Home

Don't care what people think of you

I've been told that I should "not care about other what think of you", that I should be the only one deciding whether I'm good, and all kind of similar things.

Some people also added "believe in yourself" after it, which is a paraphrase for "have faith in yourself", which is a paraphrase for "please be stupid when thinking about yourself, in the way that I'm telling you, and ignore that I have no reasoning for it". That is not the subject of today's rant.

See, humans are very much made to care about what others think of them. Social specie, y'know?

Sometimes you want to go against natural tendencies. For example, treating women like child-spawners is very good on an evolutive POV¹, but I do not recommend it.

Sometimes it turns out the natural tendency is good.

Let's take a totally fictive example : imagine a few people think that I'm homophobic because I got Poe's lawed by a stranger. What is there to care about :

I'm not worried about actually being homophobic

I'm worried about these people being hostile to me

I'm worried about making them think the world is worst than it actually is.

I'm pretty sure I should care about the last two. And that these last two should be accounted for in future joke decision-making. Not caring what people think about me in this situation is being an asshole.

And it's a recurrent problem. What people think of you affects your interactions with them and their longterm vision of the world. It's kind of hard to build intuition on how big that is.

People seeing you differently changes the way they interact with you, changing the way you see humankind in a multitude of subtle ways you'll never notice.

I mean, people kill themselves because of how their ex perceive them. That one is easy to build intuition on. People build entirely new gender theories because of how their ex perceive them.

You may also want to care about how your efforts may get negated by a bad opinion about you. You won't comfort or teach to someone that hates you. The comfort and teaching will actually get retroactively cancelled if the person changes their mind.

You definitely want to care about what people think about you.

Unsurprisingly.

It's all probably obvious to anyone else than me.

---

1. There are so many cool things that derive from this. I hate everything.

qwel[]e.email