Nearly all the social attention we receive in life is from people we know: family, friends, kin, coworkers. This conditions us to care what other people say or think about us, because caring what they say or think is what makes up the reciprocal glue of the relationship. The devilish trick of social attention from strangers is that it comes with no relationship and no reciprocity attached. But you don’t realize that! Or if you do at an intellectual level, you can’t quite internalize it at the deepest level of your psyche.
