and it took nearly 15 years to trust it. That discomfort might have been the first sign of waking up. Now, here I am, a barber in pursuit of becoming a Rolex-certified watchmaker. Life is funny that way.

If you’re feeling the itch, too, I urge you to trust it. Don’t waste time in the loop. Step out and discover who you are really meant to be and why it matters to you.