People that think you’re an asshole

https://leowid.com/the-people-that-think-youre-an-asshole/

by LeonW • 6 years ago

44 54 6 years ago

Shugarl• 6 years ago

Isn't this state of mind kind of dangerous ? Like a self fulfilling prophecy?

liotier• 6 years ago

It might be dangerous, but it is useful to feel righteously self-justified when about to do something that will lead people to logically deduce that you're an asshole !

tsujp• 6 years ago

Not caring what others think of you isn't the same as actively trying to screw others over or just being rude if that's what you're alluding at (I'm guessing). For example, "not caring what others think" and just cutting in-front of a queue is an objectively dick move. So in that sense, yes it's self fulfilling (but this is not what "not caring what others think" means).

Perhaps a good example of a positive "not caring what others think" might be dancing however you want; you don't feel embarrassed because you're not a good dancer you just do whatever.

Perhaps another good example is Bob is a vegan and hates that you aren't; now you don't really care anymore and can focus on eating the food you want to. Flip the roles, Bob eats whatever he wants and hates that you're a vegan; you again don't care.

jhare• 6 years ago

Actions are different from thoughts. We're judged/arrested when we do that. What people think, on the other hand, is immaterial to whether one should be happy or not.

If one is required to be concerned with not "being an asshole", how are risky ventures ever undertaken?

Tepix• 6 years ago

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.

dasyatidprime2• 6 years ago

And sometimes you were one all along, and you didn't know, and they also didn't know enough to recognize the warning signs until they'd already gotten entangled with you. Now you're about to gradually lose everyone as they realize how much of a drain you're being and quietly shut you out.

Kaze404• 6 years ago

I don't know how common this sentiment is but I definitely felt it with a previous group of friends. The behaviors you internalize just to be able to fit in with what seems like the only people that will ever like you really have no limit at all, and can lead you to do things you never thought you would.

Specifically, I strictly remember bullying this poor kid relentlessly during middle school because he (I kid you not) had lips so red he looked like he wore lipstick. You can imagine my shock when I later found out I was bisexual and that wearing lipstick is awesome actually.

BayAreaEscapee• 6 years ago

When you're twenty, you worry about what people think.

When you're forty, you don't care what people think.

And when you're sixty, you realize that nobody was thinking about you in the first place.

Blikkentrekker• 6 years ago

I really do not find that a man starts to care less about what others think of him as he ages at all.

Rather, I find it is that adults rule the conformance games that adolescents and teenagers play are “silly” all the while partaking in their own, which are of course not silly, but rather how one should conform and teenagers are wrong for not conforming to those ideals.

Consider that the parent who berates his child for smoking marihuana to be part of his clique will the next day consume alcohol at his office party, as to not be left out.

dasyatidprime2• 6 years ago

Which connects up, in the sense that you stereotypically care less in a way that you consciously notice because you gradually internalize the culture strongly enough for it to just feel like “the way things are”, and then in old age you impute upon yourself (and/or society imputes upon you) a position of sufficient immunity that you can keep saying “the kids are wrong” even as they're about to displace you.

watwut2• 6 years ago

Consider that the parent who berates his child for smoking marihuana to be part of his clique will the next day consume alcohol at his office party, as to not be left out.

I don't think this is good example. I dont want my kids to drink alcohol yet. When I do drink alcohol, it is really not so that "I am not left out". Pretty much all office parties I have been at had bunch of people who were not drinking in them.

And marihuana has added effect of being illegal in many places.

And if your kid is smoking it so that the kid fits, it absolutely makes sense to treat it as issue. Regardless of whether you sometimes drink alcohol at office party.

watwut2• 6 years ago

When you're forty, you don't care what people think.

I assure you that 40 years old do care about what people think. Partly, because people are simply wired that way, that is why we are social animals instead of solitary ones.

But the other is that it matters. What people think about you influences how they treat you, what they tell you and what chances they give you. It makes difference between being listened to and being ignored.

bonoboTP6• 6 years ago

It's a great "mind-bown" insight story, but just not true. People do judge each other and have opinions and put them in little mental boxes all the time. Impressions matter and can make or break your life. For example, anyone who used to be fat and then loses weight can attest that it matters what others think of you and they do think things. It's comfortable and uplifting and "wise" to say that nobody cares but they do. People assess their relative status and success all the time by comparing with others.

Now this doesn't mean you have to go crazy trying to satisfy everyone because you can't. People want contradictory things from you. You need to have your own moral or other principles to keep on track of a certain path in the face of rejection. But if everyone thinks you're an asshole, the answer isn't to just ignore everyone.

I think a better lesson is that it's better to have some haters and some who really like you than to have everyone be lukewarm about you and ignore you. The haters are no big issue unless they are really determined enemies, and the upside of the truly appreciative people is bigger. You can only get true deep connections if you accept the risk that some people won't like you. As long as you try to please everyone you won't really please anyone. See the story of the miller and his son.

dunmalg2• 6 years ago

It's a great "mind-blown" insight story, but just not true. People do judge each other and have opinions and put them in little mental boxes all the time

Yes, we all understand that people stereotype. I think you're getting bogged down in the details and missing the overall point, which is far more generalized. The above story is meant to be short and clever, and to do so it glosses over a few things that you're meant to pick up contextually. The point it's trying to make is this:

20 year olds tend to think people are watching, judging, and remembering their every move and are concerned about it

40 year olds still tend to think they're being watched and judged, but don't care

60 year olds realize that everyone is too busy thinking about their own situation to really pay much attention to others beyond superficial stereotyping, and that unless you affect someone deeply with your presentation, they won't likely cling to previous judgements of you.

_the_inflator• 6 years ago

I experienced this first hand on our high school reunion party. Zero people remembered my most awkward or embarrassing moments - only I did. The only thing they cared about was themselves. I was totally stunned. They had a completely different picture of me.

Then it damned on me: I couldn't really remember any other awkward nor embarrassing moments by others. All I cared about was I.

Relief. :D

bonoboTP6• 6 years ago

It doesn't matter whether they remember you decades later. What matters is whether they shun you or include you in the moment. Perhaps they don't really even notice you enough to care if you're awkward or they just know you're so awkward and "other" that there's no point in keeping track of yet another awkward moment of yours. It doesn't mean their perceptions don't influence your life.

im3w1l• 6 years ago

When you are twenty you need to prove yourself to women and employers.

When you are sixty, less of your life remains, so the stakes are lower. If you piss someone off to the point that they do you in - who cares?

VoodooJuJu• 6 years ago

I mostly understand this, but it doesn't go deep enough.

Sure, I don't worry about what people consciously think of me, like "Does he think I'm incompetent because of that mistake I made? Does she like the way I'm dressed?". I'm more concerned with what they're not thinking, or rather the biases they may be unconsciously harboring about myself or others. Look at this [1], from a study on the relation of criminal sentences and attractiveness:

Physical Attractiveness had a significant influence on judges sentencing. The more unattractive the criminal, the higher the sentence. Or conversely, the more attractive the criminal, the lower the sentence. The results of three studies show a minimum increase of 119.25% and a maximum increase of 304.88%.

That's pretty disturbing to me. It what other ways am I being treated and being shaped by the unconscious biases of others? Say Jim gets promoted into management and made leader of a project instead of me, because he's a "better fit" for the role. For what reasons is he a "better fit"? Imagine if the unconscious mind could speak. It might say something like this:

"Jim was made tribe leader because of his robust musculature. His square jaw arouses me to no end - such an indicator of higher testosterone, strength, and disease resistance will serve our offspring well. Broad-shouldered Jim can probably throw a spear hard enough to pierce fifty men. A warrior of his magnitude will surely lead us to victory against our ancestral foe, the Google tribe."

Okay, that's fine, but what does that have to do with shipping a profitable software product?

"Square. Jaw."

Completely absurd. We can never completely relieve ourselves of these kinds of biases, and of politics. But I believe we can mitigate it to a meaningful degree. We can have meaningful standards and metrics for evaluating people for certain roles. Horowitz talks about this kind of politics-mitigation in at least one chapter in his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

[1] The Law Project. (2021, January 16). The Law Project. Retrieved from https://www.thelawproject.com.au/insights/attractiveness-bia.... (The relevant HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24044409)

bonoboTP6• 6 years ago

But what if it's a self fulfilling bias in the sense that he actually will be a better leader precisely because that little unconscious man in people's minds will say those kinds of things to them and they will actually be more likely to follow his lead than if you put a weakling in his place who is technically better versed in software.

As in, society is biased to pick the square-jaw guy for leadership, because society knows that society follows square-jaw guys in leader roles better.

kubanczyk• 6 years ago

Completely absurd.

Where it matters, people and organizations are able to overcome bias. We got a square-jaw man to the moon, but the rocket itself was not designed by a square-jaw men.

The key phrase: where it matters.

psyc• 6 years ago

At 40, it isn’t that I don’t care. It’s that I no longer worry or even think about it at all. I’m confident enough that people think well of me.

It isn’t likely that nobody thinks about me at all, given that I think about everyone else quite a bit.

Whoever coined this mildly amusing canard sounds a bit antisocial.

sirsinsalot3• 6 years ago

I think "caring" and "worrying" is too general. What's important is _how_ other people's feelings about us affect our actions and _why_.

That's what changes over time.

wombatmobile2• 6 years ago

It is good to not care what people think about you.

And bad to act like an asshole.

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.

Assholes might still annoy you, but when that happens, your friends will help you to feel better.

pashsdk27• 6 years ago

It's hard to be nice when you feel that the others are exploiting you in some way. Even if you can empathize with their situation, sometimes you cannot sympathize enough to put their well being over your own (mainly in cases where the absolute difference between the relative importance of their needs to your own, in your opinion as per your beliefs, is small).

Well, I'm an antisocial shut-in so maybe this is a fringe opinion to have for our techno-monkey tribes. :))

neom• 6 years ago

My solution to that is to not be around people who make me feel like I'm being exploited.

jjj123• 6 years ago

Being nice doesn’t mean putting their well being over yours. You can still set boundaries around what you’re willing to do for someone without being an ass about it.

wombatmobile2• 6 years ago

Give Marisa Peer a try, my friend

How to avoid rejection and get connection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeDt9dgFXFk

paulpauper• 6 years ago

there is no content here. I wish she had said more

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.

DFHippie• 6 years ago

I like the picture at the top. It's a beautiful image of freedom and living in the moment. It's not Leo, though. I'm pretty sure Leo is a he. There's a picture of him at the bottom of the page.

iambateman• 6 years ago

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.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Happy Sunday.

ungamedplayer• 6 years ago

The cringer are the weak ones. I think we should make MORE people cringe.

toyg• 6 years ago

Ah yes, “many enemies, much honor!” Who said that, I wonder? /s

Bakary2• 6 years ago

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.

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.

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.

ambivalents• 6 years ago

I'd love to know more what you mean by 'life-affirming.' Based on context, sounds like you mean, be an authentic person, don't sugar coat things, be imperfect, show vulnerabilities. Is that right?

I find myself drawn to these types--they may have asshole-ish moments or nice moments. That doesn't matter as much as my personal connection to them, the sense of whether I am rooting for them or not.

waheoo• 6 years ago

Adjective; having an emotionally or spiritually uplifting effect.

Bakary2• 6 years ago

I would define it as a positive feedback loop that is a mix of authenticity, energy, personality, desire, boldness, desire and will. There is perhaps a better word for it, but generally a person that exemplifies some of the strongest characteristics of human life as instinctively recognized by humans themselves.

As a corollary, such people tend to be naturally charismatic, but I would venture that this is a direct consequence of their other traits. One arresting definition of charisma I have heard is that it is a measure of how much you can delineate yourself as an entity in the world and how you can use that to affect reality. Life-affirmation and a zest for living draw directly into that.

Note that I don't necessarily include intellectual brilliance in the equation, though it obviously helps.

sunjester• 6 years ago

why do you care about what other people think about other people. youre the asshole.

civilized• 6 years ago

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.

zuzuleinen• 6 years ago

I think awareness helps alot with these kind of issues.

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?

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.

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.

_b8r0• 6 years ago

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.

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.

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].

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y8XgGhXkTQ&list=PLJA_jUddXv...

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/08/varieties-of-argumenta...

[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

[4] https://www.rationality.org/resources/updates/2016/double-cr...

mkl952• 6 years ago

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.

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".

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.

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.

sirsinsalot3• 6 years ago

You somehow managed to turn other people's dislike of you in to dismissal and insult. It isn't an observation, it is a protection mechanism you have to avoid introspection because maybe ... just maybe ... you are an arsehole.

mkl952• 6 years ago

I might as well do what I want anyway :-)

beervirus• 6 years ago

What shitty advice. “Just go ahead and do whatever horrible things you want, don’t worry about whether people will hate you for them.”

Sapph• 6 years ago

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.

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.

sirsinsalot3• 6 years ago

I agree. I think many of the extremes, like "be yourself [despite all others]" comes from a lack of self confidence. Hearing what others feel about you, empathising and deciding what _you_ feel about it takes a lot of self confidence.

yboris• 6 years ago

An excellent essay on the topic: A theory of jerks by Eric Schwitzgebel

https://aeon.co/essays/so-you-re-surrounded-by-idiots-guess-...

mehagar• 6 years ago

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.

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:

First stage: Emotional slavery: we see ourselves responsible for others’ feelings.

Second stage: “Obnoxious”: we feel angry; we no longer want to be responsible for others’ feelings.

Third stage: Emotional liberation: we take responsibility for our intentions and actions.

[1] https://about-nvc.tumblr.com/post/98642157391/from-emotional...

People that think you’re an asshole

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