How To Not Care What People Think About You
A Guide
I find few lies more laughable than the line “I don’t care what people think about me.”
That line itself is a signal you care what people think. It’s an unconscious hope that someone will smile and say, “Hey, listen, I just love how you don’t care what anyone thinks,” as she blushes, touches your shoulder, and twists her hair. You hear this and feel a surge of happy chemicals in your brain. You think, “It is pretty damn cool I don't care what anyone thinks about me. Finally, someone recognizes.”
But more often than not, this “I don’t care what anyone thinks" posturing comes off like Michael Scott from The Office. You puff your chest, lift your chin, and say it with pride yet you sound like Scott when he said: “do I need to be liked? Absolutely not. I like to be liked. I enjoy being liked. I have to be liked, but it's not like this compulsive need to be liked.”
That statement is absurd, yet it is human, all too human.
The human brain is a social brain.1 There is no escaping this aspect of our nature.
Consider the father of your father’s father and so on, all the way back into the foggy mists of deep time.2 You may not have much in common with those going back hundreds of thousands of years. They may not appreciate the subtle humor of The Office, for example.
But there is something everyone in the chain of reproduction that led to you had in common. They cared what other people thought.
The evolutionary explanation is simple: For a long time, if people in your tribe did not like you, things would turn bad. Like, real bad.
If they thought you sucked at hunting, if they didn’t trust you because of your eccentric beliefs, if they hated your stand-up comedy performance in the cave, guess what? You’re banished from the tribe, buddy. You wake up one day and realize everyone in your hunter-gatherer squad ditched you. So now wolves are going to attack you. Wolves are going to attack you as you are cold, scared, and alone in the forest.
For a long time, what other people thought about you was inseparable from your survival.
But as you may have noticed, this is not quite the case anymore. Modern society is much safer. If you bomb doing stand-up comedy, you drive home. You make some buttery pasta, take a steaming shower, and fall asleep under your puffy comforter. People thinking ill of you is much less costly nowadays. But on your drive home, you still felt as the early human with a poor sense of humor felt when he woke up that fateful day.
You must realize, then, that the first step to actually not caring what people think is recognizing the way your psyche is programmed. I’m only being slightly tongue-in-cheek when I say your psyche is programmed is to feel that social disapproval equals wolves eating your cold lonely body.
It’s important to accept this because then you’re being real. You’re not deceiving yourself about our nature. You’re acknowledging our deeply ingrained sociality and evolved emotional tendencies.
The good news is that there are many logical ways to get past these evolved emotional tendencies. Like considering the spotlight effect. Like considering the infinity of outer space.3 Like considering the nature of time. Yes, time. What more do you need to know? Say what you need to say and do what you want to do. Before it is too late.
But the simplest way—and most important way—is to seek truth.
If you’re legitimately trying to figure out what is going on in this bizarre world in which we find ourselves, you naturally won’t care as much what people think. Because you're on a mission. The mission of seeking truth. A mission that requires intense studying, focus, and curiosity. With it, you lose the brain space to worry much about how people perceive you. You don’t even have the time.4
With all that in mind, let us conclude with our nuanced version of “I don’t care what people think about me.” Here it is: “I recognize that I am a hyper-social creature hardwired to care what others think about me. While accounting for this strong evolved emotional tendency, I choose to only care what certain people think about me for the right reasons. This is the most intelligent thing to do, because most people are people I don’t want to be like in character, thought, or lifestyle anyway, therefore it does not make logical sense to care what they think.5 Additionally, I choose not to care too much even about the people whose opinion I do consciously value think about me. My reason for this is that what I think about myself—whether I truly respect myself or not—is always more important. Therefore, I would never let the opinions of others stop me from trusting my gut, taking calculated risks, or following my intuition and curiosity. Above all, I seek truth and recognize that my time on this planet is desperately short. Thanks to all these practical principles, it becomes easy to not care what other people think about me.”
If only he could have read this article, that poor Michael Scott.
Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire (2021) by Luke Burgis has many valuable insights on the human psyche.
The Ape That Understood The Universe (2018) by Steve Stuart-Williams has many valuable insights on evolutionary psychology.
Why does considering the infinity of outer space help you not care as much what people think about you? I don’t know. It just does.
Naval Podcast - “Groups Search for Consensus, Individuals Search for Truth.“
There was an ancient joke that when the masses were praising a wise man, he asked what he had done wrong.
The wolves that used to eat us if we were scared and alone have now evolved into fat guys (or Chinese bots) living in their parents basement stirring things up on X (formerly known as twitter).
Fire jeff