The Fear of Being Outcast
How our relations to others dictate our actions and emotions
Each month, we tackle a different theme on how to live what the ancient philosophers called the “good life”—a life in the pursuit of becoming the best version of oneself.
For the month of March, we’ve been focusing on the theme of suffering and its role in everyday existence. You can find links to the series at the bottom of this article.
Quick Update:
Hi all,
I just wanted to say thank you for all those who responded to the poll last week about what the desired number of emails per week should be. I will be making some adjustments and will likely roll those out next week.
You can expect this week to continue as normal.
Thanks again for your feedback and support. Now, let’s dive into this week’s meditation.
-D.A.
“Nature is connection. Which is why disconnection leads to such dysregulation and damage, not just at the level of society, but at the level of the cell.”
Loneliness
by William Patrick and John T. Cacioppo
We desperately care about what others think about us.
Whether we like to admit it or not, we care about the opinions others have about us, we care about what they say when we’re not around, and we care how these things impact our circles of friends, colleagues, and family.
We’re all afraid of being alone, and to avoid this fear, from a conscious and unconscious level, we work to stay well-liked within our groups.
This fear is universal. We are hyper-social creatures and therefore our survival is driven in part by our connection to others.
As easy as it would be to have the “I don’t care” attitude of forgetting what others think of you, the fact of the matter is, this attitude only goes so far and is in fact a facade to our deep desire to be liked by others.
We simply cannot survive in the world with a “who cares” attitude because the fact of the matter is, we do care, and more importantly, we need to care.
We need people to like us when we’re in interviews so we can showcase our skills and personality for a job;
We need our customers to care about us so they continue buying our product and not our competitors;
We care when our neighbors and friends know we are trustworthy and they can rely upon us.
All of these cares help form our communities in life, and we depend upon these communities for survival. As the famed biologist E.O. Wilson once put it:
“People must belong to a tribe, they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves.”
We are social creatures through and through and our societies are built around this social aspect of life—just think about how we eat, we more often than not share a meal with someone else.
To not be liked, or to feel ostracized from our “tribe” gives us the same pain as getting physically hurt.
We experience pain as a guide for what to pursue and what to avoid. If we touch a hot stove and burn our hand, our brain registers the pain and we rip our hand away, taking note not to perform that action again.
Emotional pain works much the same way.
When we encounter social situations that cause us pain—say an embarrassing moment, or the feeling of being left out—we actually feel that pain, not just in the emotional sense but also in the physical one, and we take note not to perform that action again.
William Patrick and John T. Cacioppo write that social pain likely evolved for the same reason physical pain did—to protect us:
“Physical pain protects the individual from physical dangers. Social pain, also known as loneliness, evolved for a similar reason: because it protected the individual from the danger of remaining isolated.”
If you look back throughout human history, and even further to before we evolved from chimps, we always depended on others outside of ourselves. We are community-based creatures and therefore are built to work not just with and for ourselves, but with and for others.
We therefore are heavily reliant upon others’ opinions of us as a way to keep our community intact, and our standing within that community in good graces.
This, as the writer Will Storr has pointed out, is what he has deemed the “status game,” and it permeates through everything we do.
“Status is what researchers call an ‘ultimate’ rather than a ‘proximate’ drive: it’s a kind of mothermotivation, a deep evolutionary cause of many other downstream beliefs and behaviours that’s been favoured by selection and is written into the design of our brains.”
Simply put, we humans are always looking to upgrade our standing or “status” within our group as a way to not only cement ourselves within it, but gain power and prestige. We do so through the clothes we wear, the stories we tell, the posts we make online, the beliefs we hold—pretty much everything we do is done, whether it is known to us or not, to pursue status.
“Up and down and up and down and up and down we go, moment by moment, day by day, from childhood to the grave. Life is not a journey towards a perfect destination. It’s a game that never ends. And it’s the very worst of us.”
But it doesn’t stop there, the communities we’ve invested in then fight for status over other communities. As Storr points out:
“our groups also compete with rival groups in status contests: political coalition battles political coalition; corporation battles corporation; football team battles football team. When our games win status, we do too. When they lose, so do we. These games form our identity. We become the games we play.”
Because we are constantly playing these games, because we are always looking for approval or standing from those around us, we are always, consciously or not, at the whim of those we seek approval from.
And when we can’t get it, when others don’t think highly of us, it is crushing.
This issue is extremely prevalent in the younger generations who have been brought up directly with the internet and social media.
For those of us who knew a life prior to the internet, we know there is life outside of it. But for Gen Z and Gen Alpha (soon to also include Gen Beta), what is online, from the follower counts we have to the likes we get on each of our posts, the attention we get and the status points we earn holds tremendous weight.
The psychologist Jean M. Twenge has deemed these technology-driven generations, “iGen.” And this status seeking craze has perhaps impacted young girls the most.
“Girls may also be uniquely vulnerable to the effects of social media on mental health. The emphasis on perfect selfies has amplified body image issues for girls, who often chase likes by taking hundreds of pictures to get just the right one but still end up feeling as though they’ve fallen short.”
And while we live in a world dominated by social media and the internet, a world with WhatsApp and Telegram, Instagram and Snapchat, where it seems everything that is posted is make or break for us elevating our status and being liked, there is hope.
The psychologist
recently suggested in The Atlantic that we need an anti-smartphone movement. The entrepreneur and investor sees this picking up steam, writing that the future will have phone free zones, dopamine rehab centers, and more in real life experiences where screens aren’t allowed or wanted.
In the meantime, we need to be able to handle life and the fear of feeling outcast. And there are ways to evade these immediate pulls toward caring what others think.
To start, we can be reminded that life exists outside of being online. And while that seems cliché (especially to younger generations), it is pertinent to remember that life is in fact meant to be lived in person.
Learning to step outside of the online space and understanding it is not the end-all-be-all is important to our mental health. When we’re able to shut off the electronics and go for a walk, or talk with a friend over a meal, or be present with a loved one, we’re reminded of the importance of real-life face-to-face interactions and how these are what matter most, that these are in fact what raise or shrink our actual status in life.
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was famous for telling his students that the majority of our problems lied not in things, but in our opinion of those things.
It is important to always keep in the front of our minds that we are only as injured as we allow ourselves to be.
The internet, and life for that matter, has a way of quickly sweeping us up off our feet and leading us to believe the sky is falling.
Epictetus’ Enchiridion provides two examples of how to ground us in times of need, especially when we’re feeling as though people don’t like us:
“Keep in mind that what injures you is not people who are rude or aggressive but your opinion that they are injuring you. So whenever someone provokes you, be aware that the provocation really comes from your own judgment. Start, then, by trying not to get carried away by the impression. Once you pause and give yourself time, you will more easily control yourself.”
The first step according to Epictetus, therefore, is before reacting, before allowing our emotional states to get out of control and feel like the world hates us, pause, give ourselves a moment, and check our situation.
The second is that sometimes people misjudge us, and that misjudgment, while it seems like a slight to us, is in fact a slight against themselves:
“Whenever people treat you badly or criticize you, remember that they are only doing and saying what they think is appropriate for them. They cannot take their lead from your opinion but only from their own. So if their opinion is incorrect, they are the people who suffer harm because they are the ones who got it wrong.”
The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius provides a third example of handling these situations: Care more about your own opinion than their’s.
“It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.”
While our innate nature in life is to require connection to others, it does not mean we need to constantly play to their status games. Yes, we are hyper-social creatures, but opinions of others should not matter as much as we build them up to.
By properly learning to navigate the opinions of others, we can better manage the status game world and relinquish others’ holds on our mental well-being.
True connection and “status” building does not happen online, rather, it happens in the real world, in face-to-face interactions, and is the true driver for our belonging within a community.
Our ability to rise above these games of status are directly held within our control, in our ability to be resilient to what others say, to care more deeply about what people think in real life, and to remember a single person’s opinion is never the end-all-be-all in life.
3-Bullet Summary:
At each of our core is a desire for human connection, and when that human connection is threatened, when people do not like us, we fear isolation from our community;
This fear of isolation is heavily prevalent in the world of social media where we look to vanity metrics like how many likes and followers we have as a signs of approval and status within out groups;
By focusing on real-world connections, by attempting to rise above the status games we play, we are able to live a more fulfilling life and still find ways to connect with people.
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For the month of March, we’ve been focusing on the theme of suffering through our Monday Meditations (MM), Wednesday Wisdoms (WW), and Friday Sweet Bites (SB).
Here are the topics covered so far if you wish to catch up:
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Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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