Understandably, a lot of people are uneasy with the idea of striving to impress because it seems fake and insecure and other such adjectives. These people see striving to impress as a fault, and they think the world would be a better place if we all stopped putting on a show and just acted like ourselves so people could know us and love us for who we really are. Or something like that.
A more eloquent articulation of this view came from a recent commencement speech by Jonathan Franzen (hat tip: Anna), who suggested that impressing people (= trying to be liked) is borne out of fear of pain and rejection:
The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.
My first concern with such arguments is that I don’t know what a Real Self means.
My second and bigger concern is that now we’re
The reality is that we do care about impressing people, or at least not looking stupid in front of them. To care what others think is human. It’s not a decision, it’s a fact of life. Or at least a default setting.
Some people will deny this. My friend Bob already has:
I've never really wanted not to care what someone else thought of me, my choices, my performance, my ideas... I just found over and over again that I didn't. I wrestled with wanting to care. Eventually it became wanting to want to care, and I realized I just didn't, and that was OK (though hard to sell to society - but who cares?).
I wonder whether we are talking about the same thing because I have yet to meet a person that made me think, “wow, that person really doesn’t care.” Even shameless shitters tend not to wear sweatpants out of the house.
Here’s a simple test to find out whether someone cares: Just ask them, “do you ever feel embarrassed?”
This works because feeling embarrassed, by definition, means caring about what others think.
Most people would admit to at least occasionally feeling embarrassed, but some would not. Here’s the thing: To even be able to say that you never feel embarrassed requires that you know how embarrassment feels, and so the statement makes no sense. If a person truly did not care, the only legitimate response to the question would be “I don’t know. What’s embarrassment?” And if they said that, then we’d have to subject them to some serious psychological tests, because that’s just weird.
So, I conclude that caring about how we are perceived is a reality for almost everyone. And even if we could sit behind our keyboards and change this reality, I doubt it’d be wise to. I prefer to view our desire to impress not as a vice but as a great motivator that has inspired many of the greatest creative works throughout human history, from cave paintings to 3D documentaries about cave paintings.
And beyond just the pleasure of aesthetic consumption (like this lovely post you're merrily consuming right now), the desire to impress (= the competition over relative status) is probably what led humans to where we are today. Xan explains in a post called Let them eat status. Here's a piece:
Imagine that at any point in our evolutionary path, we have some store of knowledge, and some baseline of intelligence that is able to put that knowledge to use. If you're smarter, you add a little increment to the pot, which everyone subsequently gets to share. Everyone levels up the same amount relative to the rest of the animals, but you also get additional esteem within human society for being such a smartypants.
(According to this model, if you're a fan of modern society, then competition for relative status is something to be grateful for! Without it, we'd have had considerably less reason to grow to our current state.)
So, don't knock status-seeking.
Now is when I turn the tables a bit: Just as life would be dull if we stopped trying to impress one another, so would it be dull if we never stopped trying to impress one another. Just as there is a natural desire to impress, so I think there is a natural desire to stop impressing once we have been around someone for long enough and feel sufficiently comfortable in their presence. This is the basis of intimacy.
Case and point: There comes a time in every romantic relationship – hopefully well after the first date – when someone has to release the first toot. The transition from a not-farting-relationship to a farting-relationship can be awkward and difficult, but it is an important (and funny) sign of progress. I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship where I felt I always had to be at my best and I had to be careful not to do anything ugly or stinky or human.
What would be even worse is to be in a relationship where the other person never felt comfortable enough to drop their guard. I don’t know if I could trust someone if they were always polite, well-behaved, and intelligent. In a weird way, I want my friends to rip ones in front of me, in part because some toots are impressive, but mostly because toots are human, and my friends’ willingness to release them says that they are comfortable enough with me to have created a refuge from the status-seeking world.
I use flatulence as a salient and amusing example, but this of course applies to many other kinds of behaviors. The important part is having some kind of signal that you are comfortable enough around them that you have stopped trying to impress them. And this matters because it means you can get down to the business of really knowing them and appreciating them, rather than "winning" their favor.
It may be the only kind of relationship worth having.
And having that initial desire to impress is crucial because without it there wouldn’t be a guard to be dropped, meaning there wouldn’t be vulnerabilities, meaning there wouldn’t be intimacy. To put it as simply as I can, the formula for any healthy relationship is this: Impress me at first, then don’t.
Luckily, this seems to be how the Universe actually works, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
