Newsrooms are rarely not full of tension, and sometimes, these tensions boil over, as tensions are wont to do. Which is why, in 2014, I found myself swearing at my boss, a woman I liked and utterly respected. I can’t remember what the problem was, only that my response – “I don’t give a f**k what you think” – probably wasn’t the solution. And that’s when I realised I wasn’t a people-pleaser.
Did the phrase exist 12 years ago? Probably – but it wasn’t bandied about with the same casual, crashingly misused alacrity as it is now; the ultimate example of misused therapy speak. In 2026, everyone’s a people-pleaser, just as everyone has OCD. I hate to break it to you, but gaining satisfaction from lining your cans up neatly in your kitchen cupboard doesn’t mean you have OCD (though it might: I’m not a doctor). Likewise, holding the door open for a colleague, letting your housemate borrow your top or agreeing to go to a pub you don’t like as much as the pub round the corner with the better beer garden doesn’t make you a people-pleaser.
Although it doesn’t not make you a people-pleaser either. So conditioned are we to “Conditionitis” that even the mildest behavioural issues will have us slapping labels on them and elevating them to a syndrome. When it comes to the trend of medicalising our often perfectly normal personalities, I blame TikTok, a platform as rife with misinformation about mental health as it is dreary unboxing videos of influencers in ill-advised leopard-print flares.
