Why do we care so much about how other people judge us?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ส.ค. 2024
- This video explores the connection between other people's judgments of us, and our own sense of self-worth. Here's a table of contents (with time-stamps) for the material in this video:
1:00 - Three dimensions of variability that make the question difficult
2:32 - How the question changes as we mature
5:09 - The importance of accumulating life-experience over time
6:30 - How to convince ourselves of our own self-worth
8:09 - Negotiating the tension between pleasing others and being true to ourselves
9:40 - The essential role of wisdom
12:13 - The issue of balance... and the seasons of our experience
14:36 - Courage and the price of wisdom: What's the alternative?
Here's link to my video on wisdom and education (which I mention in this video):
• Wisdom and Education
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'have the concrete experiences that prove to yourself, on what you are capable of and what you are not '- its the way to escape unnecessary pressure of social judgement - something I 'needed' to hear - Yea you answered my question.
People often advise on pointlessness of worrying about others opinions ..but mare awareness doesn't work
Thanks for the video
.
I would posit that people of normal competence have no good reason to care more than slightly, or even at all, what others think of them.
Well, I'm happy that I wasn't completely misconstruing your question, and that I ended up saying something that turned out to have actual relevance to your life. That makes me happy. Yeah... so, we can certainly become avid collectors of those sorts of life-experiences, and I think that there's definitely a value to doing so. And I agree with you about the limitations of mere awareness. I'd say that awareness (and especially self-awareness ) is usually an important step along the way. But on the other hand, it's usually not enough. Thanks again for the cool suggestion. I think that my next video might be an extension of some of the stuff in this one. It's working title (in my noggin) is: Judgment vs. Understanding. Take care. Eric D.
@@ericdodson2644 after I asked you the question - I attended workshop - where I, for the first time, met like minded people to whom I truly felt equal with , and its just the beginning - and this is possibly the perfect possible time to I have watched this video - might be it was purely matter of coincidence /luck - but yes this is the fact
waiting for your next video
@@naufilmanasiya1368 Well, I think that a lot of the time, what we think of as coincidence or luck is actually life's way of trying to draw our attention toward something... usually because it has something to offer us in our larger journeys. Anyhow, I'm glad that you had such a wonderful experience at that workshop. It's a real blessing to share the road with kindred spirits, and to discover our spiritual families along the way. Eric D.
@@ericdodson2644 yeah
Wow, can you speak like this ad lib? You're incredibly eloquent and the imagery you use is so powerful and vivid.
Wow this is the best video ever!!!
This is a vast subject and all that you've said is stimulating and thoughtful. Allow me to add this: humans are naturally sensitized to the reactions of others because our lives depend on it from birth. Our nervous system develops only with inputs from the environment. Our conscience develops only through interaction with our social environs. The political/cultural system enforces compliance through terrorism. People will say we live in a free country where anyone can speak and act freely. These are the same people who never do anything original or take any appreciable risk. Obedience is freedom. There are long term costs to living under a regime of terror.
Yeah, it certainly is a vast subject, and I've definitely omitted many important elements of it (most notably the quid pro quo element of caring about other people's judgments). But part of the reason why I wanted to make this video is precisely because it seems so challenging. And actually, I was wondering if I could even do it justice. I guess that at this point in my life, I enjoy trying to do things that I'm not sure I can even do. Anyhow, I hope that you're healing and starting to feel better... take care of yourself. And, as always, thanks for watching and commenting. Gratitude. Eric D.
I loved this "No matter what you do or who you are, you will always be hated".
Also In my experience realizing the fact that "What others think ultimately makes no difference in your life." helps.
I think a reason for most people swaying between extremes is because it is easier. Removing some, if not most, of the nuance and complexity of life will alleviate anxiety and existential dread for a while. Either I should care about what others think or I shouldn't.
As I struggle with personal development and trying to live a healthy lifestyle, one of my biggest problems to balance is sugar. It is either I eat sugar or I don't, and for me, I chose to never eat it. While I both fear and love having existential battles every time I pass the ice cream aisle in the supermarket, I realize that the answer might have some shades of grey.
For now, I will continue to be a black and white fool that aims for the white-seems better than the opposite-and I will let life adjust my trajectory accordingly.
Another great video Eric, thank you!
Have you done a video on self-deception yet? That might be one of the biggest problems when one seeks wisdom. How to know if, for example, caring about the opinions of others is coming from a place of insecurity or a place of understanding?
Excellent question. Jordan Peterson has discussed this some.
Wow, thanks, Struggler, for that idea (i.e., self-deception)! Gratitude! I agree with what you're saying about over-simplification. Yes, it's a great temptation for us, mostly because it's hard to tolerate the paradoxical and subtle complexity of many things in this life. Of course, on the other hand, we're also pretty good at over-complicating things sometimes. The trick, it seems, is to treat life with the right balance between simplicity and complexity. And I'd say that the same basic logic applies to the "shades of gray" issue. Sometimes life is actually asking us to see things in stark, binary terms, and sometimes it's not. And wisdom is mostly about being able to discern the difference, and then to live accordingly. So, ultimately there's nothing inherently evil or wrong about black-and-white logic, just as there's nothing inherently evil or wrong about "shades of gray" logic. It's mostly a question of what life is asking of us at any particular moment. Anyhow, it's good to "hear" your "voice" again... Thanks again for watching and commenting. Eric D.
@@ericdodson2644 Thanks for the reply Eric. I further agree with you. I perceived dichotomies to be "wrong" and in order to oppose them I created another dichotomy of "black and white" and "shades of grey", haha. Maybe it is as you say, both are just tools used in order to grow in an universe that will forever elude human understanding.
Cheers!
@@ericdodson2644 Congratulations for going meta and realizing that seeing everything as grey and nuanced can be a form If black and white thinking itself. A lot of people really miss this, which then leads them to abstain from and even condemn clear judgements when a situation actually merits it. Seeing the grey complexity, nuance and contingency of things after all not the same as assuming a mushy relativistic picture which equates and blends everything, because the whole point of dropping pre-conceived notions in the first place, is to be able to figure out those which best fit the situation at hand.
@@gabrielfrostbrand2754 Ha ha... "Going meta..." Maybe that should be the title of my autobiography. Yeah, I agree with what you're saying here... especially the part at the end where you're saying that they situation at-hand is the best determinant of whether it's right to think more terms of black-and-white logic, or more in terms of "shades of gray." Anyhow, thanks for taking the time to watch & comment. Eric D.
Deeply insightful video as usual. Also, I'd be interested in your thoughts about the tension between psychotherapy's encouragement of developing a healthy sense of self and Buddhism's claim that our clinging to the sense of self is exactly what makes us so miserable. It seems that both perspectives get at something deeply true about life (although maybe one more than the other). Love to know what you think!
Hi TROD. Good to hear from you again, especially with such an interesting question. My own sense of it is that the two are actually more related than they might seem to be at first. That's because part of the paradox here is that it actually take a healthy sense of self in order first to realize that clinging tenaciously to the self is a source of great misery, and then to let go of it eventually. Basically, it takes a strong self to get past a strong self. On the other hand, if we don't have a fairly well-developed self, we'll probably be too encumbered with various insecurities and worries to be able to realize any of that in the first place. Instead, we'll probably be spending practically all of our time & energy on trying to fortify the shaky bastions of who we think we are, and then getting what we think is commensurate with that... and all of the logic of Buddhism will sound like utter gibberish to our ears. Anyhow, thanks for the cool question... and also for taking the time to watch... Eric D.
Wow, that clarified a lot for me. I guess it’s like knowing the rules before you break them. We must cultivate the ego-self before we realize that there’s nothing there. Thanks for the thoughtful answer, and looking forward to your next video!
God I love this. I took that last part as a clip to replay.
Wow, I'm honored. And it makes me happy that I was able to contribute something worthwhile to your life. Thanks for telling me that, Rob. Eric D.
I might quit smoking by the time this playlist ends
It's Valentine's week. Do one on the meaning of love.
Very understandable and down to earth .
This content is something else.
Great video, thanks
Thanks. And thanks for taking the time to watch, and to comment, too. Eric D.
Cheers Eric
Dependance is weakness am i right!. Lovely and funny how wonderful biology has made us engage in such behaivours
You can certainly see dependency as a form of weakness. But then again, pretty much every human being is weak in one way or another. And the simple reality of our mortality means that we're all weak in an ultimate and very biological sense -- not even strong enough to sustain our own continuity for much more than a century or so. And so, perhaps another way of seeing dependency would be that it's simply another dimension of our inevitable, human fragility.
Attachment bonding and attachment security, for example.
Wonderful poetry Eric, I really appreciate your courage to be artful in your thinking and speaking, to venture far beyond the common pretense of rigid academic formality, beyond the clinical desert into the jungles of the soul. And I strongly recommend the extremely carefully informed and judicious use of LSD in small doses (getting scrambled is not the goal here), as a learning tool that is often capable of helping the mind and soul break free, to see at once the constellations of one's personal real lived meaning that assemble into the structure of wisdom, and to incorporate that metaperspective and the clear fact of its existence into one's daily perspective. In short, I think LSD can be a powerful tool for building wisdom.
I found your approach to the subject matter interesting, because my automatic response was to approach the problem from what might well be thought of as the opposite side to what you chose. I think we see a good case here where nature has evolved and woven into our brains complex abstract "programmable" information machines, capable of grappling with our live's experiences rationally, and emerging knowledge and wisdom ("emerging" used as a verb, to cause to emerge new emergent information/knowledge structures). I would say your approach spoke to generally working within that kind of intellectual information-space, where we learn things and assemble wisdom from the meanings of our experiences. I'll call it the intellectual side of things for short.
On the other hand, nature also forged into our brains many deep animal behaviors, and my first response to the question was essentially to speak to our biology: *"We care how other people judge us in large part because we're hyper-social animals who deal far more in instinct driven emotions and innate reasoning faculties than in learned logic and rational thought, and we evolved depending on our ability to communicate and receive signals of those emotions, because our ancestors did not yet have the ability to speak our mental conditions to each other, yet required in-depth communication to survive in the social ways that they did. Hence we are wired to both intuitively perceive and to care in our very bones what other people think of us, because that is fundamentally how we social monkeys understand each other and get through life together."*
I will add that while we can say with good confidence that my description is true to some degree, we must also admit that we have barely scratched the surface of a useful understanding of such animal mechanisms and how they operate in our minds and in our lives. The study of cognitive biases gives us measured little peeks into the machine. Informally, some people may be fairly good at spotting likely realistic candidates of such animal behaviors while watching people in action, but this is all highly speculative. It still doesn't constitute anything like a comprehensive understanding of what must be a radically complex set of animal behavioral phenomena, which complexity is only radically complicated again by being intimately interconnected with the highly flexible intellectual aspects of our brains, that we are all so intimately familiar with in our typically wordy conscious awareness as babbling monkeys.
And recognizing the speculative nature of our fledgling understanding of our animal behavior, I note that your intellectual / philosophical thinking on this topic is a very good and necessary complement to exploring the biological side of it, because you provide numerous examples where intellectual processes offer real explanatory power to aspects of life that would be easy to oversimplify, dismiss and just outright miss, when exploring the possibilities of what and how might be our human animal behavior. My best personal take on this subject is that there are always many elements or aspects of both our animal behavior AND our intellectual processes at play, ALWAYS BOTH, and that we're extremely lucky when we manage to untangle with any clarity what contributions are made by either side, and how together they combine to be the dance of our lives.
So it's death or disease, and life gets it, like a pin of a scale is life and it just inclines towards either a disease that is offered by the world (like addictions) or death, but the phase between that thing is your will or life to drive it and feel the ride until you either cath a disease or death
Your videos are wholesome!
It doesn't necessarily matter but you remind me of my friend David. He was smart and a nice guy Even though he was a Mormon
Your videos are fantastic! I just discovered them and plan to watch them all. I have to say though, I thought you were wearing a band shirt in this video because you were maybe going to comment on metalhead culture....how we form tribes based on other people's artwork/achievements and create a sense of identity out of that. I mean, there's no denying that Nightwish is awesome, but I'd love to hear your thoughts about how metalhead culture/band shirt "identity" plays into this topic of defining self worth and other people's judgements of us.
"kaleidoscopic clockwork" :)
14:59
Guess I'm just an Internet troll asking random stuff to a person who wants to spend his time preciously!
A video in praise of sociopaths.
Actually, what I'm saying about sociopathy is that it's an extreme example of what happens when we fail to care about other people's judgments when wisdom would warrant our doing so... which of course is a pointed criticism of sociopaths, not a way of praising them.
@@ericdodson2644
It just seems to me that sociopathy is the ugly, red-headed stepchild of the pop psychology world. A convenient scapegoat to hang all the world's problems on.
But non-sociopaths commit atrocities every day, and I doubt sociopaths are as scary as popular culture makes them out to be. Exploring the possibility as a future video idea.
@@quintessenceSL Hmm.... yeah, like the idea... something like, "The atrocities of everyday life." Or maybe, "Everyday monstrosity." Thanks for the idea, quintessence... I'll put it on the list!
Can sociopaths be reformed? Possibly. I ran across a book awhile back by a sociopath no less telling what it was like. I wish I could remember the name of it. Possibly they are born without some caring gene yet that doesn’t mean they’re all going to be criminals.