Grace Beverley

And with this, studies on something called the spotlight effect shows that we dramatically overestimate how much other people notice and remember our mistakes, which is totally fair enough.

Like, in your world, you are the main character.

In my world, I am the main character.

It is very easy to think that when you do something wrong, people are going to be thinking about it just as much as you do, particularly when that feels magnified by so many different social platforms.

And what I found was really interesting is in a classic experiment by psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky,

participants were asked to wear an embarrassing t-shirt into a room of strangers and then estimate how many people noticed it.

On average, they believed around half the room had registered it.

In reality, it was closer to a quarter.

And that's like a loud, embarrassing t-shirt.

That's something visual.

That's not necessarily something you're just trying every day.

The researchers found that because we are so immersed in our own experience, we very much struggle to accurately imagine how little attention other people are actually paying to us.

But obviously nowadays, when your awkward moment can be screenshotted, stitched, reposted, or commented on by strangers, it doesn't just feel like you're risking embarrassment in a room.

It can feel very much like you are risking reputation at scale, and I do totally get that.

And so what happens is that we self-censor before we even begin.

We don't launch the project, we don't post the video, we don't say the opinion, we don't apply for the job.

And the tragedy of that, I think, is that the fear of cringe becomes more powerful

than the desire to create or the desire to build the life you love or the desire to represent yourself or turn up and show up in the way that you want to show up.

And obviously I'm speaking like I'm kind of disconnected from this, but I have felt this very personally.

Like when I first started posting on Instagram, I was 18 and it makes me laugh now because to give you a taste of how embarrassed I was, I didn't even post my face in any of the Instagrams.