We humans have an unerring capacity to create the situations we try so hard to avoid

14/3/2026

A friend told me a story about how in a group of people who had just met each other there was one who was always harping on about some of their differences, making sure that everyone knew that they were aware of these differences in money and class and background. In these days of being able to ‘find friends’ on their phones they had shared numbers and now this person was always tracking where the others were and complaining about not being told about what they were doing. What this individual was managing to do was get themselves pushed out of the group.  What they wanted more than anything was to be part of that group.

My suggestion is that their anxiety was such that they felt almost impelled to let people know about the differences they noticed, quite what they thought they would achieve by this is an unknown, but clearly, they wanted to make sure that everyone knew that they were different.  Even though all of the group came from different places there were perhaps more similarities between the others and the individual noticed that so wanted to point it out. Maybe they hoped it would gain them some sympathy or some interest in the fact of being different.

More importantly, I suspect, they were so anxious about being left out of things that they tracked all the others on their phones and then noticed if people were not where they expected them to be.  Given that they were all just getting to know each other there will have been a lot of ‘unexpected’ comings and goings but this individual found that quite frightening, it played easily into their fear of being left out.

This is a relatively common occurrence, people want to be liked, to be part of the group, to be recognised by others and end up pushing them away and irritating them by the almost constant refrain of Where are you? What are you doing ? Why haven’t you let me know where you are going?.  It can happen in social groups, or at work where it is important to feel part of the team or the organisation.

My thinking here is that it is important to focus on the anxiety rather than the activities.  What is that you are feeling anxious about? Can you find ways to reassure yourself without checking where the others are.  If people in your group are doing it, it might be helpful to see if you can find ways to let them know that they are part of the group, reassuring the anxiety that is driving the activity.