Several characters in my life lied to me. They told me they don’t care what other people think. Maybe you’ve heard this? It’s very 90s teenage apathy, but lots of kids are still totally into this fashion statement. I can’t take it seriously.
Besides being an incredibly inhuman proposition as all humans, the social creatures that they are, care immensely what other humans think, the paradox within the statement screams absurdity. Why are you telling me that you don’t care what I think if you don’t care what I think? Clearly, you care enough to try to convince me that you don’t. If you don’t care what I think you wouldn’t say it, and you definitely wouldn’t say it as often as you do.
I’m not so different. Scratch that, I’m not different at all. I care what other people think but I don’t like to think that I do. So I fool myself. I recognize the paradox of saying it out loud, so I have to layer on a more sophisticated version of self-foolery. “I don’t care what other people think so much that I don’t feel the need to say it,” I tell myself.
I feel the weight of what goes on in other people’s heads even when I don’t admit it. I see one version of myself, and then I see me through their eyes, and those can be very different pictures. I tell myself that the real picture - the genuine me - is the one I see of myself, not the one I see through others. After all, I’m the closest thing to me. I am me. So of course I know the real me better than anyone else, right?
Wrong. I am the worst person in the world to judge the real me. I may have proximity as an advantage, but I am severely disadvantaged by having the incentive to self-deceive. I don’t just have skin in the game, I have all the skin in the game. My whole entirety is invested in this game. I am the easiest person in the world for me to fool because I have the most motivation to believe my own deception.
Ever play that game that shows you a zoomed-in picture and you have to guess what the object is? At some point being any closer obscures one’s ability to see. So I’d better care what people think because they’re not staring at the molecules in the strawberry, they’re staring at the strawberry. Other people view an angle of me that I am in no position to assess. I am way too close to me to see me.
Excellent post! Proximity is one of those things (which I notice many of, I might add) that is optimized somewhere in the middle: not staring at the H2O molecules inside the strawberry, not viewing it through a telescope from Mars, but rather on a scale close to the strawberry's actual size. Humans are medium-sized creatures, and need medium-sized points of view.
ReplyDelete