How to Cope With Being Disliked

Seeking social validation is a trap

The thing about other people disliking you — even if their thoughts have every bit of power over your life as a man minding his own business on the other side of the planet — is that they feel like real threats.

You intellectually know that these people cannot harm you, no matter what they think of you. Yet strangely, you cannot help but to concern yourself with other people’s thoughts — thereby inflicting real harm by lowering the quality of your life.

These emotional reactions to false threats are due to interpersonal conflicts inciting the same biochemical pathways as when a caveman, isolated from his tribe, has an increased likelihood of dying at the hands (or paws) of some very real predators.

In our modern world, however, we hardly ever encounter them. Have you ever seen a tiger outside of a situation with guaranteed safety?

The Absurdity of Online Drama

If we look at interpersonal relations during the pandemic, the situation is even more bizarre. Online drama feels viscerally real, even though from our end they are just pixels on the screen. These people have zero chance of ever meeting you in real life — moreover, hurting you physically.

People on Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter aren’t even interacting with the ‘real’ you. If you met each other in real life, you’d probably treat each other differently. Do you bicker with strangers over your choice of political candidate as vehemently as you do in real life compared to online?

Online, you only fight one another’s online presences, which is starkly different from who you are in real life. Social media is ripe with people who consciously filter their vulnerabilities from the masses. The result is that we see accounts as entities, rather than real people.

We post our opinions, justifying them using ‘reason’. People attack us using their ‘reason’ too — as well as personal insults. Reason, however, is a social technology intended to convince people of our hunches, instead of being the axioms that lead up to our conclusions.

We source an intuition first and then find reasons for them, instead of thinking of reasons carefully and forming a conclusion after. The former is how human psychology actually works, while the latter is the delusion that justifies our irrationalities as subjectively rational.

When we post or say those things online, we rarely have anyone in particular in mind apart from immediate thoughts. We don’t filter our reactions with other people in mind. It’s always yourself and your immediate vices: Someone insulted me, therefore I have to protect myself.

We see other online presences as impersonal threats, instead of imagining the person behind the screen with compassion; acknowledging that they are beings with feelings too. We find it difficult to consider that the other person might just be reacting to their own immediate vices instead of deliberately plotting to harm us.

Why is our mind wrapped around such insignificant things?

I am guilty of this too; I’d find myself in an awful mood whenever I read certain ‘love letters’. We have our lives outside the online world — or even if in real life, outside that drama. Yet, why do other people’s opinions of us hold so much bearing on how we are able to enjoy our lives?

The answer is that we have no free will. The most beneficial option is to accept that we are not in control of our feelings, but after the acknowledgment, we can find useful methods to mitigate the harm false threats pose on our emotional wellbeing. Practicing meditation made me realize that we have no control over our feelings.

We’d like to think feelings are within our control because they happen internally. In reality, however, they are as uncontrollable as the external events that happen in our lives. You have as much control over whether you feel angry, happy, or sad to the extent that you can control the weather outside your window.

Meditating made me notice that feelings come and go without conscious decision-making. When we feel angry, our heart beats faster, our brows furrow, and our brain feels more alert. These are bodily reactions happening unconsciously without our conscious control.

In The Unquiet Grave, Cyril Connolly wrote that like how it works in the body, the mind would also cease to function without the unconscious. The unconscious is an integral part of our psychology, similar to how you want your heart to keep on beating without having to decide for every beat.

Likewise, our natural unconscious instincts guard us against danger quickly and form the bulk of our minds. Getting rid of the unconscious would be analogous to removing the roots of a plant and expecting the plant to sustain itself without them.

Nevertheless, if we could shift our perspective by interpreting interpersonal conflict and the little bearing it has on real-life using our rational consciousness instead of the biochemically-driven unconscious, the distressing nature of interpersonal conflict would cease to exist (or at the very least, greatly mitigated).

We imbue meaning into objectively meaningless natural phenomena.

Human beings have a natural tendency to imbue meaning in everything. People tell themselves that everything happens for a reason. Surely, there must be a good reason for someone to act so distastefully towards us!

On the other hand, perhaps we should consider the alternative: People’s behaviour is as meaningless as a natural phenomenon and should be viewed as such.

Even so, humans still like to add meaning into even soulless things. John Gray believed that poets who seek refuge in nature and gain inspirations from trees, flowers, and rivers are delusional.

Fernando Pessoa’s poem, featured in Straw Dogs, adequately captures the sentiment:

Only if you don’t know what flowers, stones, and rivers are

Can you talk about their feelings.

To talk about the soul of flowers, stones, and rivers,

Is to talk about yourself, about your delusions.

Thank God stones are just stones,

And rivers just rivers,

And flowers just flowers.

Likewise, letting other people’s judgement of you hurt you is indulging in your own solipsism. After all, you are the one who imbues mere electrical signals in somebody else’s brain with meaning. People’s thoughts about us are just thoughts.

Just like how you have no control over what you think of certain things, these people have no control over what they think or feel either. No one goes, “I deliberately choose to exert my energy for the purposes of hating this person I will have no association within five years!”

Marcus Aurelius sums it up beautifully in Meditations:

“Man joins the category of things indifferent to me — no less than the sun, the wind, a wild animal.”

In truth, we rarely see things as their true nature because we always see things in relation to ourselves. Common advice states to practice mindfulness: Be aware of your unconscious biases.

In contrast, I advocate for mindlessness — whenever something bad happens to you, just don’t think about it. Perhaps poets should just take clouds as clouds instead of overthinking about it.

In truth, we rarely see things as their true nature because we always see things in relation to ourselves.

Marcus Aurelius described it excellently:

“It is not their actions which trouble us — because these lie in their own directing minds — but our judgements of them.”

Not thinking about something is hard, because negative thoughts are guaranteed to intrude. Nevertheless, the central premise remains: Acknowledge people’s behaviour as natural phenomenon, just like how a wild animal has no control over their behaviors, tendencies, and quirks. Moreover, people’s moods are as unpredictable as the natural seasons. They should similarly be observed through a curious, impersonal lens.

Acknowledge people’s behaviour as natural phenomenon, just like how a wild animal has no control over their behaviors, tendencies, and quirks.

It is also worth questioning why people’s opinions of us matter.

After all, irrespective of how poorly they judge us, we know ourselves best — while they only have had a short encounter with us. You know your story from birth till present, while other people may wrongfully extrapolate assumptions about your entire being based on fragments of the puzzle.

Even worse, other people may project their own insecurities, biases, and vices onto you, making their statements reveal more about themselves than it does about you.

You know your story from birth till present, while other people may wrongfully extrapolate assumptions about your entire being based on fragments of the puzzle.

La Rochefoucauld astutely noted:

“In even the smallest affairs we challenge the authority of the judges, and yet we let our reputation and good name depend upon the judgement of other men, all of whom are ill disposed towards us either through jealously, concern with their own affairs, or lack of sense. Merely in order to make them decide in our favour we imperil our peace of mind and way of life in countless ways.”

Marcus Aurelius concluded likewise:

“I have often wondered how it is that everyone loves himself more than anyone else, but rates his own judgement of himself below that of others… So it is that we have more respect for what our neighbours think of us than we have for ourselves.”

Remember that you are a sentient human being in a marvelous universe.

If you are still not convinced thus far, remember that the potential beauty of your life is too great to be tainted by trivial things, including the judgment of other people. You can do literally anything you wish to without anyone restricting you.

If you do things that make yourself happy, you benefit — not them. Why should their concerns bother you? You know what makes yourself happy: immersing in beautiful literature, walking peacefully in nature, spending time with close friends, caring for your family, watching an excellent movie, and doing work that you enjoy. You can easily cut yourself off from people who make you feel awful and focus on what truly makes you happy.

Social validation is something that you cannot choose or control. Furthermore, it isn’t even guaranteed to make you happy. Because once you get a certain level of validation, the end result is not happiness but the craving for more. It is fundamentally pointless to chase it.

Instead, learn to revel in the existential wonder of how you are a sentient creature living in a marvelous universe, capable of experiencing a wide range of emotions, appreciating all the beauty and meaning that is accessible to you — if only you’d stop focusing on the trivial.

La Rochefoucauld correctly noted that men who cannot escape from focusing on little things are incapable of handling big ones.

Finally, remember that life is short.

In the words of Marcus Aurelius:

“When you are high in indignation and perhaps losing patience, remember that human life is a mere fragment of time and shortly we are all in our graves.”