Nobody Cares About the Embarrassing Thing You Did
One of my most embarrassing moments in life involves gourmet hotdogs and a bloody band-aid. In college, I started a job as a bartender to earn money for alcohol. The weekend before the incident in question, I was opening up wine bottles for a wedding and managed to slice my finger open on a corkscrew. The result was a bandaged finger and a lie about how I got it.
A couple of days later I’m in line at a Doghaus having a friendly conversation with the cashier about my day, and what I want off the menu. Standard procedure at this point. The girl is super friendly, and because I just received a healthy cash tip, I figured I’d spread the wealth and throw a five in the tip jar.
Apparently, the texture of a U.S. standard dollar is surprisingly similar to a bloody band-aid that you may have left in your pocket after you cut your finger on a corkscrew. I learned this in the exact way you would imagine that I learned this. The look on her face when she saw that crusty band-aid resting like a newborn on top of her hard-earned tips will haunt me until the day I die.
What’s worse is it was one of those vase jars with the skinny neck so I couldn’t even dive into the jar with my hand to fish it out for her. I just stared at it like it was a Salvador Dali painting trying to figure out how my existence had brought me to this point. I spent what felt like an hour apologizing for being such a disgusting human, and debating plunging myself into the traffic outside.
We’ve all been there. Maybe you haven’t made a crime scene out of some poor girl’s tip jar, but doing things that make you blush is part of the human experience. The act of making a fool of yourself is as universal as New Year’s Eve. You crack a joke you’re convinced is going to bring down the house only to be received by tight-lipped smiles and nodding heads. Falling in front of a crowd or missing a step is a classic. Involuntary bodily functions seem to have their own genre in terms of the power they hold to humiliate us. Puberty comes early in life, and practically guarantees dozens (if not millions) of regretful actions. Yet this does nothing to prepare us for all the humiliation life has in store for us.
For all the practice that we get, you’d think we’d get better at handling it. But it plays out the same way every time. All eyes seem to shift in our direction. Palms get sweaty. Your knees get weak and your arms get heavy. Blood rushes to your cheeks, and if you are of a lighter complexion you try to suppress the blushing, but it only makes it worse. There’s a chance that you begin frantically apologizing, or maybe you just count your losses and leave. The worst part of a truly embarrassing moment is the emotional scars they leave. The situation plays itself out over and over again in your head until it becomes a self-inflicted psychological torture. If you’re an anxious person, these thoughts can take you into some rough waters.
How many times have we laid in bed at night self-flagellating ourselves for something that we perceived to be humiliating? The answer is more likely than we’d like to admit.
Here’s the truth: Nobody gives a shit the embarrassing thing you did. Moreover, nobody gives a shit about most of what you even do. We’re all too wrapped in the cocoons of our own self-interests that most people don’t have the spare time to think about whatever it is we are afraid they remember. At some point, we all do something we wish we could take back, or say something we wish we could shovel back into our mouths. It is what it is. Chances are it was never that big of a deal in the first place. Spending more time thinking about it is the only thing that makes it so. And it’s not helping anyone, least of all you.
If you want an example of how to truly not give a shit, look no further than Diogenes the Cynic. Diogenes was a homeless philosopher that lived in a barrel in ancient Athens and he was famous for being both a genius and batshit insane. He is one of the founders of the philosophical school of Cynicism, yet he would make even the most depraved homeless man look like a prince by comparison. Diogenes was famous for the spectacle he made of his own life. His goal was to live according to nature, and by that, it meant he intended to live as much like an animal as possible. Poverty for him was the greatest virtue. When he wasn’t sleeping in his barrel, one could expect to find Diogenes either wreaking havoc on the population or spreading his philosophy in the most abrasive ways possible. He begged for food but refused utensils, he peed on people that he didn’t like, he would defecate everywhere and in front of everyone, and would practice public masturbation on a regular basis. Diogenes was a straight-up menace, but people liked him for his sense of humor, his ability to reject any sense of shame or embarrassment, and because every once and a while he’d say some enlightening things like:
“No Man is hurt but by himself” — Diogenes
or
“Modesty is the color of virtue.” — Diogenes
Here’s another one to remind you that this guy was also trolling long before the internet…
Now you might think that this guy is batshit crazy, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But the fact that people still find some of his ideas relevant despite him running around town jacking it daily is a testament to his influence. He believed that to teach he needed to demonstrate through his own actions. At the core of his being, he believed that others’ opinions of us should be the least of our concerns, and that shame about oneself was the worst vanity one could engage in. He rubbed people the wrong way because through his actions he pointed out how self-absorbed everyone around him was. To him, the only thing holding everyone else back from behaving exactly like him was the fear of what others would think about their behavior. So his goal was to demonstrate that whatever people were afraid of, it wasn’t so bad. None of this is to say that we should take his example and start masturbating in public. But consider how much stress we could alleviate if we just cared a little bit less.
People are rarely thankful for their awkward moments, but they can provide valuable lessons. Humiliation is just a shortcut to humility. Embarrassment can be a useful lesson in teaching us not to take ourselves too seriously.
Imagine someone who trips and spills a drink all over themselves. They get up, act flustered, and then leave the building in a rush. Pretty embarrassing situation overall, but likely not something you’d give much thought to other than feeling bad for them at the moment. Now imagine the same person trips, spills the drink all over themselves and laughs about it. How much less embarrassing is that? Significantly.
Studies have shown that embarrassing moments have the power to make people like you more. We’ve all been there. We know the sting of an error, and most people are compassionate enough that they’ll quickly forgive a faux pas. Instinctually, humans find embarrassing acts endearing because we perceive them as a kind behavioral trait in that we care about other people’s feelings, and therefore are less likely to act selfishly around them.
So the next time you do something stupid 𑁋don’t sweat it. It’s all perspective. We have the choice between being humiliated and not. So don’t. Laugh it off. Life isn’t as fun when we take it seriously.
