Who cares what people think?
*raises hand*
Earlier this week, a newsletter fell into my inbox from the remarkable Rayne Fisher-Quann, a thinker and cultural critic of piercing intellect and shockingly few years on this earth. I felt challenged by it immediately, and not just for those reasons. Called “no good alone,” it talks about a particular brand—and I use that word deliberately—of au courant therapy-speak on the internet, the kind that encourages you to close in, protect yourself, cut off relationships that “no longer serve you,” and discover, I suppose, the greatest love of all. (Yourself, I mean. Or possibly your therapist.) Fisher-Quann ends her first paragraph with this (emphasis mine): “Seductively, it whispers that you ‘don’t owe anyone anything.’ It glamourizes — and moralizes — a life spent alone.”
Now of course a few weeks ago I put out a three-part series about boundary-setting that starts with the premise, “Nobody owes anybody anything.” I felt a little called out, even though I completely did not mean that people should have no connections to others, or that eliminating people from your life instead of working out the messy bits of being in relationship was a good idea. Still. I found myself wanting first to jump in and say something like this, to, you know, defend myself from the horror of contributing to this capitalist nightmare of a mental health narrative. But even more, I wanted to promote this piece all over the place, because it’s wonderful. So here it is:
What’s funny is that a few weeks ago, I started a draft for later (I have, like, fifteen of them in my sidebar, it’s ridiculous) that’s related to this idea, the misguided notion that the way to “healing” is away from everyone else, free of pesky conflicts, messy feelings, interdependence, or indeed any need for other people at all. It started from a question I find a lot of people ask themselves when they’re frustrated with living in community. And it goes like this:
“Why do I care so much about what other people think?”
This question goes right along with the weird narrative that I feel like I grew up with in the 80s and 90s, but which then metastasized into the Instagram-horror Fisher-Quann talks about in her essay. Its tenets are “Be Yourself,” “Don’t Worry What Other People Think,” and of course the famous, “You Can’t Love Someone Else Until You Love Yourself.”
Never mind how impossible all of those messages seemed to be as a child and young adult. “Be myself.” Okay, who’s that, exactly? And how do I…be…that? The third one is a poison I’ve had to suck out of my own soul like a snake bite, and then help suck it out of other people, too, so they could make room for the love that was busy healing them whether they found they could “love themselves” or not. (Okay, now this idea is in danger of becoming its own newsletter…)
One of the most remarkable pleasures that love has to offer, in fact, is the feeling of meeting someone who is scarred and beat-up and bruised, too emotional or not emotional enough or oscillating wildly between the two, and offering to love them enough to help them get better (and, of course, to have them do the same to you).
But the second—don’t worry about what other people think— is such a twisted curse of an idea. Of course I hear it most often (and said it most often, in younger years) from people who wish very badly to Be Themselves (or whatever I, or they, thought they had figured out that meant), and found that they were afraid to do it because of what others would think.
Gen X in particular, of which I am a part, grew up with an intense narrative of not just individualism, but what I might call “fuck-you individualism.” We were so pissed off, so abandoned, so “over it” that we were going to be “ourselves” whatever it took, whoever we had to run over in the process. It was the era of punk rock, then post-punk, then irony poisoning in literature, then hipsters and their quaintly and casually offensive adult cartoons.
I lived through all of it. I even loved some of those cartoons. Then millennials started dominating the media landscape, and now the zoomers are close behind. The former cultivated a more wholesome and sensitive approach to things, which had a huge role in softening me over the years, and making me believe that maybe people weren’t entirely awful. Now the zoomers are here with the new Dada, but also with a sharpness and realness and messiness that I deeply appreciate: the sensitivity of millennial culture meets the razor blade of Gen X, with an extra dose of cheerful nihilism.
And now when I hear the question my answer is different. Why do you care so much what people think? I don’t know, maybe because you’re not a psychopath? Which is really to say: because you’re a human being, which means you are a communal being, a caring being, someone who innately understands that we are interconnected and cannot survive without each other?
When relationships are made difficult by traumas, anxieties, and neuroses — and when those issues are triggered as you navigate complicated relationships — being alone really can feel a lot like being cured. Relationships with other complex, flawed people are beautiful and transformative and fulfilling, but they’re also inherently maddening, infuriating, hurtful, stressful, and yes, triggering.
The imprecation to not care what others think is a selfish notion, yet another arm of the capitalist octopus that is reliably squeezing us to death. “Toughen up!” “Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps!” “Stop caring so much what others think!” “Be an isolated, armored, unfeeling automaton who doesn’t need anyone and only cares about work!” Okay, they don’t literally say that last one, but it’s heavily implied.
Of course you care what other people think: it’s what we do. The goal is not, as so much conventional wisdom had it when I was growing up, to not care what people think. The goal—if you want to be a fully realized human, to find and walk your true path, to not feel when you come to the end of it all that you have wasted your life—is to find out who truly matters to you, and check in periodically as to what they, specifically, must think of you.
What people are really generally asking, when they wonder why they care so much about what other people think, is at least one of the following:
Why do I find it so difficult to go after what I truly want?
Why am I so sure that if I reveal my true self, people will hate me?
Why do I get terrified when I imagine acting outside the dictates of people I don’t even know?
All of which, when I’m feeling particularly well-resourced, bring me back to the question: why do I imagine that these people, whoever they are, are thinking about me at all?
Because here’s the truth of the matter: most of the time, the people we’re so worried about often don’t care about us, or even think about us much. Often the voices of that deadly “they” are internal voices, learned from our upbringings. It’s your mother you’re worried about disappointing, your grade-school crush you’re worried about impressing, your high-school English teacher you’re terrified to embarrass yourself in front of.
As adults, in this capitalist machine we’re a part of, we re-attach to figures—or even imagined figures—who either don’t actually matter, don’t have our best interests at heart, or don’t even really know we exist. What would the CEO think of me? What makes you think he does think of you? (It’s nearly always a “he.”)
Who matters to you, really? Whose approval do you seek? Whose love do you wish to preserve? Whose eyes make your day when they look into yours? Who makes you want to get up in the morning? Who inspires you?
Who cares what you think of them?
Very thought provoking! I’ve always felt a kind of inner recoil at most of the social media call to arms to block or cut off anyone from our lives without first taking into consideration what we may have contributed to the issue at hand.
Of course, I’m an advocate for removing anyone who causes us not to feel safe, etc. But so often this behavior feeds into blaming others entirely and not doing the inner work to recognize, admit, and apologize when we’ve caused harm ourselves--and to otherwise show up better in relationships as “communal beings” (as you said).
This was an excellent piece. Thanks for asking the hard questions.