February Vacation Post 6: Being Noticed and Unnoticed

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:00 Tom: On being seen and being invisible. You could be forgiven for believing, as most of us do at some point, hell at many points in our lives, that the world is watching you. Turn on any video or movie and the world is very neatly divided into two kinds of actors. The main characters, and the extras. The main characters are the ones who drive the story, the ones whose lives, whose minute and trivial trials and tribulations, whose sufferings and joys infuse the story with heart and movement. The extras are, of course, forgettable. They clap in the background, they dine at the tables adjacent to the action. Extras are in the frame, true, but two seconds after the scene shifts, you've forgotten them.

0:00:47 Tom: I'm going to tell you something here that may sound harsh, but is nonetheless true, and if you really digest it, should offer you tremendous comfort.

0:00:56 Tom: You are an extra. Nearly everyone, most of the time, is an extra right now. At this very moment, there are but a tiny handful of people in the world thinking about you. Now, maybe that sounds harsh, but it's not. Here's what I mean. Just because you are the leading men in the story of your own lives doesn't mean that yours is the story that's being told. Your story is mostly the story you tell to yourself. The audience of your story is much more limited than you will intuitively believe. Most of the hours of most of your life, the primary audience for the story of you is just you.

0:01:42 Tom: What this means is that most of the time, even if someone sees you, they are not invested. They are not forming opinions of you or incorporating you into their story. There's a name for this and it's called the spotlight effect. And it is the mistaken belief that you are being noticed more than you are. It goes a little further than that. More importantly than the fact that you were not being noticed, you were not being remembered. Think about it like this. How much of your time do you think about yourself? About how you feel, your plans, your worries, your joys? And how much time, honestly, do you spend thinking about people you don't know? Know, about people who happened to just be somewhere that you happened to be at.

0:02:30 Tom: We think about the people that are in our lives, that's certain, but we think generally about how they interact with us, how we interact with them. We think about their impact on our lives and our impact on theirs. We think about our conflicts and our loves and our obligations, about what we want from people and what we want to give to others. And if that's how we think, that's how everyone else is thinking. Which means that just like you don't remember the extras in your story, no one remembers you when your role in their life is fleeting, when you are the extra. And what this means is that more often than not, you are effectively socially invisible. Now, there are some very notable exceptions to this.

0:03:16 Tom: The first are places where the social order is well-defined by virtue of age and the context of your interactions. So here, think about when you're at school, where putting hundreds of kids in the same place all day creates a need for the development of cliques and where the requirements of finding romantic partners creates pressure to catch the attention of a romantic interest. Think too about the workplace, where unless you work from home, you will need to be visible to your co-workers, bosses, clients, etc, etc. Your co-workers, clients, bosses, they will see you. Here's the gist, boys. In your everyday life, you will need to make choices about your level of visibility. When you're just going about your day-to-day life, you can rest reasonably well assured that you are, for most everyone around you, an extra.

0:04:07 Tom: It doesn't matter over much if you slip and fall or if you spill a little coffee on your shirt. If anyone notices, they will not remember it. To prove this, try to remember when that happened to someone that you didn't know. Chances are good that unless the situation was extreme, you don't remember. You are, for most of the people in the world, someone they don't know, and someone they are not paying attention to and not forming memories about. This invisibility means that you can go about your life more secure and more confident and more self-contained. You are, to most people, most of the time, background noise. Revel in the freedom and confidence that being invisible really gives you.

0:04:52 Tom: For most of the people that you meet, again, you are the extra. Now, just as importantly, there are times when you need to know that you are very much not invisible. Know when you are not the extra and adjust your expectations for yourself, for those situations where you are not a big character, for when you have a central part in someone else's story. There are times you want to be seen, and when you will be seen and remembered, even if you don't want to. There also are times when you need to be. Know the circumstances of your life well enough to know when being socially invisible is desirable, favorable and when being visible and making impressions on others is required of you. When you are required to be visible, be conscious of your visibility, of what your appearance says about you.

0:05:43 Tom: Make sure that you are in control of those impressions by controlling your manner of dress, your hygiene, your style, your manners. Tailoring the way you act to be perceived in the best possible light is not dishonest. It is a social requirement that all successful people match, whether it is in the workplace or in a social or romantic setting. Be yourself, but always try to be the best version of yourself. I think I can summarize what I mean like this. There is far too much social anxiety in the world, and most of your life, if you just remember a couple of simple things, I think you'll be much happier dealing with it. No one is watching you anywhere nearly as closely as you are. Keep track of yourself and your image, know your audience, and rest assured that everyone is just as scared as you.