Published in On Our Selection News, July 28, 2016

It’s impossible to not care about what other people think.

There’s plenty of people on the Facebook who will attest to the fact that they don’t have a duck to give about others’ opinion of them. Why they would give people a type of web-footed poultry I’m not sure, but people on social media love to tell the world they don’t consider others’ opinions about them important.

Everywhere you look, people are proclaiming that they don’t care if people are judging them. They live by their own rules, apparently. And that’s great, but I don’t know if it’s completely true 100 per cent of the time.

Sure, we all have times when we say “dash the neighbours” and let our freak flags fly, but usually this has to involve a pint or two of something. Because we all know the world is a judgemental place. I know this, because I am a gleeful participant.

Kid yourself all you want about not being judgemental or prejudicial in any way, but it’s in our nature. Humans born with eyes, noses and ears not just so we can see, smell and hear when food is near, but so we can sense dangers. In the early days, back before the wheel or even the Nokia 3315, humans needed to sense danger in order to survive. Now that we have supermarkets and mozzie repellent, the major dangers we have to avoid in our cushy Western lives are social dangers. The threat of being uncool. The threat of being a dingbat.

Because, from an evolutionary standpoint, dingbats are bad news. To put it succinctly, either you are one and or are associated with a group of the uncool and no one wants to breed with you or share their half-eaten antelope carcass with you. You die from starvation and produce no young to guilt into feeding you. It’s science: we use our senses to avoid becoming an undesirable.

Kid yourself all you want but we all know the opinion that really matters is the one you imagine people have of you.

Let me take you back to just over a week ago. There I was, standing in line at KFC wearing socks with thongs like a maniac. To make matters worse, my socks were turned inside out. I hadn’t showered at all that day. I smelt like a second-hand gorilla’s armpit. I was having lunch, but it was about 6.30pm. I wasn’t in a good way. The venue, the outfit, the unconscious hunching over like a 120-year-old woman in a shawl: it was all very sad.

In fact, it was more than just sad, it was confusing. How did it get to this point? I mean, I’ve eaten kale multiple times! I had a tertiary education and a loving family and (as far as I know) no horrific memories I had been repressing. And yet, here I was, taking dump in the toilet of the world’s greasiest fast food restaurants on a Saturday night, reeking of sweat and Windex, wearing socks and thongs. How did it all come to this:

( As a bit of background: the music in the toilet sounded like it was chosen by a weedy 16-year-old who wears a shell necklace and hopes to get a DJ gig at Schoolies events and was louder and more obnoxious than a Bulldogs fan sitting in a clump of Broncos supporters at Suncorp Stadium) 

I mean, KFC is delicious. But after that news story came out of China about a 25-year-old girl not leaving KFC for a week after being dumped, I’ve always associated the chicken joint with the deluded and the downright pathetic. So it was fitting perhaps that I was drawn to that particular fast food outlet on this, my last night in NSW.

I walked in with my head hanging in shame.

But a thought crept into my head, “perhaps these people are the dingbats and you are the cool one”. I realised that, while I cared about what people thought of me, I didn’t care about what THESE people thought of me. Because they were in NSW and I was blowing that popsicle stand.