4) ———>

The Pareto Principle is a familiar 80/20 principle in economics, business and production: roughly eighty per cent of an outcome comes from twenty per cent of the population or field at which one is aiming. In this sense, if you have ten thousand people in your network of readers, perhaps only two thousand are likely to be your principal audience. Of a thousand Facebook friends, in the best case perhaps only two hundred will have even a minimal meaningful engagement with your posts, such as liking them; and of those two hundred, perhaps only forty will engage somewhat more deeply. But if you are truly looking for a genuine audience for something you regard as important, make your aim the “individuals,” not the numbers. The quality of a group does not increase in a simple linear relationship with its size. Sometimes one person may offer a force more valuable than thousands. Never abandon your highest values, who you truly are or what you genuinely believe simply for popularity, because only then will those valuable and genuine individuals be able to find you.

If, with consistency and continuity, you share work of value with others and make an honest effort to invite them to think, introduce them to the beauty of your artistic work or even simply make them laugh, you will gradually create a brand around your work, and eventually that brand will find its audience—people who are sincerely interested in what you do and believe in its value.

If, on the other hand, most of what you share—more than forty per cent of it—is concerned only with yourself and does not move beyond photographs and writings about “me” and what this “important me” feels, perhaps it is worth thinking more carefully about the same question that the elderly woman asked Lacie. The truth is that if we spend eight hours a day trying to present a brighter and better image of ourselves in order to receive likes from others, it will gradually become harder to accept the greyer and less luminous reality of our own lives—especially because we live in a world in which we compare our grey reality with the bright, colourful but often unreal images of other people's happiness.

To what extent, in your view, is other people's opinion of you equivalent to truth or a reflection of reality? To what extent does the opinion of others determine your value, or the value of a piece of writing, a photograph or anything else? The answers to these questions are inversely related to our self-confidence and to the respect we have for ourselves, for others and for truth. The more affirmative our answer, the more our life is organised around seeking the approval of others.

Some time ago I was reading research from Stanford University concerning students who had died by suicide. Many of them, even up to the time of their deaths, presented an idealised and happy picture of themselves on social media. The researchers called this phenomenon Duck Syndrome: ducks appear to glide smoothly and effortlessly across the water, while beneath the surface their feet are struggling continuously to make that movement possible—something invisible to anyone watching the duck move serenely over the surface.

It is important to understand that neither the image we present nor the image of happiness we see in the photographs, journeys and parties of others is the whole picture of our lives or theirs. What ultimately matters is who we are within ourselves.

In his well-known play No Exit!, Jean-Paul Sartre tells the story of three sinners condemned to remain in hell for eternity. Yet in this story hell is neither fire nor physical torture. Hell is simply a small furnished room in which the three are condemned to spend eternity together while each believes himself or herself to be better than the image the other two hold.

The final statement of the play, spoken by Joseph Garcin, one of its three central characters, is “Hell is other people!”—a phrase connected to Sartre's philosophical idea of “the Look.” The presence of others causes us to experience ourselves as an Object, transforming us from a free human being into a “thing” among other things. The presence of others thus becomes a hell for our freedom because it freezes us into the fixed form of what we are—what Sartre describes through our Facticity—and prevents our Transcendence.