Similar to very early posts on being afraid of getting in trouble and being afraid of disappointing others, it's quite obvious now that a part in me is desperate to impress others. It seems that it's mainly an attempt to feel safe, because historically I have felt very unsafe in my family as a child, using the intermediary of school, and for a short period of my life, playing the piano, to impress my parents and feel safe in that way. It's also a way to guide myself to be better in certain aspects, because I have this background fear that without this desperation to impress others, I would let myself relax and be lazy, and waste my time away and remain mediocre. There is a deep fear of being "normal", being unexceptional, just someone else that can be ignored.
It's not healthy to live this way. It doesn't even make me good at the things I'm desperately trying to be good. I would like to produce a good, or at least interesting comic, but I have found myself again and again paralyzed by my own expectations, because I am so desperate to impress others.
I don't think it's inherently bad to want to impress people, there are too many different life situations to make such a sweeping claim. I do think it is generally bad to want to impress people in general however, but there might be some good in impressing certain specific people, such as mentors, or people that one deeply respects. In my case however, this need comes from fear and neuroticism, not from a deeply grounded desire to improve myself, which is why I emphasize the desperation here.
There is often a sense of disappointment I feel when people don't compliment me about my art—which to be fair isn't that good to begin with, but also why am I looking for that in the first place? There is also a sense of dread, of fear and of overwhelm when I see someone else's amazing art, because I am afraid that I won't be able to do something similar, a sense of scarcity that if others are doing well, then I must "outcompete" them for the finite pool of attention.
This (implicit) way of looking at life is essentially Hell, it prevents me from enjoying the successes of others and wishing to partake in acts of collaboration, instead making me feel separate and at odds with other creators. I am jealous of other artists, and it's time that I admit that and look for ways to move past that resentment.
It also makes me very, very sensitive to any possible sense of rejection. Any hint of disapproval, or even any response which is not overt enthusiasm tends to register as a threat to me. I remember an interaction with the professor who was in charge of my master's thesis, and at one point he frowned at the computer trying to understand something I read, and I instantly felt wildly dysregulated, just from a fairly innocent frown, because I was just so afraid of anything potentially bad coming from someone I knew.
Such insecurities cannot lead to healthy relationships, which are inevitably messy and require conscious, mature confrontation. The downstream effect of this fear of rejection is that I try to act in a way that prevents any possibility of rejection. I try to control situations such that I can never be the "bad" person, the one who is blamed, which taxes me of my time, energy and peace, because I am stuck trying to plan for an array of diverging scenarios in a the future, the vast majority of which never happen.
Another strategy to deal with the fear of rejection is to simply avoid interactions altogether. Staying away from people. Giving up when things become too difficult. Not sharing about my life to avoid being met with indifference. Never doing the things I actually want, which could hurt my ego when I fail (or simply fall short of my expectations), and instead trying to please others by doing what they want. Again, a recipe for relationship disasters. Fear is in many ways the opposite of love, and I do not want to be controlled by the former, but want to live by the latter as much as I can.
What is the opposite of the desperate need to impress others? The first word that comes to my mind is 'silence'. Not the beatific silence of those mindfulness(TM) teachers beaming their rays of enlightenment onto the plebians that we are—that will be $2000 an hour to sit with me on a cushion by the way—but the simple silence from which real honesty is built. Only in silence can we see ourselves clearly, which is probably why a lot of people subconsciously fear it and try to fill any moment of silence in their life with stimulation and noise, because they are afraid of feeling things they've been running away from for a long time.
Silence by itself is not enough however, though it is often an amazing gateway into what we could call 'intimacy with oneself'. It's possible to be in silence but still try to control what one feels. Or to be in silence and try to force insights into arising. And it's possible to be in silence in a performative manner, as was alluded by the example of the spiritual(TM) teachers who put on a display to attract students (and thus money), rather than a grounded manner.
We live in a world of performance, which is why people pretend to work when the boss or the manager enters the room, why people are so keen on telling everyone about the good actions or the recent achievements in their life, and why 'social' media eats away more and more of our social interactions by making everything under the sun public. 1
It's the game we have to play on dating apps, or on our resumes, and to some degree, you can't exactly blame the players for following the incentives of their environment: people maximize for what they signal to other people because it is much easier than building real virtues, which are not only illegible, but require real sacrifices.
I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with wearing a mask. At its best, a mask is not just a boundary, which we need in all sorts of contexts, and it's not just a way to make social interactions smoother, but it can also be a rather fun and expressive game we play with one another, sort of like improv with people you already know, playing with expectations and status rather than being tied down by them.
Masks become problematic when there is nothing but the mask, when it can no longer be removed because there is nothing underneath it. Then, the desperation to impress others seeps in, because there is no character 2 that can hold the pain of the disapproval of others, which turns the mask into a sort of gamified social point maximizer: perform this and that to get the maximum number of laughs at a gathering!
All this to say that only someone who is comfortable with silence, discomfort, disapproval and pain can let go of the need to desperately impress others. I think that trying to reduce the 'way out' to a set of methods is dangerous because it risks turning the whole thing into another performance rather than an honest contact with one's fears, like focusing on meditating constantly and making it mechanical rather than conscious.
But it is undeniable to me that I benefit from time in pure silence, away from social media and the need to do anything. There I can be in contact with myself, without the need to perform or pretend, and that's when I can let go of the fear that animates the need to impress people, because I realize that there isn't much substance to it.
One of the most hilarious—and somewhat tragic in a sense—realization for me was how quickly people move on from whatever it was that they were impressed with. The individual and collective attention spans are so short nowadays that whatever is deemed impressive now will probably exit people's minds only a few weeks from now. And yet how hard some people try to be famous and achieve things! Walking into the colosseum expecting to leave from there as a hero is very foolish, because the spectators aren't even paying attention at this point. There is no one to impress.
1 There is also the way in which large groups of people (5 and above, and sometimes 4) are basically always performative, whereas conversations featuring 2, 3 or 4 people tend to be more intimate and personal. It's quite a stark contrast to see how someone at work talks and behaves, versus how they are in a 1-on-1 setting. Conversations in large groups are essentially a series of one-man-shows, people trying to make the rest laugh, or entertain them with anecdotes, which is why I find them so dispiriting, because it feels like everyone is talking to no one in particular, making the direction of the exchanges feel really alien compared to an actual conversation.
2 Using here Darren Allen's dichotomy of personality (mask) versus (conscious) character.
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Myself Fear Social Trauma Expectations
2026-05-24