You are not in their thoughts at all

The most useful thing anybody ever worked out about other people is that you occupy very little space in their minds.

Not you specifically. Everyone. Nobody in this is special or famous or rich enough for it to work differently and the ones who are famous mostly find it applies to them too once they’re out of view. People may see you and they don’t much care and that isn’t a self-effacing complaint dressed up as an observation. It’s that everyone is inside their own life, fighting whatever they’re currently fighting, and not spending much of the day thinking about anybody else.

We assume we’re being judged harshly when we do something we’ve decided is embarrassing. The reality is that we mostly aren’t being judged at all because the judging would require somebody to still be thinking about it and they aren’t.

Try it with a room. Walk into a bar with three hundred people in it and you’ll register maybe half a dozen of them. You’ll have a quick reaction to each one, some assessment you’d be slightly ashamed of if it were said out loud, and then it’s gone. You didn’t see the other two hundred and ninety four in any meaningful sense, and five minutes later you’ve forgotten all six as well, including whichever one you reacted to most strongly.

Everyone in that room is doing exactly the same thing which means the version of you that exists in a stranger’s head has a lifespan of about five minutes and roughly two adjectives in it. Why put any weight on what somebody might be thinking when the probability is very high that you’re not in their thoughts at all.

Getting that straight is what makes it possible to live the way you want to. Not through bravado or by deciding other people’s opinions don’t matter on principle but by noticing that the audience you’re performing for is largely imaginary. The scrutiny you’re managing is your own, projected outward onto people who are busy.

There’s an obvious exception and it’s worth stating rather than pretending to a detachment nobody has. What a partner thinks matters. What close friends think matters. The useful part there is that those people will tell you if they think something’s wrong which means you can stop guessing at their opinions and wait for them to arrive. If it’s important they’ll say so. If they haven’t said so, it probably isn’t and the version you’ve constructed of their disapproval is again your own.

That’s the whole thing and it takes about a decade to properly believe. Most of the discomfort you’re carrying about how you’re being perceived is being generated locally and the people you’re worried about have gone home and are worrying about something else entirely.

The practical use of this is narrower than it sounds, and it doesn’t make you braver and it won’t help with anything you’re avoiding for a good reason. What it removes is the phantom audience, and a surprising share of what stops people doing things is that audience rather than the thing itself.

The other thing it gives you is a bit of charity in the other direction. If nobody is thinking much about you, then you’re also not thinking much about them, and most of the slights you’ve collected over the years were probably somebody being distracted rather than somebody making a decision about you.

None of which makes the feeling go away, and knowing a thing and believing it are different operations. It does mean that when the feeling turns up you have somewhere to put it, which is more than most self-consciousness offers you.