#syberian

Female Lowell Marvin

Is it possible not to worry about what others say?

Humans are biologically built to care about how others evaluate them because, for most of our evolutionary history, reputation affected survival, access to resources, and mating opportunities. Being excluded from a group could be fatal. So the nervous system treats social evaluation as a serious signal. That is why the advice “just don’t care what others think” often fails in practice. It runs directly against mechanisms shaped long before modern therapy existed.

What actually exists that can be done voluntarily is more limited than motivational language suggests, but it is not zero. The voluntary part lies mainly in selecting inputs and constraints that slowly retrain the system. You cannot directly command the brain to stop reacting to social judgment. But you can repeatedly expose the system to situations where the feared consequences of judgment do not occur, or where alternative rewards become stronger. Over time, the brain updates its predictions about how dangerous or important other people’s opinions are.

Psychotherapy tries to use this principle, although it is often simplified in slogans. Techniques like exposure, cognitive reframing, or behavioral experiments are not about instantly changing attitude. They are about changing the data your nervous system receives. When the brain repeatedly experiences “people judged me and nothing catastrophic happened,” or “I acted according to my own plan and the outcome was still acceptable,” the weight given to social evaluation can gradually weaken. This is slow because the underlying circuits evolved to err on the side of caution.

Another voluntary lever is attention. What you repeatedly attend to becomes statistically more important to your predictive system. If attention is constantly directed toward social comparison, status signals, and imagined evaluation, the system keeps amplifying those signals. If attention is repeatedly redirected toward tasks, skills, or concrete problems that produce feedback from reality rather than from approval, the relative influence of social judgment can decrease. Not disappear, but decrease.

There is also a structural point that aligns with Baruch Spinoza. In his framework, freedom is not the ability to act without causes; it is understanding the causes well enough that different outcomes become possible. When you understand why your system reacts strongly to social evaluation, you can modify conditions that feed that reaction. That is a constrained form of agency, not absolute control.

Humans will probably never become completely indifferent to others’ opinions because group dynamics remain central to our species. What can change is the calibration of how strongly and in which contexts that signal dominates decision-making. Therapy, training, and repeated experience can adjust that calibration, but they do not erase the underlying mechanism.

now there is nothing

a barren space

frozen tundra

a derailed Syberian railway

where is she

the keeper

the feeder

the killer

of Zhivago