When you're twenty, you worry about what people think.<p>When you're forty, you don't care what people think.<p>And when you're sixty, you realize that nobody was thinking about you in the first place.
One key insight about social relationships that took me a while to understand is that people respond mainly to whether you are life-affirming in your behavior or not. If you have things going on in your life and aren't afraid to exist as a person, they will naturally gravitate to you and give you a lot of leeway. Being a nice person or an asshole is orthogonal to the issue: they are just facets that may help or hinder this depending on the situation. In fact, they are defined entirely in relation to people's general impression of you so they have no real meaning on their own.<p>People then end up frustrated because they often confuse being weak and hollow as being nice and being assertive and self-directed with being an asshole.<p>In a way, we are Veblen goods: it's all about status and perceived scarcity in the end, whether it's conscious or not. That is not necessarily a negative or depressing thing as it also is the engine behind great things happening.
It is good to not care what people think about you.<p>And bad to act like an asshole.<p>If you act nice, and don't care what people think about you, you can't lose, and most people will like to have you around.<p>Assholes might still annoy you, but when that happens, your friends will help you to feel better.
During my life (especially school years but also early in my career) I have found that people who come across as thinking I am an asshole don't really think I am an asshole.<p>In each and every case these people were relatively underprivileged and could be described as underachievers. In some cases these people had more money than me, or they had more academic achievements, etc., so their feelings can't just be described as "envy" or "jealousy".<p>I think it's a more complex emotion that has to do with knowing both your status in society and what your future looks like - none of these people went on to achieve much in their career, and in a couple of cases they weren't even able to land a job in the industry in the first place, while I was already working on exciting projects when I was a student.<p>Some people are allergic to the success and hard work of others, but when it comes to working hard themselves they just "can't be arsed" for whatever reason.
Sometimes the people who think you're an asshole are your friends. You turned into an asshole after they became your friends. It's time to change.
I'm tired of people using the word "asshole" as if it were a coherent concept in serious discussion of social behavior. "Asshole" is just an immature term of abuse. It doesn't mean anything specific enough to construct a theory around.
I think awareness helps alot with these kind of issues.<p>It's not about people not liking you. It's about the implication of this fact which is that you might be a bad person. Are you a bad person? Or are you a good person which happened to have a behavior which turned others against you?<p>Second, is good to meditate on this idea of the image you are trying to keep consistent with everyone. It's almost like slaving away to make all people like you. But that's impossible because whatever you do someone might think you're an asshole anyway.<p>So just focus on being a good person in your eyes and the rest will follow. And be kind to yourself, we all make mistakes.
I think about this a lot. I try to be kind to everyone, but there are at least a handful of people in the world who cringe when they think about me.<p>¯\_(ツ)_/¯<p>Happy Sunday.
I feel a strong need to be accepted by other people, and one of the ways that I meet that need is by considering how my actions ("taking the leap") might affect others. Sometimes, though, I place more value on others' needs than my own. This can lead to sadness that I'm not able to do what I want.<p>This author seems like he wants to overcome this fear of how others may respond, and do the thing anyway. I'm reminded of the stages of emotional liberation:<p>First stage: Emotional slavery: we see ourselves responsible for others’ feelings.<p>Second stage: “Obnoxious”: we feel angry; we no longer want to be responsible for others’ feelings.<p>Third stage: Emotional liberation: we take responsibility for our intentions and actions.<p>[1] - <a href="https://about-nvc.tumblr.com/post/98642157391/from-emotional-slavery-to-emotional-liberation-the" rel="nofollow">https://about-nvc.tumblr.com/post/98642157391/from-emotional...</a>
there is no content here. I wish she had said more<p>Being an asshole is not the worst thing you can be. A lot of famous, successful people who are well liked have somewhat asshole qualities. The thing you really do not want to be is an ignoramus--someone who is an asshole but with no redeeming qualities.
I feel the issue with a lot of this advice like "don't care about what other people think about you", "be yourself" is, it tries to free people from one extreme (caring too much about what other people think for example) by talking about the opposite extreme.<p>It is helpful to have awareness about how your behaivor and actions may affect others, depending on the situation and your relationship with them, and how they may perceive or react to it. I find the key is to have and develop values you consistently act and live by so even if someone reacts negatively or different from what you expected, you don't feel this means you did something wrong or need to change something about yourself.
An excellent essay on the topic: <i>A theory of jerks</i> by Eric Schwitzgebel<p><a href="https://aeon.co/essays/so-you-re-surrounded-by-idiots-guess-who-the-real-jerk-is" rel="nofollow">https://aeon.co/essays/so-you-re-surrounded-by-idiots-guess-...</a>
It doesn't matter what you do, if it experiences some success, no matter how fleeting someone somewhere will get really upset about it. I believe that part of this is connected to the inversion of small-scale private conversations into large-scale text-driven public ones without us really being fully aware of the difference.<p>Without the context of non-verbal communication or the closeness towards people we've never met we react differently online to offline. I think it's important not to lose sight of the idea that people can blow up online, call you every name under the sun and still be perfectly good people.<p>I found Innuendo Studios' Why Are You So Angry[1] and SSC's varieties of Argumentative Experience[2] really helpful in coming to terms with my own online behaviour. There's also a pg essay[3] that's fairly relevant. I particularly enjoyed Rationality.org's double-cruxing approach[4].<p>Right now I'm focusing on avoiding continuing discussions at the point they stop adding overall. Nobody's perfect but it's definitely keeping my internal Angry Jack at bay.<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y8XgGhXkTQ&list=PLJA_jUddXvY62dhVThbeegLPpvQlR4CjF" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y8XgGhXkTQ&list=PLJA_jUddXv...</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/08/varieties-of-argumentative-experience/" rel="nofollow">https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/08/varieties-of-argumenta...</a><p>[3] - <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html</a><p>[4] - <a href="https://www.rationality.org/resources/updates/2016/double-crux" rel="nofollow">https://www.rationality.org/resources/updates/2016/double-cr...</a>