How to Win Friends and Embarrass Yourself in Public

The other day, I posted the picture below to my Insta stories (I feel so old referring to Instagram as Insta; is that even still a thing?). I felt utterly embarrassed reading this book in public. How lonely can your life be to have to succumb to a book titled “How to Win Friends and Influence People“? It reeked of desperation. I mean, you could do that at home. The irony being, writing this is probably the most Dale Carnegie thing I could have done.

So this got me thinking, why do we care so much about what people think? Or maybe it’s a me thing. I say I don’t, and honestly I really think I don’t but sometimes, just sometimes, I probably kinda do.

But here’s the thing – nobody’s watching you, but not for the flattering reason self-help books give you. It’s not because everyone’s too busy being the main character of their own story. It’s simpler and uglier than that; I just couldn’t compete. Attention is now a finite, monetised resource, and you’re competing with algorithmically optimised content for it. You, reading your book on the metro, lost. And somehow that should be freeing?

The more adult you become, the more life, life admin and shit you have to deal with, and staring at someone reading a lonely book on the metro would probably last five seconds before you move on to the next person your gaze lands on. We’re all just passing through each other’s screens. I scrolled at least three dozen reels and TikToks yesterday, and I cannot tell you a single thing I watched. And neither can you.

I could come up with a lot of excuses for why I didn’t do certain things I wanted to, like that one time, almost twenty years ago, my mum stopped me from attending a holiday cheer camp that had already been paid for because she had a dream (love you, Mum!), but the truth is, more often than not, it was just scary. The thought of being seen. Of putting myself out there.

I say all this to say, just be you and do what you want to do, as long as you’re not hurting anyone. Just maybe don’t do it because you only live once; do it because the audience you’ve been waiting for already scrolled past.