It doesn’t matter who dislikes me. It doesn’t matter who hates me. It doesn’t even matter who likes me. All that matters is how many people love me because I live under the rule of law in a city where the people I have the potential to interact with vastly outnumber the people I have the time to interact with.
In my previous post on the virtue of pompous egotistical overconfidence, rmoehn pointed out that my “[c]ocky arrogant megalomaniac behavior makes the liking scale swing positive in some people, negative in others.” Extreme variance is advantageous because the number of people who love me is all that matters. If I put off some people in the process then that’s a bonus because I don’t have to expend my own attention triaging them.
Your weirdness should scale with the size of your audience. If you are in a room with three other people then acting out will often alienate them. If you are on the Internet then it is hard to gather attention at all without great creativity.
A side-effect of ostentatious weirdness is it triggers lots of dislike. If everyone dislikes you then that is a problem. But if at least a small number of people like you—and you like them back—then you have calibrated properly.
I am irrational because I care when people dislike me. I let strangers influence my behavior even though I shouldn’t. I want to decondition this reaction. The simplest way is to expose myself to situations where people dislike me for acting genuine.
Blogging helps.
Entrepreneurship helps.
Fastidious truth-telling helps.
Cutting ties with toxic people gets easier every time.
I am told YouTube comments are a cesspool of hate. Maybe if I post videos they can help me become stronger.
Deconditioning Aversion to Dislike
It doesn’t matter who dislikes me. It doesn’t matter who hates me. It doesn’t even matter who likes me. All that matters is how many people love me because I live under the rule of law in a city where the people I have the potential to interact with vastly outnumber the people I have the time to interact with.
In my previous post on the virtue of pompous egotistical overconfidence, rmoehn pointed out that my “[c]ocky arrogant megalomaniac behavior makes the liking scale swing positive in some people, negative in others.” Extreme variance is advantageous because the number of people who love me is all that matters. If I put off some people in the process then that’s a bonus because I don’t have to expend my own attention triaging them.
Your weirdness should scale with the size of your audience. If you are in a room with three other people then acting out will often alienate them. If you are on the Internet then it is hard to gather attention at all without great creativity.
A side-effect of ostentatious weirdness is it triggers lots of dislike. If everyone dislikes you then that is a problem. But if at least a small number of people like you—and you like them back—then you have calibrated properly.
I am irrational because I care when people dislike me. I let strangers influence my behavior even though I shouldn’t. I want to decondition this reaction. The simplest way is to expose myself to situations where people dislike me for acting genuine.
Blogging helps.
Entrepreneurship helps.
Fastidious truth-telling helps.
Cutting ties with toxic people gets easier every time.
I am told YouTube comments are a cesspool of hate. Maybe if I post videos they can help me become stronger.