You might have noticed I’m not updating my website very often these days, and that’s because I prefer to share my thoughts and insights via Substack, where I can reach a wider community of soul-minded folk. Below is one of my posts that goes out every week, to give you a taster…
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Do we ever stop caring about what people think? This is a question that was posed in my book club recently, and it gave me cause for pause.
As a long-time devotee of personal growth, my knee-jerk reaction was to say, “yes, of course! If you work on yourself you’ll definitely become secure enough to not be influenced by outside opinions!” But if I really think about it, the answer is less concrete. What’s more, I don’t think that being concerned about what people think of us is necessarily a weakness.
This memorable scene also indicates Don does indeed care about what people think of him, but doesn’t want anyone to know it. If he genuinely didn’t care about Ginsberg’s opinion, he wouldn’t have even bothered to reply, or he would have continued talking about the business issue. His cool detachment is not a sign of emotional supremacy, it’s a disguise for his deep insecurity. (Which makes sense when you consider that his whole identity is built on a lie… but I digress.)
We all, I suspect, believe that we’ll stop caring about what everyone thinks when we’re really evolved, or perhaps just really old. It seems like a marker of growth. But I don’t think this is anything to aspire to at all. We need to care about other people – to do so is deeply connected to our primal desire for belonging. (Remember that in ancient times, being part of the tribe was vital for our survival.) What we need to do, though, is care only about what the right people think.
Shame researcher Brene Brown says she carries around a list of people whose opinions matter to her. It is, by design, a very small list. It does not include mean-girl social commentators nor mean-spirited people on Facebook. It includes only a small circle of loved ones whom she knows she can count on to build her up but – crucially – also call her out on her own BS.
“When we stop caring about what people think, we lose our capacity for connection,” Brene says. “When we become defined by what people think, we lose our willingness to be vulnerable. If we dismiss all the criticism, we lose out on important feedback, but if we subject ourselves to the hatefulness, our spirits gets crushed. It's a tightrope, shame resilience is the balance bar, and the safety net below is the one or two people in our lives who can help us reality-check the criticism and cynicism.”
In short, caring about what people think, if practised with discernment, can be a sign of healthy emotional investment. So instead of asking whether we’ll ever stop caring about what people think, maybe the better question to ask is when we’ll stop caring about what random people think and learn to focus only on the people who matter.
Unless you’re a high-key asshole, I’d imagine you have a circle of people in your life who care about you. These people matter. Of course, you shouldn’t violate your own boundaries to please them, but if you hurt their feelings or dismiss them, whether inadvertently or by design, you should definitely care about that. Because the quality of those relationships will suffer if you do not.
Equally, you shouldn’t abandon yourself to make other people happy, but if you are making a choice that will end badly, it’s important to have trusted people who can point this out, and you need to be able to hear that feedback without feeling personally attacked (and this is not easy!). Because those people can probably see things that you are too close to the matter to see – and they’re bringing it to your attention because they genuinely care about you. They might be wrong, but they might also be right, and navigating those tricky conversations is part of what defines healthy relationships. The thoughts and opinions of the people I love is enormously valuable to me, and can often be very illuminating. It won’t be the deciding factor in how I approach decisions – that will always be determined by my intuition – but it absolutely does matter.
Of course, if you’re caring about the feedback from people who roundly criticise or denigrate you by extension of their own insecurity – think: jealousy, control – they probably shouldn’t be on your list in the first place.
So no, I don’t think I’ll ever stop caring about what (certain) people think. And I hope I never do.
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