I stand up, walk to the front of the class, and promptly forget every single word I’ve prepared myself to say. I give an absolute failure of a speech. When it’s over, I sit down as fast as possible in despair.
I remember thinking to myself that nobody would ever let me live it down, that I wouldn’t be able to enter that classroom again. That feeling actually made my next speeches even harder to do. I’d constantly think about the past failure and worry about my classmates’ judgment.
Much later, I realized, for everybody else in that class, it was just another Tuesday in their high school lives. Nobody remembered my flubs, my absolute failure of a presentation. I can still recall the flushed feeling of embarrassment and frustration clearly. I’m probably the only one in that class that remembers any of it.
This sort of scenario is a classical example of the psychological phenomenon known as the “spotlight effect.” The term was coined in 1999 by Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky; it is described as “the phenomenon in which people tend to believe they are being noticed more than they really are.”
A great majority of people tend to overestimate their effect on others. It’s hard not to. We are, after all, the center of our own points of view. It’s very easy to worry and agonize over something that doesn’t matter in the long run, impacting your life more than it really should. The fear of judgment can be a devastating roadblock for anyone, not just students.
There are a few reasons why the spotlight effect exists. One is a tendency for people to assume that others around them share similar opinions and behavior, or the opposite where people assume others don’t share the two. Another reason can be how people tend to overestimate how much the events in their life are directed towards themselves. As we are only human, it’s impossible to fully circumvent these tendencies.
In order to avoid deceiving oneself in accordance with this phenomenon, discussing another word is in order: “sonder,” coined by John Koenig in 2012. It means “the profound feeling that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it.”
It seems obvious to say that everyone is the hero of their own story, but I believe this exact sort of realization can combat the self-deception presented by the spotlight effect. Take a moment to think of people you know, their relationships with the people they know, how they all have years of memories just like you, and how there are 7.5 billion people out there who are just the same.
Just knowing that everyone else around you is also dealing with their own life can combat the spotlight effect. Take a moment to put everything into perspective. How much will this small interaction matter in a year? Five years? Ten?
In the grand scheme of things, the day-to-day doesn’t matter very much at all. Learn from your mistakes, take a moment to breathe, and move on. You may find the spotlight really isn’t so bright after all.
Daniel Ma is a junior at Century High School. Send comments on teen columns to Jeff Pieters, jpieters@postbulletin.com.
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June 03, 2020 at 05:02PM
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