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Do You Really Care About What Other People Think Of You?

closeup photography of bare tree during daytime

I was running along the beach early last Thursday afternoon, doing some running on the “negative” surf and came to a calming thought. I wondered why I stay bothered by what other people think about me.

The words of Alcoholics Anonymous give us the answer:

“Each of us can rise, move and fall to the ground; but we cannot fall to the ground and stay down.”

At its deepest sense, A.A. is saying that no matter what – no matter where you are, how you are feeling, how much money you have, how you look – there is only one opinion that is valid and that is your own.

Why do I stay bothered by what other people think about me? Is it because I want to feel validated, fed, heard, like I’m special, as though I have no life apart from a certain clique?

You know, I think that in my case it is because I want to feel special. I guess that I think that I need to prove myself as worthy, worthy of being loved, worthy of belonging, before I can be worthwhile as a whole. And of course, I am (or so I thought in the first place!).

It’s an error in thinking and I think that there is a world of difference between validating myself and making myself feel inadequate.

Look, NOBODY has the right toicity or bigness of a person. Oh, I hear you saying ‘Ok, but you don’t understand, it’s not fair. For each and every person who has ‘it effortlessly’ with ‘no effort’, for whom no critic can find.’ Yes, that is so and then you say that they are amazing and do emulate the ‘games’ people play on them.

However, what I am getting to is that I can only do with myself what I choose to do with myself, and every time I play games with myself I’m adding an incredible amount to a critical emotional battery that is slowly fry and die. With no oxygen for the brain, I find myself absent and SWALLOWED to negative claptrap.

With the whole world blashing to its irnows and the rational carried away by false beliefs, I’m rear-ended by the whims of other people who resist validation and won’t rise and move! And NEVER reach inner peace or regain my sense of self!

By doing nothing with myself, by not listening to my inner voice and assuming that other people know more about genuine caring than I do, I’m investment in nothing! True, there are times when other people may be more intuitive than I am and some of those people are the ones I should listen to. But rest assured, the general consensus is so wrong and so ineffectual that when I attempt to follow it I am killing myself. The fidelity I’m seeing is accompanied by more self-destructive behaviours, like declining to forgive someone, abandoning hope and surrendering joy.

I believe that I can have no higher calling than to be happy, but with that there is that opted-for commitment – be happy. And, to be happy, the act of living, to do, to be is a joy. And joy itself has nothing to do with external results. To be happy then is extrinsically determined.

I hear the practice of ‘passion’ talked about as the fuel that lights the fire of self-respect, self-love and, career, whatever one wants to call it, the inner fire of happiness. It’s the inner fire of self-worth and self-love that comes from knowing that you have been backed, not thrown down. Your drive to pick yourself up after you fall and learn to chuckle and smile under the pressure imparted by others is such a great knack, that it allows the hopeless trails to remarkable trick.

I really did think I was indestructible until I heard myself being blown down. There is a message in that blow – how can I allow myself to be blown down again? How many times as a child, have you been blown into that well of panic when you were not supposed to be? How much we give away this capacity for improvement on ourselves. It’s not we have to be perfect, but we need to have faith in ourselves, and continue to give ourselves the tolerance to enjoy the esoteric pleasures of life, to grow and keep striving to stower down the stress that comes from having to hang around people who don’t want us to be happy.

It’s a sad thing to do as opposed to to the living of our own lives, but in any case, the desire by some to conform (mind you I am not a conformist by any stretch of the imagination) is that old trick of not falling as hard as we have.

man and woman sitting on table