We are a social species. The evolution of life led to cooperative organisms because the life forms that worked to deliberately help each other and not hurt them were more likely to survive. But you can't just have organisms behave like that randomly; for the behavior to occur regularly, there has to be an incentive to do it.
Enter social emotions that increase the complexity of the core emotions such as happiness and sadness. The core emotions follow a typical stimulus -> response pattern, such as eating food and feeling satiated or being hit by a rock and feeling pain. But once organisms began cooperating, the emotions involved in relationships became important to forming and keeping social bonds.
Social emotions include contempt, shame, embarrassment, love, hatred, revenge, and other feelings you get in relation to other people. The emotions exist to form and keep bonds with others. When you're born, your parents have loving emotions toward you to incentivize them to take care of you. You have loving emotions toward them to trust them to take care of you and to stay close to them so you don't wander off when you get old enough to crawl. The emotions help you bond with others, keep you together, and also ensure that you are able to maintain relationships through conflict and misbehavior.
The point of this post is that, given that background on how emotions evolved, there is an interesting intersection between emotions and meaning when it comes to relationships. As stated in other posts on how emotions work, emotions are a response to a combination of three inputs: your desires, your beliefs, and your experiences. So if you want a person to like you, you believe that they like you, and they give you a hug (an indication that they like you), you will be happy and like that person. If you thought they liked you and wanted them to like you but they punched you, you would feel betrayed. This comes into play with meaning because meaning in life is simply the purpose or significance of a person, place, or thing to you. When something has meaning to you, you care about it. And that's where the intersection takes place: when someone cares about you, you feel like you matter (because, based on the fact that they're giving their attention to you, you do).
And so, as a social species, that's one of our core desires: for someone to care about them. That drive is pulling double-duty in the sense that it's both a simple innate drive to be social and a means through which one can feel good about oneself or feel important/significant. While this is great for human survival because it encourages pro-social behavior, it has interesting quirks.
The first one is that it causes people to do strange things to get noticed. The most common is to exhibit novel behavior. Examples include streaking in a crowded area, performing a bizarre act for entertainment purposes, and telling fantastic stories or funny jokes. These activities are meant to gain the attention and, often, approval of others. In many cases, such as social media posts, the idea is to express ideas or points that will affect or influence other people—a sign that your existence matters in the universe.
It's this two-fold benefit of caring that makes others' attention so powerful. You crave it because humans have needed it for thousands and thousands of years to survive, but it also contributes to your sense of meaning in life. As such, you might find yourself doing a lot to get others to pay attention to you or to care that you wouldn't otherwise do if it didn't.
Now, it is true that there are exceptions: some people don't have social emotions and so don't care so much about acting in ways that lead to others' approval; some people due to age, experience, or personality don't care about what others think or just want to be left alone. But outside of the rare exceptions caused by nature or nurture, this need for someone's attention or care is universal.
So what can you do with this knowledge? A few things. You can make sure that you find healthy, constructive ways to behave that attracts attention rather than resorting to negative actions that attract attention. Yes, this is difficult because the novel and threatening are the fastest, most effective ways to attract attention due to humans' evolved threat-monitoring brains, but it can also be harmful to your relationships and reputation to resort to those methods. You can also combine this knowledge with the innate human ethic of reciprocity to show that you care as a means to receive care from others. Yes, you risk being rejected, but there's no reward in life without risk. Finally, you can find means through which you can get the care and attention you need by choosing your associations. By finding social connections with similar interests, finding potential mates who find you attractive, and engaging in business transactions with people who will be willing to trade for that attention, you accumulate a set of sources of care and attention for when you need them.
There's a reason why there are many songs about needing love, from "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love" by Solomon Burke to "Everybody Needs Somebody Sometimes" by Dean Martin: because everyone needs someone to care about them. And everyone needs someone or something to care about because that's how people assign meaning to things and find/feel meaning in their lives. So if you want or need love, care, or attention in your life, you can always get it by finding other people who are looking to exchange/share or who are looking to be entertained. Just be careful—attention and care are not things that you should take lightly, take for granted, or misuse. These two aspects of a person can strongly influence them just as you craving them can influence you, so try to get what you need in the most ethical, mutually beneficial way possible.