I mean like people like parents/siblings/spouses/significant others/kids/roomates/housemates…
I mean, I have paranoia about other things too (such as germaphobia/mysophobia), but specifically on this issue of people snooping, is amongst one of my top fears, and I’m just curious if other have this similar fear/paranoia.
Like every time I wake up, I wonder if my parents or brother put some malware/spyware on my phone because they think its a funny prank or whatever.
Every time I enter my PIN for my phone, I always cover the screen before entering it in case my parents have cameras in the house. And even more so in public, I’d fear CCTV getting my PIN.
[No, I have not been diagnosed with schizophrenia, I don’t hallucinate or anything like that. (But I do have a diagnosis of depression.)]
[This is distinct from the common fears of government surveillance or whatever. That, strangely enough, I fear much less, since I’m just one in hundreds of millions of people that they would care about, so I’m not so worried about that.]
No. But sometimes I wonder if anyone around me can read my thoughts and I become super self-conscious of what I’m thinking.
The buddhists say something like “watch your thoughts because thoughts become actions”.
Could be some part of you is using “other people can tell what I’m thinking” to represent the reality that “the world will judge* me based on [what I do]*”
Where these terms can be expanded to:
So even if individuals around you can’t hear each of your individual thoughts, your mind uses that scenario to represent the reality that the contents of your head will come out, and the world of people will respond when it does.
This is probably why we have such a tendency to believe in “God”, which is an omniscient person. Just like the hippocampus which evolved for navigating physical environments also serves as a planning center for navigating abstract landscapes of possibility, it could be whatever mechanisms evolved to handle other individuals who will modulate their relationship to us based on how we treat them, to also model the way that certain behaviors will eventually lead to certain types of response from physical reality and the social world.