I see in you a person who's constantly in search of others' praise. You win all the praise you seek when you do activity X with is both "totally awesome" and a way of martyring yourself for the ungrateful.

I see in myself the very exact thing, quite often. It's shameful. I'm ashamed of it and want to fix it.

I will ambush a bunch of people with my in-your-face, I'm in full-on strut-around-the-pen foghorn leghorn mode. Look at me! And then I'll relax and digest some of that: yeeah. that was awesome, that thing you just did. So very admirable are you!

I do that! I do that! It's at best a waste of others' time.

I definitely have not fixed this. I do it still. I am starting to feel a flush of shame when I do it, which I think is a very human thing to feel. I think that's supposed to be there, and further peacocking will not make the situation better. It's only a morphine-rich salve that you rub on your ego to make the "yuck" go away.

The thing is, a whole persona built on that is doomed to fail. Sometimes they fail because everyone stops paying attention to them. Sometimes it stops because the pea-cock-er just kicks off and fades into irrelevant history of the universe. "This arrangement of particles happened once!" Whooptie Doo!

I'd guess that a tiny, tiny percentage of them actually stop and self-examine long enough to realize, "this does no one any good". There's some hot wire in there. If you touch it, you get zapped! Bad boy! Wetted your bed again, did you! So some things for you have to be protected from any careful examination. These things just are true, unlike other things, which are open to criticism.

You can go through life treating others like objects and disappear entirely into your own ego, constantly checking your figurative hair in the mirror, or you can humble yourself and try to play the game well.

Eventually you have to wrench around reality itself to conform to your eternal right-ness. Dissent shall get shouted down. "I'm just so angry at you because you're so wrong, dang it! WRONG!"

After all, so many others have wronged you by not praising you in either quality or quantity. They don't deserve you in their life.