The Fear of Spotlight: Setting Our Values

Spotlight is not for everyone. The spotlight mindset is good for maintaining adaptive behavior. But, in some moments, we would like to just turn off the spotlight, have privacy, and just be ourselves. Hiding in shadows, minding our own business. Watching our favorite unpopular joke comedians and our controversial favorite actors without being judged by anyone else.

I've seen many people feel that they are being watched by their surroundings, resulting in awkward and nervous behavior. For some people, repeating "don't mess up" might actually mess everything up.

We are being watched. Even if we don't want to. When you break a glass in a room, the whole room might be full of CCTV recording your silliness, even if they are not looking. The thoughts of people framing you as a silly person might build up overthinking situations and disturb your focus and activities to live the life.

Standing in a spotlight pushes us to predict how other people see, think, and feel about us. These are actually just our hypotheses, which sometimes build up and confuse us about how to react to them. A judge can be made based on many factors, both externally (such as observed reality) and internally (such as someone's education and normative background). Predicting how someone judges us is possible, but it is not a fact. It might be easier to predict people's reactions based on universal and general norms, such as predicting people will look at you when you start playing a song and dancing in the middle of the room. But in a small context, such as whether your dance is good or not, it is quite complex.

But do we really need to care about what everyone thinks about us in our daily lives?

"The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F" by Mark Manson taught me a lot about this phenomenon. Especially, correcting our mindset about being a freaking superstar model in every single move that we make.

"If people know, what is the worst possibility that would happen?"

"We are just a grain of sand."

"People don't know what I am actually doing."

We need to understand the priority of our values. If you are an overweight person starting your first morning run but feel embarrassed if people see our fats swaying around when we run, let's consider what is more important to us. Being judged by a stranger as a funny fat guy trying to lose weight, or the fact that you are trying to live a healthy life for your future self?

If you break a glass in a room, which is more important? People judging you as a clumsy person, or the fact that the glass flakes might hurt someone else, so you need to clean it?

One more, if you are working low-level jobs. Which is more important? People are judging you as a low-quality person who doesn't manage to get a better job or because you need to make money as fast as possible to live your life.

In this social media era, you may be being watched even if you don't know you are being watched. Does a performer in 2020 consider what someone in 2024 will think about the quality of their performance? No. But the fact is, the performer has to perform at that time.

So the fear of the spotlight is not to be avoided but rather to be managed. We have to set our values according to their relevance to our lives. Do people's thoughts about us matter more than the purpose of our actions? People don't know the exact values of our minds and actions. We do.

Not giving a f might be a useful tool for our minds to actually prioritize what matters to us and focus on the real things we are working on.