Nobody cares, and that's ok

When was the last time you fretted and worried about someone noticing something about you? That stain on your top you picked up at breakfast? That thing you said to your friend over the weekend? That thing you didn't say to your friend over the weekend?

The truth is we do it all the time. Whether it's something we posted online, something we wore, something we said, or even somewhere we went; there's a little voice (that can be VERY loud sometimes) saying to you, "people have noticed what you are doing, and they're not happy about it."

Well, I have something to tell you. The good news is, nobody cares. The bad news is, nobody cares.

Nobody gives a damn 🤷

It's a bit of a conundrum, this idea of how much, or how little people care. On the one hand, we want to be noticed, we want to have an impact on people's lives. But at the same time, we also want to be free to wear that top you've always loved but never had the courage to. What to do?

Well, according to psychologists, the key is to stop thinking about it. Our brains have a finite capacity to concentrate on things, meaning all the time we spend worrying about the opinions of other people, the less time we spend worrying about ourselves.  

In 1999 cognitive psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris created a test called The Invisible Gorilla to demonstrate this quirk of how our minds work.

In the video (you can watch it here) there is a group of people throwing a basketball around. Your job was to count how many times the basketball is passed. When they carried out this experiment for the first time, three-quarters of people didn't see the great hulking gorilla walking through the scene.

"Although people do still try to rationalize why they missed the gorilla, it's hard to explain such a failure of awareness without confronting the possibility that we are aware of far less of our world than we think," Simons said of the experiment. The pair were so convinced they'd uncovered how awful we are at noticing things, Simons and Chabris built another test. You can take it here.

No eyed dear 👀

At this very moment, your attention is focused on the words you are reading. While you are looking at this sentence, are you giving any attention to the color of the wall of the room you are in? Are you aware of the position that your feet are in? Did you notice I'd deliberately misspelt the sub-heading? Until prompted, it's highly unlikely that you were paying attention to either of those things.

The point is, what we focus on is important, and focusing on other people isn't very important. I'll refer you to the good people at The School of Life who have been grappling with this very same idea. They sum it up a lot better than I can:

"Our everyday lack of care occurs for a perfectly sane and forgivable reason: we need to spend most 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 will just be very little time left to reflect on the suddenly high-pitched voice of a customer or the outfit of a colleague."

This isn't to say we should pull the shutters down on our world and carry out the rest of our lives in a blithely ambivalent bubble. Oh no. If you see someone fall over, help them up. If someone is wearing a dashing shade of puce in the office (or whatever form of co-working environment will exist after the pandemic) do feel free to pay them a compliment.

The point is, the opinions of others, and our obsession with them is holding us back. Holding us back from starting a new business, asking someone out on a date, asking a question on a conference call. a

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 success (something which, as we now know, no one will much notice or care about anyway).

Ok, where can I learn more? 📚

• A quick video on the phenomenon of "inattentional blindness" and how bad we are at noticing.
• A nice little primer on why we stop noticing the world around us.
• Psychologist Elizabeth Styles' weighty tome on the psychology of attention.