Chapter 9: Under the Eyes of Others

Forty-Three Likes

Selma is twenty-four and works in a bookshop. On Saturday, she went hiking with friends, and in the evening she posts a photograph of herself standing on a rock at the top of a hill, the valley spread out behind her. She likes the photograph. She feels free and strong in it.

Over the next hour, she checks her phone eleven times. The photograph has forty-three likes. A friend's photograph from the same day, taken at almost the same spot, has over two hundred. Selma looks at her own picture again. Suddenly she sees things she did not see before: her hair is messy, her jacket is old, her smile looks forced. The photograph that made her feel free an hour ago now makes her feel small. She deletes it.

Later, lying in bed, she feels foolish. The hike was wonderful. The view was beautiful. Her legs still ache pleasantly from the climb. Nothing about the day has changed. What changed was that she began to see herself through other people's eyes, or rather, through her guess about how other people saw her. And in that imagined gaze, her experience shrank.

Selma's evening is a modern version of an experience that Jean-Paul Sartre described in great detail more than eighty years ago, long before anyone posted photographs online. He called it "the look", and he believed it revealed something fundamental about how we exist among other people. This chapter explores his idea, his famous play about three people trapped in a room, and what both might teach us about living under the eyes of others.

The Keyhole

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre gave an example that has become one of the most famous passages in twentieth-century philosophy. Here it is in my own retelling.

Imagine that, out of jealousy or curiosity, you have bent down to look through a keyhole into a room. You are completely absorbed in what you are seeing and hearing. In that moment, you are not thinking about yourself at all. There is only the scene on the other side of the door, and your attention to it.

Then you hear footsteps in the corridor behind you. Someone is there. Someone is looking at you. Suddenly everything changes. You become aware of yourself, bent over, eye to the keyhole, in an embarrassing position. You feel your face grow hot. You feel shame. A moment ago, you were simply looking. Now you are someone who is being looked at, and seen as a person spying through a keyhole.

Sartre used this example to show how the presence of another person transforms our experience of ourselves. Before the footsteps, you were the centre of your own world, looking out. After the footsteps, you discovered that you also exist in another person's world, as an object seen from outside. You have a side that you cannot see but that the other person can: how you look, what you seem to be doing, what kind of person you appear to be.

Sartre called this experience the look. It is not only about eyes. It is about the awareness that other people see us, judge us and give us an identity that we cannot fully control. And shame, in his account, is the feeling of recognizing that we are, in part, what others see.

Becoming an Object

Why does the look matter so much? According to Sartre, it is because the other person is free, just as we are. They can see us however they choose. They can interpret our actions, judge our character and fix us with labels: "the spy", "the lazy one", "the show-off", "the failure". We cannot control their freedom. We can only live with the fact that we exist, in part, in their eyes.

This creates a deep tension in human life. On the one hand, we are free subjects, making choices and creating meaning, as the earlier chapters have explored. On the other hand, in the eyes of others, we are also objects, with a certain appearance, reputation and character that we did not fully choose and cannot fully change.

Sartre was rather pessimistic about this tension. In Being and Nothingness, he described human relationships as a kind of constant struggle, in which each person tries to escape being made into an object by the other, often by trying to make the other into an object in turn. Many readers have found this picture too bleak, and de Beauvoir developed a more hopeful view of our bonds with others, which we will see in the next chapter. But Sartre's description captures something that many people recognize: the discomfort of being judged, and the strange way that others' opinions can change how we see ourselves.

Think of Selma's photograph. Before she imagined others' reactions, she saw it from the inside: the freedom of the hike, the strength in her legs, the beauty of the view. After, she saw it from the outside, as an object to be judged and compared. Her experience did not change. Her position in relation to it did. She had moved from being the one who looked to being the one who was looked at.

A Room With No Exit

Sartre also explored the look in a short play, dramatic and darkly funny, that was first staged in 1944. Its title is usually translated as No Exit. It is one of his most performed works, and it contains a line that has become one of the most famous sentences of the twentieth century.

The play is set in hell, but not the hell of fire and torture that many traditions imagine. Instead, three people who have recently died are shown into an ordinary, rather old-fashioned sitting room. There are no torturers, no flames, no mirrors. The lights never go out, and nobody can sleep. The three strangers, a man and two women, slowly realize that they have been put together for a reason. Each of them needs something from the others, especially the others' approval and a particular way of being seen, and each refuses to give the others what they need. They watch, judge and torment each other endlessly. Near the end of the play, one character realizes that there is no need for torturers: the other people are the torture. He sums this up in one of the most quoted lines of the century, which equates the torment of hell with the simple presence of others.

This phrase is often misunderstood as meaning that other people are simply unbearable, or that we would be better off alone. Sartre later explained that this was not his meaning. In a commentary on the play, he said, in substance, that he meant something more specific: that when our relationships with others are twisted or corrupted, when we depend completely on others' judgments to know who we are, then other people can become a kind of hell for us. The characters in the play are trapped not just by the locked room, but by their total dependence on how the others see them.

Read in this way, No Exit is less a statement about other people and more a warning about a way of living. If we hand our whole sense of self over to the opinions of others, we lock ourselves in a room with no exit. Selma, checking her phone eleven times and deleting a photograph she loved because of a number, was, for an evening, in a small version of that room.

There is a striking detail in the play that is easy to miss: the door is not always locked. At one point, it opens, and one of the characters could leave. He does not. He stays, because he cannot bear to go without first convincing one of the others to see him in the way he wants to be seen. The room with no exit, in other words, is partly of the characters' own making. They are held there by their need for approval as much as by any lock. Many readers find this detail the most haunting part of the play, because it suggests that our own rooms with no exit may also have doors we are choosing not to use.

Living for the Gaze

Many people today live much of their lives under an imagined gaze. We think about how we look, how our homes look, how our jobs, children, holidays and meals look to others. Social media has made this gaze more constant and more measurable, with numbers of likes, followers and comments. But the basic experience is ancient. People have always cared about reputation, status and how they appear to their neighbours.

Caring about others' opinions is not in itself a problem. We are social beings, and the views of people we respect can guide and improve us. A friend's honest feedback, a teacher's encouragement or a colleague's criticism can help us grow. The problem arises when the gaze becomes the main measure of our worth, when we stop asking "Is this good?" or "Do I value this?" and only ask "How will this look?"

When we live for the gaze, several things tend to happen. We start choosing our actions to please others rather than from our own values. We feel anxious much of the time, because others' opinions are outside our control. We compare ourselves constantly, usually with people who seem to be doing better. And we may lose touch with our own experience, as Selma did, seeing our lives from the outside rather than living them from the inside.

Sartre's analysis also shows why living for the gaze can never fully succeed. Other people are free. Their opinions will always be partly unpredictable and beyond our control. We can never collect enough approval to be safe. However many likes Selma's photograph received, someone else's would always have more, and the next photograph would need approval all over again.

Seeing this clearly can be liberating. If we can never fully control how others see us, we can stop trying so hard, and turn our attention back to what we can choose: our own actions, values and experience. Others will still look. We will still be seen. But we do not have to live inside their eyes.

It can help to notice how rarely other people are actually thinking about us as much as we fear. Most people are busy with their own lives, their own worries and their own sense of being watched. The audience we imagine is often far more attentive, more critical and more interested in us than any real audience. This is not a reason to feel unimportant. It is a reason to feel freer. If others are mostly looking at their own lives, we can look at ours.

Being Seen Can Also Be a Gift

It would be a mistake to conclude that being seen by others is always a threat. Sartre's description focuses on the uncomfortable side of the look, and it is a powerful description. But many thinkers, including de Beauvoir, emphasized that being seen can also be a source of recognition, connection and love.

Think of being truly seen by a friend who understands you, or by a partner who loves you as you are, or by a teacher who recognizes a talent you did not know you had. In these moments, the other person's gaze does not reduce us to an object. It confirms and enriches us. We feel known, valued and less alone.

The difference often lies in the quality of the look. A look that judges, labels and compares tends to diminish us. A look that is curious, open and caring tends to support us. And the difference also lies in us: in whether we depend on others' looks for our entire sense of self, or whether we can receive them as one part of a life that is also grounded in our own choices and values.

There is also the matter of choosing whose eyes matter. Selma was affected by the vague, anonymous gaze of people online, many of whom she barely knew. If she had shown her photograph to her closest friend, who had been on the hike with her, the response might have been very different: "You look so happy there. What a day that was." Not all gazes deserve the same weight. Part of living well among others is choosing carefully whose opinions we take to heart.

How We Look at Others

Sartre's idea of the look has another side that is easy to forget. We are not only looked at. We also look. And when we look at others, we, too, can turn them into objects, fixing them with labels and judgments.

Think of how quickly we judge strangers: by their clothes, their accent, their job, their appearance. Think of how we sometimes label people we know: "my lazy brother", "my difficult colleague", "that neighbour who never smiles". These labels may contain some truth, but they also freeze people, denying their freedom to be more and different. Just as we dislike being reduced to what others see, others dislike being reduced to what we see.

An existentialist ethic of looking might involve trying to see others as free subjects, not only as objects: remembering that the person we are judging has their own inner life, their own choices, their own reasons and their own capacity to change. This does not mean that we should never judge actions. It means remembering that a person is always more than our picture of them.

This connects with the simple, old practice of listening fully to others, without preparing our verdict while they are still speaking. When we look at someone with openness rather than with a fixed judgment, we give them room to be more than our label. And often, they surprise us.

Parents, teachers and managers have a special responsibility here, because their look carries extra weight. A child who is often looked at as "the difficult one" may come to see themselves that way. A worker whom a manager sees only as "average" may stop trying to be more. On the other hand, a look that sees possibility can help a person grow into it. Being aware of the power of our look, especially over people who depend on us, is part of using our freedom well.

Four Lives Under the Gaze

Gregor is forty-six and manages a small team in an engineering firm. He is terrified of looking incompetent in front of his staff and his superiors. He never admits mistakes, rarely asks questions and works late every night to make sure nothing he does can be criticized. He is exhausted, and his team finds him distant. When a coaching course asks participants to describe the "audience" they imagine watching them, Gregor realizes that he has been living for an imagined panel of judges. He begins, slowly, to admit small mistakes and ask for help. To his surprise, his team respects him more, not less. The judges were mostly in his head.

Lotte is fifteen and has started wearing only certain clothes, listening to certain music and expressing certain opinions, because these are what the popular group at school approves of. She is unhappy, but she is afraid of being laughed at if she shows who she really is. When a new student arrives who openly loves old films and wears unusual clothes, and who seems not to care what others think, Lotte is fascinated. They become friends. With that one ally, Lotte begins to show more of herself. Some people laugh. But she discovers that being seen as she really is, by a few people, is better than being approved of for being someone else.

Sergio is seventy and was widowed three years ago. Recently, he has become friends with a woman he met at a community choir, and he would like to invite her to dinner. But he is worried about what his children, his neighbours and his late wife's friends will think. Will they judge him for moving on? He talks to his daughter, who tells him that she wants him to be happy. He realizes that he has been living under an imagined gaze of disapproval that, at least in his daughter's case, did not exist. He invites his friend to dinner. Some neighbours do gossip. Sergio finds that he does not mind as much as he expected.

Selma, from the beginning of this chapter, decides to try an experiment. For a month, she stops posting photographs online. She still takes them, but she shares them only with the friends who were there, or keeps them for herself. At first, she feels a pull to post and check. Then, gradually, she notices that she enjoys her experiences more while they are happening, because she is no longer half-planning how they will look. At the end of the month, she starts posting again, but less often, and she stops checking the numbers.

Gregor, Lotte, Sergio and Selma each lived, for a time, under a gaze that shaped their choices: of judges, of a group, of disapproving neighbours, of anonymous viewers. In each case, they could not stop being seen. But they could change how much power they gave to the gaze, and whose eyes they let matter. In doing so, they stepped out of a small room with no exit.

Practical Steps

First, notice the imagined audience. When you feel anxious about how something will look, ask: who exactly am I imagining watching me? Often, the audience is vague, harsh and larger than reality.

Second, return to your own experience. When you catch yourself seeing your life from the outside, as Selma did with her photograph, deliberately return to how it feels from the inside. What did you actually experience? What do you actually value about it?

Third, choose whose eyes matter. Make a short list of people whose honest opinion you truly respect. Give their views weight. Give the vague, anonymous gaze much less.

Fourth, limit the measures. If counting likes, followers or other measures of approval affects your mood, try reducing how often you check them, or taking a break.

Fifth, look at others more freely. When you catch yourself labelling someone, remember that they are a free person, with an inner life and the capacity to change. Try to see them freshly.

Sixth, find an ally. Like Lotte, you may find it easier to be yourself when at least one other person sees and accepts you. Seek such people out, and be such a person for others.

A Short Exercise: The Imagined Audience

This exercise takes about twenty minutes. It helps you see more clearly whose gaze shapes your choices.

Think of an area of your life where you often worry about how you appear: your work, your appearance, your home, your parenting, your social life or something else. Write it at the top of a page.

Now imagine that there is an audience watching you in this area of your life. Describe them. Who is in the audience? Are they real people or vague figures? What do they think of you? What do they want from you? What would make them approve, and what would make them disapprove? Write everything down, without censoring.

Next, look at your description and ask: how much of this is based on real evidence, such as things people have actually said, and how much is my imagination? Mark the parts that are real with one colour or symbol, and the imagined parts with another.

Then ask: if this audience disappeared completely, what would I do differently in this area of my life? Write down at least three things.

Finally, choose one of those things and try it this week, while noticing how the imagined audience reacts in your mind. You may find that, when you act, the audience grows quieter. Write a few sentences afterwards about what happened.

Questions People Often Ask

"Should I stop caring what others think?" Not completely. Caring about how our actions affect others, and listening to honest feedback from people we respect, is part of living well among others. The aim is not indifference, but freedom: not letting the vague, judging gaze decide your choices, while still caring about the real people in your life.

"Is social media bad, according to existentialism?" The existentialists wrote long before social media, so they did not address it directly. But their ideas can help us use it more wisely. Social media can connect us, inform us and give us joy. It can also intensify the look, making us more aware of being judged and compared. Noticing how it affects you, and choosing how to use it, is more helpful than simply calling it good or bad.

"What if the judgment of others is harsh and real, such as bullying or discrimination?" This is very different from an imagined gaze. Real harassment, bullying or discrimination can cause serious harm, and it is not something a person should simply learn to ignore. If you face such treatment, please seek support from people you trust and from the appropriate authorities, services or organizations. De Beauvoir and others wrote powerfully about how unjust social gazes, such as those directed at women and other groups, must be challenged, not just endured.

Chapter Summary

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre described a person looking through a keyhole who suddenly hears footsteps and feels shame at being seen. He called this experience the look: the awareness that other people see us, judge us and give us an identity we cannot fully control. In the eyes of others, we are not only free subjects but also objects, and Sartre described human relationships as often a struggle over this.

In his play No Exit (1944), three people in hell torment each other with their judgments, and the play's most famous line, which equates hell with the presence of others, sums up their situation. Sartre later explained that he meant that relationships become hell when we depend completely on others' judgments. Living for the gaze can never fully succeed, because others are free. Being seen can also be a gift, and we, too, look at others and can either freeze them with labels or see them as free.

In the next chapter, we turn to Simone de Beauvoir, who argued that our freedom is bound up with the freedom of others, and that we cannot truly want one without the other.