When you're twenty, you worry about what people think.
When you're forty, you don't care what people think.
And when you're sixty, you realize that nobody was thinking about you in the first place.
When you're forty, you don't care what people think.
And when you're sixty, you realize that nobody was thinking about you in the first place.
Now this doesn't mean you have to go crazy trying to satisfy everyone because you can't. People want contradictory things from you. You need to have your own moral or other principles to keep on track of a certain path in the face of rejection. But if everyone thinks you're an asshole, the answer isn't to just ignore everyone.
I think a better lesson is that it's better to have some haters and some who really like you than to have everyone be lukewarm about you and ignore you. The haters are no big issue unless they are really determined enemies, and the upside of the truly appreciative people is bigger. You can only get true deep connections if you accept the risk that some people won't like you. As long as you try to please everyone you won't really please anyone. See the story of the miller and his son.
Yes, we all understand that people stereotype. I think you're getting bogged down in the details and missing the overall point, which is far more generalized. The above story is meant to be short and clever, and to do so it glosses over a few things that you're meant to pick up contextually. The point it's trying to make is this:
20 year olds tend to think people are watching, judging, and remembering their every move and are concerned about it
40 year olds still tend to think they're being watched and judged, but don't care
60 year olds realize that everyone is too busy thinking about their own situation to really pay much attention to others beyond superficial stereotyping, and that unless you affect someone deeply with your presentation, they won't likely cling to previous judgements of you.
(Caveat that I haven’t looked into how deeply this has survived the psych and social psych replication crisis)
If you think people think about you all the time, then you benefit from the message of this story about the 20, 40, 60 year olds.
But don't take it too literally. It matters how you present yourself and what impressions you leave.
The good news is, you have to be really really bad to leave a long lasting bad impression (except if you personally screw someone over or cheat against them even in minor ways - people tend to remember that) and failed but honest attempts to get ahead don't tend to compound, but success does compound. Meaning it's worth playing a numbers game and diversifying your potential outcomes. A good impression can lead to a lot of value for years to come, a bad impression often simply means you can try again elsewhere with added experience.
But it does matter a lot in those years. Teens are correct in their assessment that fitting in is important. At least in some group. Doesn't have to be the "popular kids". As you grow up, achievements and status become more manifest, it's not so much about pretenses. Things are now more cemented and move slower. You have this or that profession with a certain status. You live in a good or a bad neighborhood, move in fancy or non fancy circles, can afford traveling or not, and so on. By contrast in your teens and early adulthood, all you have is how you perform in social interaction. Later you're like "maybe I'm awkward but I'm a surgeon and you're a fast food worker".
And when you're 60, the status fights are mostly over, you're living off of what you achieved earlier. So you think it was useless because now you have little to lose in future potential. You mostly have your familial and friendship situation cemented for the rest of your life, usually no more worry about who will marry you, whether you can be promoted high, whether your kids turn out good etc. Typically 60+ year olds don't have to prove themselves in the moment any more, they just ride on the past.
Rather, I find it is that adults rule the conformance games that adolescents and teenagers play are “silly” all the while partaking in their own, which are of course not silly, but rather how one should conform and teenagers are wrong for not conforming to those ideals.
Consider that the parent who berates his child for smoking marihuana to be part of his clique will the next day consume alcohol at his office party, as to not be left out.
I don't think this is good example. I dont want my kids to drink alcohol yet. When I do drink alcohol, it is really not so that "I am not left out". Pretty much all office parties I have been at had bunch of people who were not drinking in them.
And marihuana has added effect of being illegal in many places.
And if your kid is smoking it so that the kid fits, it absolutely makes sense to treat it as issue. Regardless of whether you sometimes drink alcohol at office party.
I assure you that 40 years old do care about what people think. Partly, because people are simply wired that way, that is why we are social animals instead of solitary ones.
But the other is that it matters. What people think about you influences how they treat you, what they tell you and what chances they give you. It makes difference between being listened to and being ignored.
Sure, I don't worry about what people consciously think of me, like "Does he think I'm incompetent because of that mistake I made? Does she like the way I'm dressed?". I'm more concerned with what they're not thinking, or rather the biases they may be unconsciously harboring about myself or others. Look at this [1], from a study on the relation of criminal sentences and attractiveness:
>Physical Attractiveness had a significant influence on judges sentencing. The more unattractive the criminal, the higher the sentence. Or conversely, the more attractive the criminal, the lower the sentence. The results of three studies show a minimum increase of 119.25% and a maximum increase of 304.88%.
That's pretty disturbing to me. It what other ways am I being treated and being shaped by the unconscious biases of others? Say Jim gets promoted into management and made leader of a project instead of me, because he's a "better fit" for the role. For what reasons is he a "better fit"? Imagine if the unconscious mind could speak. It might say something like this:
"Jim was made tribe leader because of his robust musculature. His square jaw arouses me to no end - such an indicator of higher testosterone, strength, and disease resistance will serve our offspring well. Broad-shouldered Jim can probably throw a spear hard enough to pierce fifty men. A warrior of his magnitude will surely lead us to victory against our ancestral foe, the Google tribe."
Okay, that's fine, but what does that have to do with shipping a profitable software product?
"Square. Jaw."
Completely absurd. We can never completely relieve ourselves of these kinds of biases, and of politics. But I believe we can mitigate it to a meaningful degree. We can have meaningful standards and metrics for evaluating people for certain roles. Horowitz talks about this kind of politics-mitigation in at least one chapter in his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
[1] The Law Project. (2021, January 16). The Law Project. Retrieved from https://www.thelawproject.com.au/insights/attractiveness-bia.... (The relevant HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24044409)
As in, society is biased to pick the square-jaw guy for leadership, because society knows that society follows square-jaw guys in leader roles better.
Good leadership is less about convincing people to follow you than it is about being able to lead people in the right direction. David Koresh was highly charismatic and convinced a lot of people to follow him, but I doubt anyone would consider him a "good leader".
Often among roughly equally talented people what matters is to have a clear vision, any vision and to orient a whole group towards the same direction. It's really hard to judge in advance who is better in long term vision and strategy. Experts don't have a great track record in this and CEOs also don't seem to have a great sense of direction (ie their track record quickly regresses to the mean).
Leadership is to a large degree about crafting a convincing narrative and fostering acting in unison. "To make people long for the sea" etc.
Where it matters, people and organizations are able to overcome bias. We got a square-jaw man to the moon, but the rocket itself was not designed by a square-jaw men.
The key phrase: where it matters.
When you are sixty, less of your life remains, so the stakes are lower. If you piss someone off to the point that they do you in - who cares?
Then it damned on me: I couldn't really remember any other awkward nor embarrassing moments by others. All I cared about was I.
Relief. :D
It isn’t likely that nobody thinks about me at all, given that I think about everyone else quite a bit.
Whoever coined this mildly amusing canard sounds a bit antisocial.
That's what changes over time.