It's a great "mind-bown" insight story, but just not true. People do judge each other and have opinions and put them in little mental boxes all the time. Impressions matter and can make or break your life. For example, anyone who used to be fat and then loses weight can attest that it matters what others think of you and they do think things. It's comfortable and uplifting and "wise" to say that nobody cares but they do. People assess their relative status and success all the time by comparing with others.
Now this doesn't mean you have to go crazy trying to satisfy everyone because you can't. People want contradictory things from you. You need to have your own moral or other principles to keep on track of a certain path in the face of rejection. But if everyone thinks you're an asshole, the answer isn't to just ignore everyone.
I think a better lesson is that it's better to have some haters and some who really like you than to have everyone be lukewarm about you and ignore you. The haters are no big issue unless they are really determined enemies, and the upside of the truly appreciative people is bigger. You can only get true deep connections if you accept the risk that some people won't like you. As long as you try to please everyone you won't really please anyone. See the story of the miller and his son.
>It's a great "mind-blown" insight story, but just not true. People do judge each other and have opinions and put them in little mental boxes all the time
Yes, we all understand that people stereotype. I think you're getting bogged down in the details and missing the overall point, which is far more generalized. The above story is meant to be short and clever, and to do so it glosses over a few things that you're meant to pick up contextually. The point it's trying to make is this:
20 year olds tend to think people are watching, judging, and remembering their every move and are concerned about it
40 year olds still tend to think they're being watched and judged, but don't care
60 year olds realize that everyone is too busy thinking about their own situation to really pay much attention to others beyond superficial stereotyping, and that unless you affect someone deeply with your presentation, they won't likely cling to previous judgements of you.
For sure. You are the protagonist of your own movie but a supporting role in other people's or even just an extra.
If you think people think about you all the time, then you benefit from the message of this story about the 20, 40, 60 year olds.
But don't take it too literally. It matters how you present yourself and what impressions you leave.
The good news is, you have to be really really bad to leave a long lasting bad impression (except if you personally screw someone over or cheat against them even in minor ways - people tend to remember that) and failed but honest attempts to get ahead don't tend to compound, but success does compound. Meaning it's worth playing a numbers game and diversifying your potential outcomes. A good impression can lead to a lot of value for years to come, a bad impression often simply means you can try again elsewhere with added experience.
Yeah I think part of it is the attitude/illusion that the stakes used to be were lower earlier in life. Like, "oh how cute, they are sweating so much about petty things like teenage love and fitting in cliques, if only they knew how much it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things"
But it does matter a lot in those years. Teens are correct in their assessment that fitting in is important. At least in some group. Doesn't have to be the "popular kids". As you grow up, achievements and status become more manifest, it's not so much about pretenses. Things are now more cemented and move slower. You have this or that profession with a certain status. You live in a good or a bad neighborhood, move in fancy or non fancy circles, can afford traveling or not, and so on. By contrast in your teens and early adulthood, all you have is how you perform in social interaction. Later you're like "maybe I'm awkward but I'm a surgeon and you're a fast food worker".
And when you're 60, the status fights are mostly over, you're living off of what you achieved earlier. So you think it was useless because now you have little to lose in future potential. You mostly have your familial and friendship situation cemented for the rest of your life, usually no more worry about who will marry you, whether you can be promoted high, whether your kids turn out good etc. Typically 60+ year olds don't have to prove themselves in the moment any more, they just ride on the past.
And this observation does have empirical backing and is known as the “Spotlight Effect”. The more careful definition of it (which I agree is not the point of the pithy story) is “People tend to overestimate the degree to which others notice them and their failings.”
(Caveat that I haven’t looked into how deeply this has survived the psych and social psych replication crisis)
I really do not find that a man starts to care less about what others think of him as he ages at all.
Rather, I find it is that adults rule the conformance games that adolescents and teenagers play are “silly” all the while partaking in their own, which are of course not silly, but rather how one should conform and teenagers are wrong for not conforming to those ideals.
Consider that the parent who berates his child for smoking marihuana to be part of his clique will the next day consume alcohol at his office party, as to not be left out.
Which connects up, in the sense that you stereotypically care less in a way that you consciously notice because you gradually internalize the culture strongly enough for it to just feel like “the way things are”, and then in old age you impute upon yourself (and/or society imputes upon you) a position of sufficient immunity that you can keep saying “the kids are wrong” even as they're about to displace you.
> Consider that the parent who berates his child for smoking marihuana to be part of his clique will the next day consume alcohol at his office party, as to not be left out.
I don't think this is good example. I dont want my kids to drink alcohol yet. When I do drink alcohol, it is really not so that "I am not left out". Pretty much all office parties I have been at had bunch of people who were not drinking in them.
And marihuana has added effect of being illegal in many places.
And if your kid is smoking it so that the kid fits, it absolutely makes sense to treat it as issue. Regardless of whether you sometimes drink alcohol at office party.
> When you're forty, you don't care what people think.
I assure you that 40 years old do care about what people think. Partly, because people are simply wired that way, that is why we are social animals instead of solitary ones.
But the other is that it matters. What people think about you influences how they treat you, what they tell you and what chances they give you. It makes difference between being listened to and being ignored.
I mostly understand this, but it doesn't go deep enough.
Sure, I don't worry about what people consciously think of me, like "Does he think I'm incompetent because of that mistake I made? Does she like the way I'm dressed?". I'm more concerned with what they're not thinking, or rather the biases they may be unconsciously harboring about myself or others. Look at this [1], from a study on the relation of criminal sentences and attractiveness:
>Physical Attractiveness had a significant influence on judges sentencing. The more unattractive the criminal, the higher the sentence. Or conversely, the more attractive the criminal, the lower the sentence. The results of three studies show a minimum increase of 119.25% and a maximum increase of 304.88%.
That's pretty disturbing to me. It what other ways am I being treated and being shaped by the unconscious biases of others? Say Jim gets promoted into management and made leader of a project instead of me, because he's a "better fit" for the role. For what reasons is he a "better fit"? Imagine if the unconscious mind could speak. It might say something like this:
"Jim was made tribe leader because of his robust musculature. His square jaw arouses me to no end - such an indicator of higher testosterone, strength, and disease resistance will serve our offspring well. Broad-shouldered Jim can probably throw a spear hard enough to pierce fifty men. A warrior of his magnitude will surely lead us to victory against our ancestral foe, the Google tribe."
Okay, that's fine, but what does that have to do with shipping a profitable software product?
"Square. Jaw."
Completely absurd. We can never completely relieve ourselves of these kinds of biases, and of politics. But I believe we can mitigate it to a meaningful degree. We can have meaningful standards and metrics for evaluating people for certain roles. Horowitz talks about this kind of politics-mitigation in at least one chapter in his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
But what if it's a self fulfilling bias in the sense that he actually will be a better leader precisely because that little unconscious man in people's minds will say those kinds of things to them and they will actually be more likely to follow his lead than if you put a weakling in his place who is technically better versed in software.
As in, society is biased to pick the square-jaw guy for leadership, because society knows that society follows square-jaw guys in leader roles better.
>they will actually be more likely to follow his lead
Good leadership is less about convincing people to follow you than it is about being able to lead people in the right direction. David Koresh was highly charismatic and convinced a lot of people to follow him, but I doubt anyone would consider him a "good leader".
Or perhaps it's more about synchronizing, like a musical orchestra under a conductor's lead. Whichever piece they play, it matters most that they play the same piece to the same beat and pulse, instead of everyone trying to play their own favorite melody.
Often among roughly equally talented people what matters is to have a clear vision, any vision and to orient a whole group towards the same direction. It's really hard to judge in advance who is better in long term vision and strategy. Experts don't have a great track record in this and CEOs also don't seem to have a great sense of direction (ie their track record quickly regresses to the mean).
Leadership is to a large degree about crafting a convincing narrative and fostering acting in unison. "To make people long for the sea" etc.
Where it matters, people and organizations are able to overcome bias. We got a square-jaw man to the moon, but the rocket itself was not designed by a square-jaw men.
I experienced this first hand on our high school reunion party. Zero people remembered my most awkward or embarrassing moments - only I did. The only thing they cared about was themselves. I was totally stunned. They had a completely different picture of me.
Then it damned on me: I couldn't really remember any other awkward nor embarrassing moments by others. All I cared about was I.
It doesn't matter whether they remember you decades later. What matters is whether they shun you or include you in the moment. Perhaps they don't really even notice you enough to care if you're awkward or they just know you're so awkward and "other" that there's no point in keeping track of yet another awkward moment of yours. It doesn't mean their perceptions don't influence your life.
Now this doesn't mean you have to go crazy trying to satisfy everyone because you can't. People want contradictory things from you. You need to have your own moral or other principles to keep on track of a certain path in the face of rejection. But if everyone thinks you're an asshole, the answer isn't to just ignore everyone.
I think a better lesson is that it's better to have some haters and some who really like you than to have everyone be lukewarm about you and ignore you. The haters are no big issue unless they are really determined enemies, and the upside of the truly appreciative people is bigger. You can only get true deep connections if you accept the risk that some people won't like you. As long as you try to please everyone you won't really please anyone. See the story of the miller and his son.