we tend to begin our lives with a deeply unrepresentative experience that of being surrounded by people who care to an extraordinary extent about us we look up from the dreams and confusions of early infancy and may find a smiling face or two observing us with the utmost tenderness and concern they watch us as a rivulet of saliva leaks slowly from the corner of our mouth and rushed to wipe it away as if dabbing at a precious canvas then indulgently stroked the fine soft hairs on our delicate scalps they declare us close to supernatural when at
last we succeed in pulling our first smile the applause rings for days when we take our initial steps giggle totter fall and bravely try to resume our progress it isn't just at home at school the best teachers encouraged us when we find something difficult they understand we might be shy they're keen to detect and encourage the early tentative signs of our particular talents then of course we grow up and we're inducted into a horrific reality we exist in a world of astonishing indifference to almost everything we are think say or do we might be in
late adolescence when the point really hits home we might be in a bedsit at university or wandering the streets of the city at night on our own when it occurs to us with full force how negligible a thing we are in the widest scheme no one in the crowds we pass knows anything about us our welfare is of no concern to them they jostle against us on the pavements and treat us as a mere impediment to their progress with tiny against the towers and brightly lit flashing advertising hoardings we might die and no one would
even notice it maybe a stern truth but we make it all the more so by focusing only on its darkest dimensions we remain grief-stricken by how invisible we are yet we cease to put this bracing thought to its proper philosophical purpose that of rescuing us from another problem which is Naurang at us all the while an ongoing and highly corrosive sense of self-consciousness in another side of our minds we haven't accepted the indifference of others at all in fact we know and suffer intensely from just how much as we feel sure others are thinking of
us we are extremely worried about how high-pitched and odd our voice sounded when we asked the waiter for a bit more milk we're certain that the sales attendant noticed how out of shape our stomach is the people in the restaurant where we're eating alone are undoubtedly spending considerable time wondering why we have no friends at work they're still dwelling on that slightly stupid thing we said last month about the u.s. sales strategy a person we went to bed with four years ago is to this day thinking ill of us in some powerful but undefined way
we don't really have any evidence for this and yet it can feel like an emotional certainty it can feel intuitively clear that our foolishness and less-than-impressive sides are being noted and dwelt on all the time by everyone at line every way in which we depart from what the world considers to be normal upstanding and dignified has been registered by the widest constituency to liberate us from this kind of punitive story we may need to conduct a deliberately artificial thought exercise we may have to set ourselves the challenge of examining how long we spend on the
foolishness or just existence of other people how we think and feel about other people we don't particularly know is perhaps the best guide to the workings of the average human imagination to pretty much the rest of the world we are the very same sort of strangers or casual acquaintances as we know and deal with in our own daily experience and now here the results can be surprising imagine that we are in an elevator standing next to someone on our way to the 20th floor they think they know that we disapprove of their choice of jacket
they think they know that we should have picked another one and that they look silly and pinched in this one but in reality we haven't noticed the jacket in fact we haven't noticed they were born or that one day they're gonna die we're just worrying about how our partner responded when we mentioned our mothers told to them last night imagine it's well on the way into the last bit of a two-hour meeting that we sense that a colleague's hair really is a bit different today though we can't quite put a finger on how even though
they spent a small fortune on their cut and thought intensely about the wisdom of visiting a new salon in other words when we take our own minds as a guide we get a far more accurate and far less oppressive vision of what's likely to be going on in the heads of other people when they encounter us which is in the nicest way not very much this kind of news is both very bad and strangely good on the one hand no one may notice when we die on the other that also sure not to have noticed
when we spill some orange juice down our front or do our hair the wrong way it's not that we or they are horrible a lack of caring isn't absolute if we really saw a stranger in trouble in the water we would dive in when a friend is in tears we are sympathetic it's just that for the most part we need to filter our everyday lack of care occurs for a perfectly sane and forgivable reason we need to spend most of our waking energies on navigating and doing justice to our own intimate concerns once we've had
to think about our relationship our career our finances our health our close relatives our offspring our upcoming holidays our friends and the state of our household there's just going to be very little time left to reflect on the suddenly high-pitched voice of a customer or the outfit of a colleague we are owed the upside of an otherwise tragic insight we shouldn't just suffer from the indifference of other people we should where it matters properly reciprocate it we shouldn't merely suffer from being ignored we should accept the liberation implicit the fact that we are being so
and then in turn we should embark more courageously on those situations and adventures where a touch of foolishness is always going to be a possibility like the start of a new business a romantic invitation or ask you a question at a conference we may fail but we can believe with new certainty that almost no one will give a damn if we do an idea that may above anything else help to contribute to our future success something which as we now know no one's going to much notice or care about anyway at the school of life
we believe that confidence is a skill we can all learn click now to learn more you
