“You wouldn’t worry about what people may think of you if you could know how seldom they do.” – Odin Miller

 

The number one deathbed regret is not having had the boldness to live the life you truly wanted.

What stopped people from living a live more true to themselves was a fear of stepping outside other people’s expectations. This is sad in itself, but it’s doubly tragic when you realise that it’s largely based on an illusion.

The “spotlight effect” is the illusion that people notice and analyse every little detail of our appearance and behaviour. In reality, we take up far less space in other people’s minds than we imagine. Most people are too busy thinking about themselves to notice or care what you do.

 

Of course, some people love and care about you. Your close friends, your spouse, your family. Most of the time anyway. For everyone else, you’re an extra in their personal movie.

Spilled your drink? Nobody cares. Went to the cinema by yourself? Nobody cares. Slight stain on your shirt? Nobody cares. You don’t need to take this on faith. Just flip the script around. Do you judge (or even give a second’s thought to) someone who has gone to the cinema by themselves? Or someone eating alone at a restaurant, or someone who trips on the sidewalk, or someone who waves at someone and doesn’t get a wave back? It might register briefly in your mind but it’s barely a blip in your consciousness. These are silly and trivial examples of course, but the same psychological truth applies on a larger scale.

Status games

The typical advice to overcome the spotlight effect is to cultivate a cool indifference to people’s opinions, to “not care what anyone thinks”.

Of course, to be a functioning adult in any society, and not a rebellious teenager, you have to care what people think. If you float through life indifferent to everyone, and your reputation, you’ll soon end up fired, dumped, in jail, institutionalised, or the town eccentric people cross the street to avoid. Reputation matters.

In fact, one of the best predictors of a person’s self-esteem and wellbeing is their “sociometric status” – the respect and admiration they get from their peers. This has a stronger impact than their socioeconomic status (their income, education, occupational prestige and so on).

The approval of strangers

With those provisos out of the way, the spirit of the advice is golden, especially for overthinkers. If you make too many life choices based on the imagined approval of some abstract, amorphous blob of strangers, then you’re holding your life hostage to a mirage. 

You would never create anything of lasting value because it would be hopelessly watered down. The song rewritten to please every playlist algorithm, the opinion softened until it means nothing at all, the novel rewritten until no one could object. All edge and originality scrubbed clean, leaving only something safe enough to bore everyone equally.

The smoke detector principle

The spotlight effect is an evolutionary hangover. For most of human history we lived in small ancestral groups (of about 150 people), relying on each other to survive. Ostracism from the group would have meant death. Our reputation was a vital possession in this world. Survival, cooperation, and mating opportunities all depended on it. It was safer to overestimate how much others noticed our behaviour than to underestimate it.

Out of this evolutionary cauldron came a mind hypersensitive to social threats. Our social self-monitoring system is like a smoke alarm that’s “biased” to go off annoyingly when the toaster mildly overdoes it.

This is partly why gratitude usually has to be trained – we’re hardwired to focus on the negatives and the potential losses. An overactive and pessimistic smoke alarm could save your life. A laid back and optimistic smoke alarm might cost you everything.

In the modern world, strangers’ opinions simply don’t matter nearly as much, but old tribal instincts persist. 

Imaginary prisons

It’s been said a billion times, and now it’s a billion and one times: You can’t please everyone and trying is a fool’s errand. People will always find something to dislike or disapprove of. A trait one person loves is a trait another person hates.

An outsized fear of criticism (and the lack of courage to be disliked) stops people from living lives that are more true to themselves. Eventually they realise something akin to the following famous saying (misattributed to everyone under the sun, from Winston Churchill to Will Rogers):

“When you’re 20, you care about what everyone thinks. When you’re 40, you stop caring what everyone thinks. And when you’re in your 60s, you realise no one was ever thinking about you in the first place.” – Unknown.

How many lives have been quietly dulled by fear of what strangers would think? How many decisions have been made not because they were right for the person, but because the deciding factor was a misguided need for approval or admiration?

Knowing about the spotlight doesn’t make it disappear, but it helps shrink it and put it in perspective.

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The spotlight effect isn’t the only trick of the mind that robs you of a happier life. Another type of is one where the spotlight is turned inward to your own mind. Fascinating research on self-awareness sheds light on the most useful – and the least useful – ways to self-reflect. You can read about it here.