Nobody is looking at your T-shirt

Around the year 2000, a group of psychologists at Cornell made a student put on a T-shirt with Barry Manilow's face on it and walk into a room full of other students.

Not a cool, ironic Barry Manilow T-shirt. The researchers picked him because he was, at the time and to that age group, about the most embarrassing thing you could wear. The student walked in, hung about for a bit, walked out, and was then asked one question: how many people in that room noticed your shirt?

They guessed about half.

It was about a quarter.

The psychologists, Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues, called it the spotlight effect. We all walk around convinced there's a beam of light following us, and there isn't. There's barely a torch. And honestly, I've come to believe this is the single most freeing fact I know. I'll tell you why near the end. First I want to make you slightly uncomfortable.

Every Indian kid grows up with a version of one sentence. In Hindi it's log kya kahenge. What will people say. Here in Kerala it's naattukaar enthu parayum, what will the neighbours say, and it's said with exactly the same face.

It's the question behind the career you were "advised" into, the wedding that had to be bigger, the opinion you swallowed at the dinner table. An entire subcontinent, organised around the imagined reaction of some people.

Who are these people? Has anyone met them? Where do they live? Do they have jobs? Because by the sound of it they spend twenty-four hours a day watching us, taking notes, and the strange thing is they never seem to say anything. Not once, in my experience, has a log actually turned up and kaha'd.

Cornell has an answer for that, by the way. A quarter of them noticed. And none of them said a word.

I've spent fifteen years in communications. My entire job, more or less, is getting people to notice things.

I can confirm, with some authority and a fair amount of pain: they don't.

You can spend a week on one paragraph. Argue about a single word. Get it signed off by four people who all want a different comma. Send it to an inbox the size of a small town. And the honest, humbling truth of my profession is that most people will look at it for less time than it took you to choose the subject line. They're not being rude. They're busy. They're wearing their own Barry Manilow T-shirt and worrying about who's looking at them.

That's the joke, isn't it. Everyone in the room thinks they're the one in the spotlight. Which means nobody is actually holding it.

You know the one. You're lying in bed and your brain, out of nowhere, plays back a thing you said in a meeting in 2019. The joke that didn't land. The name you got wrong. The moment you said "you too" to a waiter who'd said "enjoy your meal".

You've watched that clip maybe four hundred times. You know how many other people have watched it? Zero. It was never even recorded. You are the only person on earth still running a fan club for your own worst moment, and you're the president, the treasurer and the only member.

Marcus Aurelius, who ran the Roman Empire and still found time to keep a journal about not taking himself too seriously, put it like this (roughly, depending on whose translation you read): Soon you will have forgotten all things; soon all things will have forgotten you.

An emperor. Writing that to himself. If the man with his face on the coins thought nobody would remember, I think we can let the "you too" thing go.

Right. Here's where it stops being comforting.

The spotlight doesn't only fail to follow your mistakes. It fails to follow your wins too. The promotion you announced. The thing you finally finished. The post you rewrote six times so it sounded humble humble-ish. About a quarter of the room noticed that as well. Maybe less. Probably less.

Nobody is coming to applaud. That's the price of nobody coming to judge. You don't get one without the other, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a course.

And yes, before you say it, I'm aware I've written this on a blog. A blog is literally a man standing in a room, pointing at his own T-shirt, saying "please look". I see it. I'm doing it anyway. Which is sort of the point.

Here's the bit I promised.

If nobody is really watching, then log kya kahenge was never the real question. The real question was always the one underneath it, the one we used the neighbours to avoid answering: would you still do it in an empty room?

Would you still write the thing if three people read it? Still learn the instrument if nobody ever heard you play? Still be kind to the person who'll never find out it was you? Still wear the shirt?

Because that's the only honest test there is. Everything you'd do in front of a crowd tells you about the crowd. Everything you'd do in an empty room tells you about you. And the gift of the spotlight effect is that, it turns out, the room was mostly empty the whole time. You've been free for years. Nobody told you, because nobody was paying attention.

So. Say the thing in the meeting. Sing badly in the car with the window down. Start the thing you're "not ready" for. Order the dessert. Let the 2am clip play to an empty theatre and go back to sleep.

Wear the T-shirt.

What's the spotlight effect? Our habit of overestimating how much other people notice us. In the Cornell study by Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky, published in 2000, students in an embarrassing T-shirt guessed about half the room noticed. About a quarter did.

What does log kya kahenge mean? Hindi for "what will people say". The Malayalam version is naattukaar enthu parayum. Same question, same face.

Is this a post about Barry Manilow? No. Barry Manilow is fine. Leave Barry alone.

So should I stop caring what people think? Not entirely. Care about the few people who are actually paying attention. Just stop performing for the ones who aren't.

Did anyone notice my shirt today? About a quarter of them. Tops.

Tom