So to keep thinking about all this personality and like/dislike stuff – I’m trying to find the inner part of what disliking someone means to me. As Ferd noted in my comments (loving it!), repulsing people is pretty effective in a wheat/chaff sense, and you can end up repulsing the exact people you'd like to repulse, so, you know, win-win. Win-win since one of the major things about this is that in a basic way it’s pleasant to be with people you enjoy, of course. Connecting and laughing and joking and discussing things with people who resonate with you is pretty exciting. And there’s such a wide range of kinds of relationships that are interesting to have with people – for example, in some friendships I bet you like someone because they really bring out the sense of fun in you, and in other friendships you are the fun one. But in all the forms of friendship to have, the most fun to have with people is when there is some sense of life moving forward just in the being together. It’s sort of like exciting conversations, in which your ideas just feed off each other’s and by the end of the conversations you and your friend have figured out just so darn much about life and the nature of reality and perception etc.
And then, on the other hand, there’s those attempts at connectedness that just fall completely flat, where you or the other person just can’t pick up the other end of the interaction; either the idea doesn’t click with you, or they say it in a way that doesn’t seem to permit further interesting discussion, or just completely misses the point of what you were trying to say. It’s deflating energetically. But anyway spending time with someone who you dislike sort of takes the air out of the tires of life. Imagine spending the rest of time with someone you don’t like, bleh. I suppose you’d find common ground eventually, but it’s much nicer when you ring with someone.
So what makes one “ring” with someone? Right now I’m thinking about this in terms of my own disapproval. Not liking someone, for me, feels a lot about shaking my head or clucking about “the way someone is.” Some of these are personality/value judgments, like “she’s a know-it-all,” or “he’s a bigot,” or “she’s a complainer,” or “he’s full of sh*t all the time,” or “she’s too needy and reaches further in than I think this relationship should go.” Others of these are behavioral judgments, like “she chimes in with inappropriate nonsense just to be part of the conversation,” or “he jumps right in with advice even though I’m not done explaining this thing and if he’d let me finish he’d see this isn’t an advice request,” or “she drinks too much,” or “he pursues nothing beyond video games and it’s just sad.” All of these things come from my ideas about what kind of person it is okay to be. It’s not okay to ignore the conversation topic. It’s not okay to speak with total confidence about topics you’ve seen one documentary about. It’s not okay to complain all the time or make yourself out to be something you’re not. It’s not okay to play a lot of video games or drink too much. I mean, clearly I have a lot of rules in my head about what to do and how to act, and it is a person’s failure to conform to my normative imaginings that makes me dislike them. When I meet someone else who seems to have come to the same kind of behavioral/personality conclusions that I have come to, then this confirms something about my view of the world (Hey look, we both live on the same planet at the same point in history and both understand a lot of things in the same way! I must be on to something! This “rings.”). Disapproving of people also reaffirms my view of the world to me, of course.
So if I think of my disapproval in terms of looking for ways to confirm or reaffirm my view of the world, I am using my perceptions of other people as a way to stay as closed-minded as possible. If you already fit a certain mold, you’re part of the evidence of me being right about the world – and if you defy my model of existence, as luck would have it, you’re also part of the evidence of me being right about the world. Feels pretty convenient.
So then, this week's Boatmeal Challenge Continued? Why, critically consider my human-personality worldview, of course, in the hope that by loosening my concepts of what is acceptable in a person I can be a little less affected by feelings of dislike.
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