It’s Just You Thinking About You

On the freedom of recognizing our own unimportance

As a product of the 1990s, I grew up before helicopter parents descended.

When I was young, pregnant women still smoked.

Dads drank beer on country roads.

Grandparents kicked you out of the car for bickering.

While participation ribbons had hit the printing press, “you suck!” still echoed across classrooms, playgrounds, and dinner tables.

While we were largely removed from the abuses of our foremothers, trauma lurked just below the surface.

More akin to rescue dogs than golden doodles, our adults had love to give but weren’t afraid of showing their teeth.

Millennials are the gateway generation. We’re low-fi and high-fi. Then and now.

While we were spanked, we weren’t struck with a ruler.

While we were encouraged, we were reminded of where we came from.

While we were told to dream, we believed that Hollywood was for hussies and con artists.

We caught the tail end of tough love parenting, but occasionally bathed in the softer wave.

Today’s kids are soaked in “to the moon and backs” and told that they’re special—as they should be. But balance is required.

The messaging that “everyone is a winner” and “it’s not you, it’s them” is dangerous.

Being protected rather than butting up against our limitations doesn’t create a safer world. It creates a fear of failure. It fertilizes anxiety because there’s too much life we can’t control.

Buffering honesty and failure also makes people fragile, unaccountable, and self-important.

So, for anyone who’s soaked up too much of today’s first-wave, institutional adoration, there’s something you need to hear. And this probably goes for most Gen Z’ers with parents who encouraged tone-deaf singing lessons.

I hope we’re all sitting down.

Despite what you may have been told, you are not that important.

Read it again.

Let it sink in.

Let it marinate overnight in a ziplock bag with Kraft Italian dressing.

Hearing the words, “You’re not that important,” probably has your hackles up. You may even disagree. And that’s fine.

I don’t like hearing “You’re not that important,” and I’m writing this damn thing.

But as they say, the truth shall set us free.

There is genuine freedom in understanding that we’re not the center of the universe.

Feeling the smallness of our place is a gift—an inconspicuous, brown paper-wrapped gift!

Granting ourselves anonymity makes putting ourselves out there, taking risks, and self-promoting manageable. Without it, the weight of our fuck-ups, cringiness, and shutdowns feel too public.

As someone who was born artfully self-involved, know that I say none of this flippantly. I’ve had to learn to override a default setting that suggests everything is about me.

But in doing so, I’ve gained back invaluable space to discover and build with less perceived consequence.

When you recognize that not everything is about you, you get away with more.

You don’t have to second-guess.

You avoid stepping in as the jazz-handed host at someone’s failing dinner party.

You understand that it’s not on you to make it great—or to fuck it all up.

When you no longer see yourself as Truman in everybody’s Truman Show, you get to explore without reservation.

After all, there are few things you can do or say that will imprint more than a temporary “ha-ha” (Nelson from The Simpsons, duh) into someone else’s consciousness.

So, when you do or say something stupid, know this: the recipients of your asshattery didn’t notice. Why? Because they’re too busy replaying their own stupidity!

To register as more than a blip on anyone’s radar—good or bad—you have to really go for it.

On the good end, you need to show up and leach your sweet authenticity into the beds of those around you.

On the bad end, you have to repeatedly suck, or go out in a blaze of glory as a controversial creep. This is not a dare.

A few problematic qualifiers that people will remember:

Being racist, homophobic or misogynistic

Venting political or social extremes

Piling on the underdog

Shit-talking someone’s mom (even if they just did)

Revealing that you never liked the TV show Friends to a group of 35-year-old women (do not recommend)

If you’re a good person, your not-very-important self will largely go unnoticed.

That is until you have something you want us all to see.

This should embolden you to confidently do your shadow work in plain sight.

Start to build things.

Hit publish.

Take the risk.

Show people before you’re ready.

Paint something so ugly you have to forget it outside in a rainstorm.

Recognizing your unimportance lowers the volume. It takes the sting out of things beyond our control. It also helps us become consciously unselfconscious.

When you’re not fixated on how you appear to others, you get to be more of yourself. Accepting that not everyone is thinking about you, nor clocking your every pigeon-toed movement, is liberating.

So, when you think that someone is thinking about you, know this: it’s just you thinking about you.

In the same capacity that you think about how you’re coming across, most people are doing the same. To confirm, thinking about themselves, not you.

Nothing is about you until it is.

In reality, only close friends, parents, and loved ones are registering what you’re up to. So, if you want to shape any narrative, or be seen in a certain light, start with being a better person to your inner circle. To them, you are the most important.

So, to the co-worker you blew milk breath onto…

To the group of “cool girls” you bombed in front of…

To the boss you nervously told about a hospitalization after a ‘foam party incident’...

Fuck it.

Your moment of cringe was as fleeting as pop culture’s body positivity movement.

And if your failures do get noticed, we can borrow from the youth of today: it’s not you, it’s them.

Unimportance is our freedom.