Sabeeha Naseer
Consider a girl who deletes a photograph forty-seven minutes after posting it. Nothing has gone wrong. Nobody has insulted her. The picture has simply collected nine likes in forty-seven minutes, and nine feels like a verdict.
This is the strange shape the fear of judgment takes now. There is often no judge. No one shouted, no one laughed, no one even noticed. The punishment was entirely self-administered, delivered by an imagined audience that never convened.
Caring what people think is not a character flaw. It is equipment. Human beings survived by being kept, and exclusion from the group could be fatal, so we evolved to monitor our standing with something close to the urgency of hunger. The discomfort of being disliked made us cooperative, careful and reliable enough to live alongside each other. What has changed is the environment that instinct now operates in.
The old arrangement, for all its pressures, contained three accidental mercies. It had limits of scale: the people whose opinions reached you were the people you could see, a village, a street, a school, perhaps a few dozen faces. It had forgetting: a clumsy sentence or an unfortunate outfit dissolved on its own, because memory is lazy and nothing was recorded. And it had context: the people judging you had watched you grow up. They had seen you kind, seen you competent, and seen you at three in the morning helping with something difficult. Their bad opinion of one moment sat inside a long record of others.
Within roughly fifteen years, all three disappeared. The audience is now everyone you have ever met, plus strangers with no reason to be generous. The internet does not forget; it archives. And a stranger reacting to your photograph has met exactly one version of you, flattened into a rectangle and stripped of everything that would explain it.
Then approval became countable, which may matter most. Earlier generations wondered whether they were liked. We can check. Social standing now arrives as a number, and numbers are hard to argue with. “Do people like me?” is a question you can talk yourself out of at two in the morning. “Nine” is not a question. It looks like a measurement.
Psychologists call it the spotlight effect: research led by Thomas Gilovich found that we consistently overestimate how much other people notice us. You replay the awkward remark for three days; the person you said it to forgot it before dinner. That is the standard reassurance, and it is only half the truth. Sometimes people really are watching. Sometimes there is a conversation about your choices, your appearance, your career, and you did not imagine it. “Nobody cares” works for strangers online, who forget you instantly. It works badly for the relatives, employers and old friends who do not.
So the better question is not whether you are being judged. Often you are. It is which of those judgments can actually do anything. Some disapproval is expensive: a parent who controls what you may study, an employer who decides your promotion, a partner, a community you cannot easily leave. Their opinions carry real consequences, and pretending otherwise is not confidence, it is poor planning.
Most disapproval is free. The classmate you will never see again. The relative you meet twice a year. The commenter with a cartoon avatar and eleven followers. The vague “everyone” who, if you listed them by name, would come to about six people, two of whom you do not even like. Almost all the weight we carry comes from this second group. We treat every opinion as though it arrived with an invoice.
There is also a pressure that is new and contradictory. We are told constantly to be ourselves, by the same feeds that show us ten thousand other selves, each one better lit. Be authentic, and also attractive, successful, disciplined, well-travelled and visibly happy. It is hard to discover who you are while scrolling through a catalogue of who you could have been.
The answer is not to stop caring. “I don’t care what anyone thinks” is usually untrue, and some criticism is a gift, because it describes the part of you that you cannot see from inside your own head. Someone who dismisses all of it has not become free, only unreachable. The distinction worth building is between being guided by your values and being governed by other people’s expectations. Both involve listening. Only one involves obeying.
You can accept that a person dislikes your decision without accepting that the decision was a mistake. Those are two separate conclusions, and we collapse them into one almost every time. And when a judgment does land, remember what it is made of: one angle, one day, held by a person carrying their whole history into the looking. That is information, not a verdict. A mirror shows a reflection, never a fact.
Back to the deleted photograph. Nobody else remembers it. Those who liked it moved on within the hour; the rest were never thinking about it at all. It cost the audience nothing, because the audience barely existed. It cost her the evening, and a little of her willingness to be seen, which is harder to get back than a post.
People will form opinions. That is cheap, automatic and mostly about themselves. The price is paid on our side, in the sentences we did not say, the rooms we did not enter and the versions of ourselves we quietly retired to avoid being discussed.
So the question was never what people will say. They will say something. They always have. The question is what you are handing over in exchange for their approval, and whether, years from now, with the audience long dispersed, you will think it was a fair trade.
Sabeeha Naseer is Deputy Discipline In-charge in the Department of Psychology at Fazaia Bilquis College of Education for Women, Nur Khan Base, Rawalpindi.
