Reasons Not to Worry What Others Think

You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing. It’s generally a good idea to care about other people’s opinions to some degree, as they could contain some worthwhile insight.

But focusing on them too much to the point that we spend hours and hours dwelling on what people might think can leave us in agony. It’s not only potentially harmful but also unnecessary. This video explains why based on several concepts from psychology and philosophy.

(1) You’re giving away your power. The moment we let our joy depend on the validation by other people, we give away the power over our emotional states. With this attitude, it feels exhilarating when people fancy us. But when they don’t, we become sad and angry. Especially now, in the age of social media, many have made other people’s approval their focal point in life.

Positive attention, then, becomes a requirement for happiness, which entirely depends on the whims of those we try to impress. It can even become an addiction. Many of the people that we try to impress we don’t even know. Moreover, many of them have ever-changing opinions, often without substance, or are downright ignorant. So why would we waste our time trying to make them like us? Chances are, we don’t even like them?

Stoic philosopher Seneca said about this, and I quote: “How mad is he who leaves the lecture-room in a happy frame of mind simply because of applause from the ignorant! Why do you take pleasure in being praised by men whom you yourself cannot praise?”

(2) It’s beyond your control. The problem with worry is that our minds try to control the uncontrollable. People’s opinions are ultimately not up to us, so there isn’t much we can do to stop them from disliking us. Now, this doesn’t mean that we cannot influence what other people think.

As a variation to the dichotomy of control (a concept from Stoicism), professor of philosophy and author William B. Irvine proposed the trichotomy of control. The dichotomy of control as presented by Epictetus makes a distinction between the things that are within our control and things that aren’t. The trichotomy of control, however, offers three categories: Things over which we have complete control. Things over which we have no control at all. And things over which we have some but not complete control.

Opinions of other people fall into the second and third categories. In some cases, there’s nothing we can do about what others think. For example, we cannot change what someone said to us in the past, and we cannot change our parents’ disapproval of us when they’re dead. But we can influence people in the present by our words and actions.

But even though our behavior could be incredibly influential, the results are still not up to us. Therefore, worrying about what’s happening in the brains of others is futile, and we’re better off focusing on our own actions.

(3) It’s a reflection of them - not you. Often, how people react to us directly reflects themselves and how they feel. When we incur hostility, indifference, or sadness as a response to our actions or even to our very presence, it may not always be personal. Moreover, these people could be expressing parts of their unconscious without realizing it.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called this phenomenon ‘projection’. Jung believed that people tend to repress unwanted aspects of themselves into the unconscious parts of the mind, which form, what he called, the Shadow. A consequence is that we unconsciously recognize in others what we recognize in ourselves. As we dislike in others what we dislike in ourselves, an adverse emotional reaction follows.

Psychology Today describes projection as follows, and I quote: “Unconscious discomfort can lead people to attribute unacceptable feelings or impulses to someone else to avoid confronting them. Projection allows the difficult trait to be addressed without the individual fully recognizing it in themselves.”