Have you ever wondered how much time do we spend thinking about what others think about us? But how much time do we spend thinking about others? How are these two answers affecting us? In my opinion, sometimes it affects us more than it should.
Here are some words that got stuck in my mind:
“I am not what I think I am. I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.” – Charles Horton Cooley
Let it sink for a moment… I think Mr. Cooley is trying to say that we think about the opinions of others so much that we’re behaving according to our beliefs about their beliefs about us. That’s why I think we’re losing ourselves in time and that’s why we need to spend so much time to remember who we truly are. Why are we doing this? We’re doing it to be accepted by the others. We’re doing it to feel that we’re part of some groups. We’re doing it because we’re afraid about what they might think about us if we were behaving differently.
The problem with this is that whenever we want to do something, we will think about first and then we’ll think about us. The fear about what others might think is killing so many dreams and the worst part is that it’s not even true. Yes, maybe you’ll stop your daily routine to think about what X did and even judge a little, but you’ll let it go by the end of the day. That’s what most of us do. We are not giving a crap about what the others are doing, but we’re spending so much time about what others might think about us. So if we know that we are not caring about what others do, why is it so hard to understand that same thing applies to us? Obviously, the others don’t care about what we’re doing just as we don’t care about what they’re doing.
The answer to this why is fear. And it’s not even the fear of failing, it’s more likely the fear of what the others might think about us failing. We’re afraid that they might think we’re some worthless pieces of sh*t that we can’t achieve anything. They don’t give a crap and the ones that do, they’ll say that they new it all along that whatever we were trying to do it couldn’t work, and if we do succeed they’ll say that we were lucky and as you see, none of the opinion would be true.
Both failing and succeeding require lots of work so no luck would be involved. In addition, they can’t see the future so they couldn’t know. Since the others can’t have an accurate opinion, wouldn’t be better to stop carrying about their opinion? Wouldn’t be better to put ourselves first since we are the ones living our own life and also because the others don’t give a f*ck?
You know what’s funny? We worry about what the others think about us and the others worry about what we think about them and the reality is that no one worries about anyone. Isn’t that just too much time useless spent?
What do you think? Is this worrying about what others think about us any useful?