“Great news! I found the cure for my anxiety!!” the author Sarah Gailey once announced on social media. “All I need is for everyone I know to tell me definitively that they aren’t mad at me, once every 15 seconds, for ever.” I know how she feels. For years, I possessed a remarkable superpower: I could turn almost any work opportunity that came my way, no matter how exciting, into an unpleasant emotional drama, simply by agreeing to do it. Once I’d accepted a deadline or signed a contract, there was now another person in the world who might be growing impatient that I hadn’t finished yet, or who might end up disappointed in what I produced – and the thought that they might be harbouring any negativity towards me felt hugely oppressive. This same overinvestment in other people’s emotions meant I was always saying yes to things I should really have declined, because I flinched internally at the thought of the other person feeling crestfallen. And that I rarely enjoyed myself fully at social gatherings, owing to a deep suspicion that the others present, however happy they appeared, might secretly only be spending time with me reluctantly.
People-pleasing tendencies develop for different specific reasons, but right at the core of all of them lies a fundamental denial of what it means to be a limited human being. When it comes to the challenge of building a meaningful life, it’s easy enough to see that our limited quantity of time is a major stumbling block. (A vast proportion of conventional productivity advice consists of techniques for maintaining the illusion that you might, one day, find a way to fit everything in.) But we’re saddled with many other limitations, too, including the one that makes people-pleasing such an absurd and fruitless endeavour – which is that we don’t have nearly as much control over other people or their emotions as we might wish. Essentially, it’s a form of perfectionism, a felt need to perfectly curate what’s going on inside other people’s heads, if you’re ever to let yourself relax or feel secure. Like all flavours of perfectionism, it diverts energy and attention from what really matters most; and it encourages the sufferer to lead what the Swiss psychotherapist Marie-Louise von Franz called a “provisional life” – a life that somehow doesn’t quite count as the “real thing”, not just yet, because you haven’t yet developed the skills to keep everyone around you permanently happy with everything you’re doing.
What I eventually figured out – not that it ever seems to get particularly easy – is that other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them. And you have to allow other people their problems.
It bears emphasising that the people you’re worried might be angry with you, disappointed in you or bored by you almost never actually are. They’ve got their own troubles to worry about. According to stereotype, people-pleasers are self-effacing sorts, constantly putting others ahead of themselves – and yet there’s something strikingly grandiose and self-absorbed in the notion that your boss, client or colleague has nothing better to do than pace up and down all day, thinking bad thoughts about you. Or, by the same token, that your presence at a social gathering is so utterly consequential that it has the power to ruin it for anyone else. As the novelist Leila Sales observes, poking fun at this tendency in herself: “It’s weird how when I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy, but when other people don’t respond to my emails, it’s because they hate me.” (I think it’s also worth noting that on the mercifully few occasions in adulthood that another adult actually has exploded in rage at me, it had never occurred to me for a moment that they might be angry at all. Clearly, I’d been worrying about the wrong people.)
But what if someone genuinely is furious, disappointed or otherwise upset with you? Still – at the most fundamental level – not your problem. This isn’t to endorse the “ignore the haters!” mentality one sometimes encounters from self-help gurus, according to which you should disregard other people’s emotions as a matter of principle. Nor is it carte blanche to be a jerk to others, treating them like dirt before sauntering away, complacently reassuring yourself that you needn’t take responsibility for the feelings you just triggered. The point, instead, is simply that it’s a fool’s errand – and a flagrant denial of your finite power over reality – to make your sense of feeling OK dependent on the knowledge that everyone around you is feeling OK, too.
The notion that other people’s approval is what ultimately determines the value of our actions starts early in life, and runs deep. Many of us make it to middle age still craving the approval of our parents, whether or not they happen to be alive, or of substitute parent figures. The offices of the world are full of people subconsciously treating their managers as mothers, or fathers, or older siblings, while themselves busily replaying whatever role it was – “the helpful one”, “crisis manager”, “high achiever” – that elicited the greatest approval when they were kids. (And you wonder why it stresses you out so much to get a text from the boss!)
And yet, taken at face value, the news that somebody is upset because you’re not behaving the way they wanted you to behave is just that: a report on the state of their emotional weather. You might or might not choose to act on such a report, of course, but that’s a separate matter. Suppose your cantankerous manager is bugging you for a reply to his email, or your anxious partner wants you to hurry up and make a decision on your travel plans. In either case, you may decide it’s in your best interests, or in keeping with your values, to respond promptly, and if you do so, your outward behaviour may be exactly the same as if you had been motivated by a cringing desire to assuage their distress. Yet the full reality of the situation will be radically different. You will be making a conscious choice, weighing the other person’s emotions against your other priorities for your time, before then deciding on this occasion to do something that will please them. Or, in either case, you might decide that this is one of those times they’re going to have to handle their feelings without your assistance.
The deep truth here is the one expressed so pithily by Sheldon Kopp, an American psychotherapist who died in 1999: “You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.” It is the nature of life being finite that every choice to do anything comes with some kind of negative consequences, not least because, at any instant, you can only pick one path, and must deal with the repercussions of not picking any of the others. Spending a week’s holiday in Rome means not spending that same week in Paris; avoiding a conflict with a friend in the short term means dealing with whatever might result from letting a bad situation fester. Freedom isn’t a matter of somehow wriggling free of consequences altogether – sadly, that’s not an option – but of realising that you get to choose which consequences to bear. Much as it makes some people indignant to hear it, it’s virtually never literally the case that you have to do anything at all; the question is just which price you would prefer to pay.
And it’s no different with other people’s feelings: they exist, and must be weighed in the balance; equally, though, they’re no more than something to be weighed in the balance. They have no magic power to reach out and force you to act. Using the kind of “zooming out” exercise that the Roman Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius liked to recommend to his readers, it might help here to consider the billions of people on Earth who are, at this very moment, feeling angry, depressed, disappointed, impatient or anxious. The thought of this vast and miserable crowd might evoke your sympathy. And yet you surely don’t see it as your job to cheer them all up. Why should it automatically be any different in that small proportion of cases in which the emotions are – nominally, anyway – about you?
But the real revelation is that what we call “people-pleasing” isn’t even an especially effective way of pleasing other people. As the comedian Whitney Cummings once pointed out: “People-pleasing is a form of assholery … because you’re not pleasing anybody – you’re just making them resentful because you’re being disingenuous, and you’re also not giving them the dignity of their own experience [because you’re assuming] they can’t handle the truth.” Going through life trying to placate others doesn’t make you fun to work with, or live with. People pick up on the fact that you’re treating them with kid gloves, and only fulfilling your commitments to them in an attempt to make yourself feel better, rather than being motivated by an honest desire to help. So they feel patronised or manipulated – or else just annoyed at having to dedicate any brain space at all to your personal hang-ups when they’re trying to get on with their work. As an editor of mine once told me, after she’d been waiting all day for me to let her know if I could take on a certain assignment, because I feared I didn’t have the bandwidth for it, yet also couldn’t bear to disappoint her: “You know, if you can’t do something, saying so right away usually makes it much easier for everyone.” It was years before it struck me that this might have been one of the most generous things anyone had ever said to me. It helped me see that if trying so hard to manage other people’s emotions wasn’t even helping them, I had less to lose by abandoning the whole effort entirely.
Obviously, not everyone suffers from being too preoccupied with pleasing others. (By this point you may be reflecting that one or two people in your professional or domestic spheres could do with being a little more preoccupied with it.) But almost all of us suffer from some version of the affliction of which it’s one example: the idea that a sane and happy and meaningful life is something we can’t have just yet, but that we’re working towards – and that we’ll arrive at, just as soon as we can figure out how to overcome the limitations that currently stand in our way. Just as soon as we can be certain that everyone is pleased with us, or get on top of our to-do lists, or fix our chronic issues with procrastination. Or just as soon as this volatile and anxiety-inducing moment in world history has settled down into something calmer … Then we’ll be able to relax into a truly fulfilling existence.
This is an agonising way to live. But it comes with one big psychological payoff, which is that as long as you feel that you’re not quite “there” yet – because there’s something that needs fixing first – you get to avoid taking full responsibility for how you’re living now. You don’t have to confront the fact that this is it: that your present life isn’t a mere dress rehearsal for some later, better, realer time, when you will finally have earned the right to exist. For humans – with such limited time, limited control and limited knowledge of the future – a meaningful life must happen now. No outside endorsement is ever coming that would make everything feel rubber-stamped and satisfactory. You really are the boss, and no letter of resignation will ever be accepted. It’s all a bit stressful, really. But far better than spending your life in search of a feeling of security that nobody and nothing could ever provide.
The liberating truth about life as a finite human is that our situation is worse than we think. It feels really difficult to please everyone, to do everything, to create perfect work, or do a perfect job as parents, partners or citizens. But it’s not “really difficult”; it’s completely impossible. And this realisation is a portal to freedom and empowerment. You no longer have to go through life adopting the brace position, desperately hoping there is some way to prevent the plane from crashing, because you understand that the plane has already crashed. You’re already stranded on the desert island, with nothing but old aeroplane food to subsist on, and no option but to make the best of life with your fellow crash survivors. Very well, then: here you are. Here we all are. Now you can really get stuck in to living. You’re never going to please everyone, or do everything, or accomplish anything perfectly. So what would you like to do with your life instead?
• This is an edited excerpt from Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. Each daily chapter focuses on a different way to take action in an overwhelming and distracting world. It is published on 12 September by Bodley Head. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
