This was a really important update for me. I remember being afraid of lots of things before I started publishing more publicly on the internet: how my intelligence would be perceived, if I'd make some obviously stupid in retrospect point and my reputation ruined forever, etc. Then at some point in this thought loop I was like wait the most likely thing is just that no one reads this, right? More like a "huh" or a nothing at all rather than vitriolic hatred of my soul or whatever I was fearing. This was very liberating, and still is. I probably ended up over optimizing for invisibility because of the freedom I feel from it—being mostly untethered from myopic social dynamics has been really helpful for my thinking and writing.
I don't think this is quite as true for high-status people (when they get recognized). Maybe this is part of the pain of being invisible—it implies that you're low-status, which is true for most people in most contexts in the modern world, so it's not actually that bad.
You also run into Dunbar's number and related phenomena with high concentrations of people, so it's presumably even harder to be salient or high-status in an urban area, for example.
Fun post. Thanks.
I think I feel both the pain of invisibility and the comfort of invisibility at different times.
Related concepts I enjoy:
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The shadow in psychology seems to be the aspects of one's self they are denying to themselves which other people may notice about them. It's a little like the opposite of the invisibility effect which comes from other people not noticing things about them.
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The idea of "furniture" from "Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett:
Moist had a talent. He'd also acquired a lot of skills so completely that they were second nature. He'd learned to be personable, but something in his genetics made him unmemorable. He had the talent of not being noticed, for being a face in the crowd. People had difficulty describing him. He was . . . he was 'about'. He was about twenty, or about thirty. On Watch reports across the continent he was anywhere between, oh, about six feet two inches and five feet nine inches tall, hair all shades from mid-brown to blond, and his lack of distinguishing features included his entire face. He was about . . . average. What people remembered was the furniture, things like spectacles and moustaches, so he always carried a selection of both. They remembered names and mannerisms, too. He had hundreds of those.
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I feel like furniture relates well to the idea of personal branding, or branding in general, which is also the process of creating an egregore. The more people are exposed to an egregore the stronger an association it will create, so I think you can, for example, have specific outfits and accessories you wear when you want to be recognized by certain people for certain reasons and other outfits for being recognized by others or for not being recognized at all. Of course, this only works for up to a specific saturation of popularity, but as this article points out, most people do not surpass that saturation of popularity.
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Less fun of a concept, the invisibility most people have in public does not apply if you are visibly out of place. You can put this on yourself by dressing or acting out of place, but visibly marginalized people do not have the option of taking off the thing that makes them stand out, and so they do not have access to invisibility and experience the situation in a different way.
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Related to philh's "no strangers noticed", "someone noticed but didn't care", and "someone noticed, cared, but didn't react" ideas, I think "context for interaction" is interesting. If you have semi-niche pop culture references as part of your outfit, people in public will feel comfortable commenting on it to start conversation. It works because it creates enough of a shared identity to break the feeling of not wanting to bother a stranger most people have. Alternatively, people seem to feel outlandish style/accessory/behaviour is worth commenting on especially if it is genuinely uncommon, not merely an alternative style. I feel as though my experience handing out flyers and setting up a PauseAI table is a more extreme form of this, explicitly saying "I am here to give you a message, if you are willing to accept or engage". This creates a context where I am noticed and engaged with. Whether I am understood or remembered is a different matter.
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Dunbar's number suggests that "being known" is a finite resource, and the likelihood of being known falls off the further outside your social circle you go. I would expect the number of people who know of any given person follows a Pareto distribution but I'm not sure exactly why it should. I'd be interested to learn or consider more.
To your last point: the fact that "being known" spans ~8 orders of magnitude probably makes this pretty likely a Pareto distribution. Or whatever distribution is closest surely shares many of its characteristics. Also the fact that being known helps with being known. Increasing your "being known degree" by 5% is probably not that much more difficult when 100M people know you vs when 100K people know you.
Not sure how much this generalizes. E.g. attractive girls who get whistles and catcalls when they walk in a city probably don't feel invisible. Or if you are bullied at school, your bullies may comment on everything you do.
So, some people are invisible, some are too visible... what are the rules? (My first guess would be that you are invisible to nice strangers; but a hostile stranger will notice and evaluate you as a potential victim.)
This has been proven to me on multiple occasions when I have done relatively "transgressive" things in public, things like jumping fences, and been surprised that no strangers noticed.
I find social invisibility one of the most deeply depressing aspects of modernity. It is a minor weight on my days.
"Personally I recommend making peace with it and finding a way to enjoy life anyway, but that’s harder for some people than others."
I dislike the term "make peace with it." You "make peace" with an opponent by no longer fighting them, but most people aren't fighting social invisibility at all. Maybe if they did, say, by trying to become visibly famous or dressing in a strange way, they would be happier. I know multiple people who've successfully done this.
If you hate social invisibility, you can do something about it. I recommend moving to a community where you're not invisible. Join a group house, make friends with your neighbors, or move to a small community where everyone knows each other.
4This has been proven to me on multiple occasions when I have done relatively "transgressive" things in public, things like jumping fences, and been surprised that no strangers noticed.
I guess it can be hard to distinguish between "no strangers noticed", "someone noticed but didn't care", and "someone noticed, cared, but didn't react". I once saw someone do a wall backflip in public, and thought it was cool, but he presumably didn't notice me notice him.
I feel like jumping a fence is pretty likely to be noticed - though not shocking if it isn't, depending how many people are around. But even if someone does notice, and dislikes that you're doing it, what are they gonna do?
So distinguishing between them also doesn't usually matter.
Indeed, when I encounter strangers who behave in unusual ways I sometimes make an effort not to look like I notice them even though I do, as "behaves unusual" tends to make them unpredictable and usually I'm not interested in "provoking" them. Sure, that person climbing a fence in plain sight of the public may just be some friendly rationalist to whom I could express my curiosity about their endeavors, but they may also be some kind of unhinged person without self control, what do I know.
So, maybe I would even reframe invisibility - in some settings at least - to something like "don't care & don't trust & can't be bothered to engage".
Back in the Boy Scouts, at summer camp, myself and a couple friends snuck out one night after curfew to commandeer a couch someone had left by a dumpster at the other end of the camp (maybe a half kilometer away).
Now, our particular designated adult was a very stick-to-the-rules type, so we definitely did not want to get caught. I, therefore, made my way slowly and sneakily. The summer camp was in the woods, so I’d keep myself behind trees and bushes and out of the light anytime someone went by. At one point I literally hunkered down in a ditch, staying below the line of the headlights of a passing car. At another point I was maybe five feet from a guy, standing in a shadow, entirely unnoticed. It was slow, but a very fun game, and I was not noticed.
… and then I arrived to find that my two friends had done the walk much more quickly. They didn’t bother hiding at all. They just… walked over. Nobody particularly cared. Sure, our curfew violation was salient to us, but nobody else out that night was paying any attention to us. Why would they?
What I learned from that experience is that nearly everyone is, by default, invisible to nearly everyone else nearly all of the time.
If walking among strangers, it takes really quite a lot before anyone will pay you any attention at all. It’s probably not going to happen by accident, at least not to you. It certainly isn’t going to happen by sending subtle signals of any sort; zero of the strangers will pay attention to any of those.
The ancestral environment was… presumably not like this. Our ancestors were probably surrounded by strangers to a much lesser degree, and therefore were for less invisible. Our brains are probably not calibrated to the degree of our own invisibility, in the modern environment. That can cause emotional difficulties.
People relate to invisibility differently. I tend to find it comforting, safe; an invisible person attracts no threats. Other times I find it freeing: invisibility means I can just do stuff, and nobody will say anything or even pay attention, even when I do things which feel blatant to me.
… but on the flip side, for many people, invisibility feels like nobody cares. It feels like being unwanted. Like nobody being interested in you at all, like nobody would notice if you disappeared. And yeah, that’s all true to a pretty large extent; most of us are surrounded to a very large extent by strangers who mostly don’t notice us much. Personally I recommend making peace with it and finding a way to enjoy life anyway, but that’s harder for some people than others.
I suspect that a lot of people flinch away from their own invisibility. They feel the pain of “nobody notices you enough to care” (and the comfort of safety and freedom is not as salient). And then they tell themselves whatever story they can, to pretend that more people care more than they actually do. And one side effect of that flinch is to vastly overestimate the extent to which people notice when we Just Do Stuff.