Striving to Be Good in Others' Eyes

  I sometimes wonder where my fear of 'being disliked' comes from, and when it might become a chronic problem. Here, I am reminded of a documentary I watched on tv many years ago about the singer Jim Morrison, in the years shortly before he died. He was living in Paris at the time and was described as incredibly lonely and desperate to make friends toward the end of his life. As the narrator had explained it in this particular documentary, Morrison was so used to being famous as a singer that living an obscure life without the trappings of fame had become a kind of trap to him. Is it possible, I wonder, that too much 'respectability' can do a similar thing to people, to make them terribly afraid of the slightest inkling of disapproval from others?
   I think that approval and disapproval are similar to a kind of human currency. Once a person learns how to gain approval from others and avoid disapproval, they become like children stuck on a merry-go-round: each point forward impels them to keep going forward at all costs, indefinitely into the unknown. Most things that people strive for tend to be like this, and that's a problem that even 'good karma' brings about: people become addicted to a certain kind of good as a way of affirming their own existence and self-worth. At that point, the striving to become good is no longer heartfelt but can become a very sham need to impress others with one's own good(s). The problem isn't about the good itself, but rather the striving to look good in others eyes, which can create a false sense of security from harm.
   I have a feeling that this whole striving comes from an exponential sort of 'law' of doing good, which I might put something like: the more we succeed in scoring the trappings of good virtues, the harder it appears to maintain the image we build of ourselves, leading to a sense of disdain for virtue, followed by the need to look good as a way to temporarily rest from the hardships of doing good. That sounds complicated, right? I am talking about a vicious cycle that might start with an intrinsic love of the good and then end in a false illusion of having to strive for the good and maintain it in ourselves in some way.
   It's almost as though the good starts as a shining star of inspiration, but then someone comes along and tells you that you have to swallow the star in order to become immortal.  Something that belongs naturally to the sky and to everyone as a birthright is changed demonically into a kind of scarce commodity that a few people hoard up through acquisitive behavior, leaving others to suffer from a lack of it. When did the good become like this?