Some of the most insightful secular writers of our time have pointed out that a lot of our drive in life, and a lot of our angst and dysfunction, goes back to a fear that we are not accepted.

The famous playwright Arthur Miller (who wrote Death of a Salesman) stopped believing in God as a teenager. But, decades later, he said this:

I feel like I've carried around this sense of judgment. I could not escape it. I still felt like I needed to prove myself to others: to have somebody tell me that I was okay, that I was acceptable, that I was approved of.

He had replaced the God of Christmas with the "god" of audience approval. He was still looking for someone to tell him that he was accepted, and not under judgment. He never quite found it.

Madonna said this in Vanity Fair magazine:

All of my will has always been to conquer some horrible feeling of inadequacy. I'm always struggling with that fear ... My drive in life is from this horrible fear of being mediocre. And that's always pushing me, pushing me. Because even though I've become somebody, I still have to prove that I'm Somebody. My struggle has never ended and it probably never will.