You’re Not That Important

And that’s something to be happy about

Photo by Lena Bell on Unsplash

I’ve been prone to anxiety most of my life. What other people thought about me meant a lot. I would worry about the impressions I made. I felt that meeting expectations was never enough, and that I always had to surpass the performance everyone else assumed I was capable of.

Here’s the thing though, as I’ve come to realize in my ripe, wise old age of thirty years — most people don’t really care about me. And, reciprocally, I don’t really care about most other people. Nevertheless, my perception of others’ opinions of me still matters.

This cognitive dissonance, I think, is a quirk of human nature that arose from the shifting emphasis from community and teamwork in the past to individual identity that dominates our world today. I can’t imagine early humans worrying about whether their neighbor was judging their performance in life because, out of necessity, everyone had to help everyone else and the sense of identity any individual felt likely emerged from his or her fundamental role in the community, which everyone respected because it was essential.

Today’s individual autonomy likely contributes to many of the mental health problems that pervade societies around the world. The truth is, most of us don’t matter that much to other people. Population centers are…