A few weeks ago, a friend said something that led me to reexamine how I look at my relationships with people.
We were in the middle of exploring the motivations behind our actions together and I admitted that I want people to like me.
“It’s ok to want people to like you”
Maybe it’s because I came from punk rock or maybe it’s the influence of being born in the land of “rugged individualism”, but the idea of wanting people to like you always felt embarrassing to me, pathetic even.
I always associated wanting people to like me with a need for approval, the idea that you are not good enough as you are…but as I dug more, I found that my desire for people to like me was much stronger than I thought but it wasn’t about a desire for approval at all. It’s about safety.
Even when I was around 6 or 8 years old, I had a deep fear of being called crazy, and being punished for the way I saw the world. It wasn’t anything that happened to me, just the overly pervasive attitude towards certain kinds of thought experiments “What if this is all a dream?” “How do we know that plants or rocks don’t have consciousness?” “What if the good guys are actually the bad guys?” “Why does marraige exist?” “How do I know that you are real?”
“Everybody thinks these things sometimes, don’t worry about it so much. You’ll go crazy”, but these questions never left my mind. I remember how surprised I was when people acted as if The Matrix was something mind-bending. Like, “What, haven’t you thought about this before?”
This deep fear of having negative consequences for vocalizing my thoughts never really went away though because I had been trained to try and remain presentable. God forbid a potential employer discovered what a weirdo I was.
I tried, but I lost friends and in junior high school a lot of people said I was on drugs when I wasn’t.
There is also the fear of isolating myself from my community. Not having the same ideas as the rest of your circle can be devestating to your social life, now more than ever, and as open minded as people claim to be, they tend to only be open-minded within a certain framework that they are confortable with. The typical us vs. them mentality.
It’s scary to become a “them” when you’ve been part of “us”.
We can’t really survive or thrive if people don’t like us. If you are an employee, someone has to like you in order to hire you, and if you are a freelancer or artist, you need people to like you enough to be willing to pay for your work.
Your neighbors or even strangers can make life diffiuclt for you if they don’t like you. It also feels good to build a positive feedback loop with the people around you, and being like and respected are usually part of that.
So most people live multiple lives in order to minimize damage. They are one person at work and another at home. If they have two groups of friends with different interests, they may completely wall off people from seeing the other side of them.
This is a conversation for another day but I decided a few years ago I was tired of living that way and have been trying to integrate all sides of myself. It’s tricky but I feel so much less stress as I get better at it.
As artists or just as people who think of themselves as “free-thinking” we like to pretend we don’t care what others think because we know how easy it is to fall into the trap of changing what we do in order to get people’s approval.
Pandering IS bullshit.
That’s why we think we shouldn’t care what others think. It’s natural to want people to like who you really are and respect your work. This is not the same thing as sacrificing your values or style so people like you, and maybe that’s common sense to some people but I am only just starting to see the difference.
Perhaps it’s hard because so many things feel “impossible”. It’s impossible that you can keep your job and also let everyone know about your niche hobby. It’s impossible to remain friends with your current friends if they know how you really feel about some issue. It’s impossible that people will accept your secrets. Right?
That’s what it feels like.
In some cases, something may be truly impossible but much less often than we think. So I’ve changed my life philosophy again. For a while it was “Go with the flow and accept everything” and then it was “grind hard for the life you want”, then some combination of the two. Now it’s “Be yourself, harder and better every day”.
“You” is a tricky concept to someone who has spent a long time trying to detach from ego and who deeply questions the nature of the “self”. Another topic for another day but for now let’s call it “my experience, thoughts, emotions and everything that brings me closer to universal love”
My artistic process and personal growth are both about digging to understand what drives me. Challenging myself to better understand others and better communicate myself improves my relationship and it creates space for better results in anything I do.
So it’s not a bad thing that it’s been hard to express to others how I see the world. The challenge forces me to level up and keep leveling up. I asked the universe for things I’ve been yold were impossible and the universe responds by saying “Bring your A-game bro, I’m waiting”.
This all may sound like incredibly basic to some people, but I was too stuck in fear for my wellbeing to realize it. Now I am starting to see that thriving means going fucking hard on the things I believe in, being completey honest with my feelings and constantly trying to improve how I go about that.
My wellbeing is tied directly to how much I focus on that and not wasting a ton of mental bandwith on all the things that could go wrong or whether or not people like it or understand it. “Just be yourself, harder and better. Right now.”
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