What would your life be like if you did not care what other people thought of you? If you were completely independent of people’s opinions, good or bad, and would go about your day without so much as a single self-conscious decision. It would be wonderful freedom, of course. You would feel free to do what you wanted, and have a clarity of mind that comes with not being constantly preoccupied with thinking about the judgment of those around you.
Looking at our current state of affairs, it would seem that the culture we humans have created for ourselves is driven by “what other people think,” the tension between the desire for approval and the fear of disapproval. Businesses, families, friendships, sports, politics; everything is, if not completely driven by this tension, at the very least heavily influenced by it. And this we can see very clearly when looking for it, how much our motivation for doing things arises in the concern for what the world thinks. It is a feeling that your very existence relies on other people’s judgment of you; that you exist only as a mental image in other people’s minds. Which is mostly unconscious, of course, because when we drag it up to the surface and into the light we can see clearly just how insane it really is.
