Getting through April's self-consciousness in 'low resolution.' Seaweed on teeth and a bow that didn't land

It has been exactly two weeks since the new fiscal year began.

It is about time that the veneer of tension, the desire to be thought of as a 'good person,' starts to flake off at the edges.

I did it again the other day.

On the train platform, I thought I made eye contact with someone from my company walking toward me whose name I still barely remember.

I gave a deep bow at the angle of a 'good morning' with the utmost affection.

But the other person walked right past me with an expressionless face.

In that moment, my thoughts froze.

'Was I ignored?'
'No, did they just not notice me?'
'Or did they not realize it was me?'
'Was my bow just now weird?'

That loop of thoughts didn't stop even after I arrived at the office.

While booting up my computer and flipping through meeting materials, that 'missed bow' from earlier was being replayed in my brain in high definition.

I had botched my performance grandly in the grand theater of the train platform, bathed in the spotlight all by myself.

While wrapped in that sense of despair, I suddenly noticed a certain 'discomfort.'

My back had been feeling strangely itchy for a while. The tag of the inner shirt I had put on inside-out in the morning rush was gently attacking my skin.

My own 'self-surveillance camera' is always in 4K resolution.

Why do we interpret our own 'failures' so excessively?

In psychology, there is a phenomenon with a name that is both glamorous and cruel: the 'spotlight effect.'

It is a mental habit of assuming that 'one's own existence is constantly the center of others' attention, as if one were under a spotlight.'

There is a famous experiment conducted by Cornell University psychologist Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues.

They had subjects wear a T-shirt with a picture of a celebrity that was considered 'a bit embarrassing to wear' by college students at the time, and sent them into a classroom where other students were working.

The person wearing the T-shirt answered, 'About half of the people in the classroom must have noticed this tacky T-shirt.'

However, when I actually asked people around me, 'Did you notice that T-shirt?', only about 20% had noticed.

A large gap between one's own prediction (50%) and reality (23%).

In other words, while our 'self-surveillance camera' is always capturing us in high-resolution 4K, other people's cameras are only seeing us at a resolution level of a blurry background.

My missed bow on the train platform, or perhaps the pink dry-cleaning tag that might have been fluttering on my back—the things I thought the whole world was paying attention to were actually just noise like static, leaving no memory in anyone's mind.

Impurities of life and the resolution of self-consciousness

But even knowing this, self-consciousness doesn't easily 'turn off'.

I look in the mirror in the office break room in the evening, and my breath stops once again.

Right in the middle of my front teeth, a 'single piece of seaweed' that must have escaped from the chikuwa tempura with seaweed from my lunch was sitting proudly.

That was the very tempura I had won yesterday after waiting for the 'half-price' sticker to be placed on it at the supermarket deli.

'It's over...'

I must have spoken enthusiastically about 'this term's goals' during the afternoon meeting.

Could it be that the gazes of the colleagues who participated were not on my presentation materials, but constantly focused on this one spot of green?

Was the manager's slight smile at the end not an agreement with my idea, but a mockery of this seaweed?

My brain's camera zooms in tightly on the seaweed.

But, I try to remember something.

What color tie was the colleague sitting next to me wearing during the afternoon meeting?

Was there any change in the hairstyle of the section manager sitting across from me?

...I can't remember anything.

The others in my memory are always nothing more than a 'background' with blurred outlines.

And yet, why do I assume that only my own '1-millimeter impurity on my front tooth' is a matter of concern for the whole world?

In the depths of my disappointment, I rummaged through my bag, and my fingertips, which were supposed to be searching for a pen, touched a 'slightly well-shaped stone' I had picked up with my child yesterday.

While my self-consciousness was screaming, focusing all its energy on the 'green speck on my front tooth,' this stone had just been there, silently, since yesterday.

Touching its coldness, which held no meaning, no name, and no solution, I felt my boiling self-consciousness suddenly lose its place and fade away.

Seaweed, and freedom.

In the end, the true nature of the difficulty we feel in living might not be the 'attention from the world,' but the 'attention from ourselves.'

Trying to perform perfectly on our own stage, we turn up the spotlight on our own, deepen the shadows, and want to run backstage at the slightest acting mistake.

But if you look out at the audience, everyone is desperate to memorize their own lines, and they weren't watching our performance from the start.

That is a little lonely, but it is also an invitation to immense 'freedom.'

No one is watching.

If that's the case, it's fine to miss a nod as many times as you want.

Even if there's an Anpanman sticker from my child on my clothes, I can just walk around thinking it's my own style.

If it's true that no one is watching me...

Wouldn't it be fine to just wear a light spring coat over my pajamas to work starting tomorrow?

Even such an extreme idea feels like 'maybe that's okay' right now, and my heart feels suddenly lighter.

Even if I have seaweed stuck right in the middle of my front teeth tomorrow, the Earth will keep spinning, and my colleagues will be too busy thinking about what to have for lunch.

I'll take a little break from looking through the 4K camera of my self-consciousness and try diving defenselessly into a blurry world.

In the still somewhat stiff air of April, I feel that a bit of that casualness is just the right kind of salvation.

▼ For those who want to observe a little more 'wonder'

Behind the sense of liberation that no one is watching you, I once discovered that there is a rule of 'kindness in choosing to look away' hidden in the city.

Even though the brain won't let a single millimeter of its own mistakes slide, it is surprisingly indifferent to the 'heat once every 20 seconds' contained in someone else's nods.