Most times, in our self-absorption, we assume that people are talking about us. When some of us enter a social gathering, we are so self-conscious in our exaggerated self-importance that we think that all eyes at the party are centred on us especially so, if we believed the designer-dress we adorned was the rarest attire in town.

Actors, writers, newscasters, musicians and other artistes engaged in various genres of the performing arts belong in this category of people who believe that the world owes them attention and notice.

Politicians, notorious for flaunting their presence on captured citizens also belong in the category of people who believe that they are always the centre of people’s attention.

Another category of people are the nouveau riche, those who suddenly stumbled on wealth and thought that everybody in the gathering ought to recognize that a billionaire has arrived as one of special dignitaries. They believe the gold or golden chain dangling on their chests should be evidence enough of the wearer’s status!

No! You are the one noticing yourself! You are the one who assume, it is an assumption, that you are being noticed and everybody else in the gathering had suspended their lives to watch you.

Human beings are generally pre-occupied with various degrees of challenges in their personal lives that they hardly bother to expend their thoughts on other people. They are not concerned about your presence.

What is most laughable is for people in their 70s and 80s, or even beyond that age bracket still craving for recognition. Most human beings that are talked about or discussed in serious circles are people who had made their marks in their 30s, 40s or in few cases, in their 60s. If at age 70 or 80 one is still under the illusion that the life that had passed them in their mid-life could still be lived in the evening or sun-set of their lives, they must be living in a fool’s paradise.

This brings me to the kernel of this essay. We are talking of people who live in self-delusion that members of their families, members of their extended families, members of their villages or old acquaintances and former colleagues are talking about them. Wherever they are, they are constantly enamoured with the thought that someone somewhere or some people somewhere must be talking about them.

Some people, maybe they make an unusual appearance in a newspaper story, or they appear in the footnote of television news or they are just appointed or elected as an official of an organization [which no one other than the members of that organization knows anything about]  begin to nurse this self-elevated feeling that they have suddenly become ‘talk of the town’.

It is a serious matter.

Quite a number of people on the other hand lose their confidence, their self-esteem because they suspect that other people are talking about them. It could be a sign of inferiority complex or a total lack of self-confidence when a woman feels shy to walk straight to the altar in a church gathering or when someone is called upstage to receive a prize and he or she starts shuffling their feet. It is a thought in their subconscious that suggests to them that everyone in the gathering is talking about them.

It is a carry-over of this kind of mind-set which makes some people gloat at the airport or at any group-event and they start screaming at whoever is perceived to have crossed their redline with rhetoric like ‘Do you know who I am?’ Comeon! If you don’t know who you are, who cares?

People who spend a life time imagining that other people are talking about them should please learn some modesty or if such a feeling is due to lack of confidence, they should buckle-up and dismiss the notion that the world cares about them.

There are millions of organizations, NGOs and other agencies all over the world with their leaderships and Chief  Operating Officers and it is therefore ludicrous for a leader of any of such organizations to believe that the world is talking about them.

There are presidents, prime ministers and heads of state whose countries are hardly recognized on the world map. Yet, some of these back of the wood leaders believe that the world is talking about them. And so it is with some village champions who delude themselves with the thought that they are the centre of discussions in various homes in the country.

Pathological insecurity which drives some people to crave for attention also makes people feel that they are being talked about at gatherings or even behind their back.

Please relax.

Nobody is talking about you!

** Tola Adeniyi, veteran journalist, is Chairman/Managing Consultant, The Knowledge Plaza