Perhaps the single greatest disease facing humanity is the plague of individual insecurity – i.e., a sense of anxiety or discomfort about your own self and your situation within the world around you (i.e., your identity). This universal, pervasive feeling is responsible for more subjective suffering, through direct and indirect effects, than any kind of other disease, including cancer or heart disease. This is because it prevents people from truly connecting with each other, and themselves, and living in the present moment, and thus makes people lead significantly less happy and fulfilling lives.
Everyone experiences feelings of insecurity about themselves, each of us in different ways, at different times. How could it be otherwise? Each person is a fully encapsulated, separate island of subjective experience, so we only know what we ourselves experience internally. Everything else is an inference based on “looking in from the outside” at other people and their lives.
Nobody wants to share their own feelings of insecurity – that just makes it worse! So we present ourselves to others as confident and self-assured, which of course exacerbates the subjective feelings of insecurity for everyone else, who now sees this calm, cool exterior, and compares that against their own subjective feelings.
This pervasive asymmetry has been widely recognized with the advent of social media, where people explicitly curate a “perfect” online life that then sets an impossible standard for everyone else with their own messy and insecure internal lives, that only they truly experience. But this self-vs-other asymmetry is fundamental to all social interaction (and beyond; Brick Road) – the online case just makes it more obvious.
Causes
Why are we insecure in the first place? There are many reasons.
• We don’t really have control over our own thoughts, feelings, behaviors, so there is a lot of uncertainty about who we truly are. In fact, we contain multitudes (see personality), many different “attractor states” shaped by different contexts and interactions. We are constantly learning and updating our own “self-model”.
Many people react to this uncertainty by closing themselves off and freezing their self-model into a certain stable, comfortable version. This forecloses the possibility for change, representing a major casualty of insecurity. It is only when we are truly open to expanding our own self-model that we can connect more deeply with others: what otherwise would be the point of connecting with someone who is a closed and frozen being?
• We are constantly judging other people against various social standards, and are therefore acutely aware that, indeed, other people do have things that they could justifiably feel insecure about. Thus, it is natural to apply this same judgment to ourselves, and recognize that there are indeed things that we could justifiably feel insecure about – things that others could judge negatively about us – because you are doing it all the time!
In other words, nobody’s perfect. We all have things we dislike about ourselves, and it is natural for us to judge ourselves in the same way that we judge others.
• Our brains are wired to adapt to our current situation, so that we can recognize changes or differences. Anything that remains constant is presumably already accounted for, and therefore gets less attention. For example, the dopamine system adapts to the learned expectations of subjective “pleasure” or “value”, and so we are highly sensitized to outcomes that differ from these expectations. Furthermore, this discounting is asymmetrically applied to positive vs. negative outcomes: positive outcomes are discounted much more than negative ones, because you don’t really want to discount things that could adversely affect your survival.
Therefore, everything good about ourselves is discounted, leaving the nagging negative things with more salience. This leads to the “rock star” effect: even people who have so obviously “made it” in the world just discount all that success, and the discrepant experience of “normal”, insecure feelings in that context presumably leads to all the drug addiction etc that is so prevalent. Drugs are used to try to recapture the initial feelings of success and excitement, after they are so cruelly stamped out by the discounting brain.
Effects
The most pervasive, damaging symptom of insecurity is that it makes it impossible to more deeply connect with other people. We are wired to want this kind of deep interpersonal connection, and yet, we are also wired in ways that make it very difficult to establish these connections. The end result is a vast “wasteland” of disconnected individuals, who seem to become increasingly disconnected over time, searching for something that they cannot find, because it is hidden behind a wall of their own construction.
The spotlight effect phenomenon nicely illustrates this point: every insecure-feeling person over-estimates the extent to which others are judging them, feeling as if they are under a spotlight of judgement. Therefore, they spend much of their mental effort processing all these feelings of insecurity and judgment, including also indeed applying that judgment to others, because one way to assuage those insecure feelings is to feel somehow superior to others in some respects.
The end result is that each such person ends up living in this little bubble of judgment, with much of their mental and sensory world preoccupied, preventing the ability to actually see and experience the reality around them in the present moment.
This disconnected reality is more obvious when you see all these cell-phone zombies walking around with their faces firmly implanted into their phones, completely ignoring the real world around them. This more recent phenomenon is only making more explicit a dynamic that long preceded the cell phone as a technological turbocharger of disconnection.
The irony of course is that given that everyone is lost in their own little bubbles of self-judgement, on average most people are actually not paying much attention to you. If you truly recognize this fact, then you can experience a great feeling of freedom and relief!! Just be yourself – nobody else actually cares that much about you – they are all just living in their own self-obsessed little bubbles! Sure, you will be the subject of some random judgments here and there, but relatively speaking, it is almost certainly far less than you expect.
Solutions
Is there some kind of simple “miracle cure” for insecurity? No, unfortunately not. The universal, pervasive nature of this phenomenon is a clear indication that it is a direct consequence of how our brains have been shaped by evolution for survival in a world full of threats. We are fearful because it is adaptive.
We have strong social motivations because we depend fundamentally on others for our very survival. These motivations drive us to care strongly about what others think of us, and about our relative social standing and status. All of these things are wired into our brainstems. See personality for more discussion.
Thus, an important way forward is to develop a higher level of understanding about ourselves and the way our brains work, so that we can start from a foundation of acceptance that this is who we are, and that, fundamentally, we are all in this together.
The strong nature of social motivations can also be an advantage: this sense of belonging in a common in-group of people is a powerful force for reassurance. Indeed, it is this force that makes religion so powerful, including this essential feature of fundamental acceptance of others in the in-group (e.g., “we are all sinners” and “we are all forgiven” etc).
If we can all look out and recognize that each of us must confront the same fundamental challenges of insecurity and judgement, then we can all feel some measure of acceptance, of self and other.
At an interpersonal level, in interactions with specific other individuals, you could perhaps try to break through the other person’s veil of insecurity, and see if you can establish a relationship of trust and acceptance that allows them to break out of their own bubble, and you out of yours, to establish more direct and deeper levels of connection.
Ultimately, the traditions of mysticism and mindfulness provide powerful tools for developing a deeper level of fundamental acceptance of yourself and the facts of physical reality, where you can Own it All! and become a more centered and open individual.
Another important feature of our brains that is useful to keep in mind, is that we are strongly goal driven beings, and that this goal-driven system is fundamentally organized around approach goals. We are wired to activate thoughts about what we actually want, and how to obtain these desired outcomes.
Indeed, if you reflect on what fills your mind while daydreaming, much of it is centered around future plans, and how past events play into those plans. You might be thinking about how someone said something hurtful to you (playing into your insecurities), and how you are going to get back at them in some way or another. Or you might just be thinking about your next meal.
When you are ruminating about negative feelings, these are not directly translatable into positive approach goals. You need to do some kind of extra work to convert negative feelings into positive actions. In addition to reinforcing the negative feelings themselves, this rumination and translation processing weighs down your brain, and takes you away from the present moment.
Thus, it is overall much more productive to focus directly on positive approach goals associated with the actual present world around you: what do you actually want in the present moment? Instead of thinking about the past or the future, the present is the only place where you can actually act right now – what do you want right now?
Focus on that, with the recognition that life is only ever a series of such present moments, and if you are constantly living in the past and the future, you might be missing these opportunities for spontaneous action, taking advantage of the unique affordances available only in this very present moment!
It is this pernicious ability of insecurity to rob us of all these present moments, the true presents that life is constantly giving us, that constitutes its most severe cost. Just think about all the times that you spent all that mental energy worrying about various possible negative outcomes, which never materialized:
hey sorry for being so anxious earlier i had no idea everything would be fine (twitter/X)
As usual, the most powerful truths are captured in trite sayings:
you can only truly love, and be loved, if you first love yourself.
This means becoming fully accepting of who you truly are, faults and all! Then you can be open to the spontaneous opportunities of the present moment, and open to the emergent interactions between people that lead to deeper feelings of connection and true sharing.