Morning Coffee #50: The Prison of the Mind… aka Nobody really spends that much time thinking about you
There is something funny about humans as social beings. We thoroughly underestimate ourselves or massively overestimate ourselves. A perfect example is someone who is presented with a task for the first time. He might think he cannot do it because he hasn’t tried it before so he doubts himself. After a bit of push and mental motivation, he does it and does it very well. Then with the confidence he’s newly acquired, he continues, thinking that he will never fail. Until he does and then he begins to beat himself up. Underestimation and Overestimation.
Most times, we don’t want to fail because we are afraid of starting afresh. We don’t want to see our effort and time go for nothing. But one of the real reasons we don’t want to fail is because of external opinions. If a man falls in private, he doesn’t think much about the fall as much as he thinks about getting up. But if he falls in full view of hundreds of people and by the mighty stroke of luck, someone starts laughing, he spends more time thinking about the fall instead of shrugging it off. That scenario keeps on playing in his head. He feels embarrassed by his actions and mentally berates himself. Why? Because people saw him do something he deems stupid and they laughed.
Except that while he’s spending time worrying about his fall, others have moved on. I can think of so many situations where I had laughed at someone for doing something and later on forgot what the person did. And that’s just me. Now imagine millions of people laughing then forgetting about it. Ok, there might be a lot of people that will constantly remind us but they aren’t really thinking of our failures constantly. In fact, they have other worries of their own. Instead we set up our mental Kirikiri and fall into this loop of overthinking our failures when in fact, what we should be thinking about is the next move. I tend to think about failures as lessons. I know why I failed most of my courses in university. I did not find them interesting and useful enough for me to spend time studying and understanding them. I know why my first real relationship failed. I grew too insecure and overbearing because I didn’t think of myself highly. The problem is we never take these failures into account and try not to repeat them. We just do the same thing over and over again. Then we wait for external validation to let us know our self-worth.
And the irony is this: how do we expect our self-worth to be nurtured by others when nobody thinks about us except ourselves?
