‘The liberating truth is: they’re probably not thinking about you’: Oliver Burkeman on how to quit people-pleasing

In an extract from his new book on making the most of our finite time on Earth, the writer argues that worrying about how friends and colleagues are feeling is an agonising way to live

“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.

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