[Serious] How can a person "rejection-proof" their life?
To extrapolate:
People often say that one should not worry about what others think of them, but life simply doesn't work that way. What other people think of you really does matter; point-in-fact, it can be everything depending on what field you go into.
Like say, for example, you're a business owner and you're recorded arguing with an angry Karen of a customer, the video's posted online, and the internet sides with the Karen. Then, people boycott your business and you're left without a livelihood.
Or perhaps you say something crass and get cancelled. Or simply anger or inconvenience someone with a lot of influence.
Or, even more horrifyingly, say you were assaulted and you came forward, and were ostracized and shunned by your community as a result.
How could one set up their life such that it would be impossible for people like that to rob one of their livelihood? How could one make it impossible for others to shun or ostracize them?
How could a business owner set up their business so that other people couldn't simply shut it down on a whim in such a manner?
EDIT: I'll just "be myself" since that's what the majority of people in the thread want and repeat what I said to another individual:
Honestly, the way everybody is acting is really, really shameful. I am a person who made a thread and gave it a [Serious] tag because I wanted serious, literal answers to a serious problem that, given my chosen career path, will affect me at some point in my life and could potentially ruin it without good info to prepare for such a crisis beforehand. But all I’m getting is denial, mockery, condescension, lies, put-downs.
And it’s rooted in this desire to either pretend the problem is not real because you’re all secretly afraid it’ll affect you yourselves, or it’s because you know it’s real but you view it as a positive because ostracization and shunning people is an emotional cudgel you wield to silence people you don’t agree with on the internet, and answering the question honestly would require framing such actions as a negative and that would make you question the morality of your actions. And that’s not only sick, that’s just cowardly. If you believe cancelling people is morally A-O good, then at least have the temerity to threaten me with a “Don’t speak your mind and mask up” response like at least a few people were honest enough to do.
But don’t insult my intelligence by thinking you can lie to my face and pretend that something I’ve been personally watching happen to other people for over a decade is not, in fact, happening.
Now I came here for a serious answer to a serious problem that affects everyone. If you can't participate in good faith and offer meaningful strategies to avoid or fix such problems and want to either misconstrue it as an emotional issue -- much as you'll do with what I'm saying here after the majority of you demanded I just be myself and not worry about the consequences -- or outright deny it's a real problem when it's been real for over a decade, just don't participate in the thread. Just go elsewhere.
Okay, I just acted like myself. Everyone happy?
In almost every case, the best defense against this is to be a genuinely good person. Treat everyone with kindness and you will get surprising amount of support.
IDK these don't really seem like realistic examples. The number of real people who do nothing wrong but lose their job or get ostracized from their community is vanishingly small.
I really don't think you need to worry about this comrade. Just be a good person and live your life.
idk, there are anti-BDS laws in some places that cause some people real problems.
yeah cancel culture is real and deadly on the left. No one's burning evidence off of Ben Shapiro's corpse in a car fire because he's organizing boaters to protest teaching history to high schoolers
Exactly. These things seem common because we see examples of them amplified on social media. Most of them are vanishingly rare.
There are two components to risk: frequency and magnitude. Most people like to mitigate rare events that would be catastrophic if they happened.
For example, I don't go outside during a lightning storm, because even though being struck by lightning is quite rare, it has a high magnitude as it can kill or maim you.
For @darthfabulous42069 social shunning has a significant magnitude.
A few examples would be Alan Turing, gays, trans, the majority of rape victims, the Jews
Like many imaginary worries (something that could, but hasn't happened) the answer to how do I avoid this 100% isn't just, "you can't" but rather, "you shouldn't".
Imagine the similar question, "how do I make sure that there is zero chance of being harmed in a terror attack?" While the consequences are dire, the chances are very low, and the costs of avoiding it completely are far to high.
And this scales with the level of risk and consequences:
Ultimately, it's (getting cancelled, rejected en mass, etc.) a new and very visable fear in the 21st century, but like a long list of worries, spending time trying to solve something that hasn't and likely won't happen, is a waste of our limited years here. Be a good(ish) person, live your life and IF rejection happens, do your best to deal with it as it comes.
🤔
If no one has said it, try talking to a therapist. Not only is rejection unavoidable, but it seems you might have anxiety or some sort of fixation on rejection. Totally normal to talk something like this out with a professional
Holy shit, and now you all are labeling OP mentally ill for voicing a valid concern and getting upset when you all do the exact same thing they were afraid you would do
You scumfucks are fucking incredible.
The person you're responding to isn't putting OP down. Getting help from a professional isn't a weakness, and based on what OP said, it could be something that really helps them.
Oh lol at someone from .world speaking authoritatively on anything. I left your dumbass instance for a reason.
Sure looks like a fucking put-down to me.
Again, you are taking a very valid concern that other people aside from OP have, that has prevented justice on serious issues, that other people in the thread provided evidence for and you're defending a knuckledragger whose only response was to blame OP and invalidate their emotions by labeling them with a mental disorder they do not have the knowledge or authority to apply.
And of course your alt-right yee-hawing cousin-fucking ass from the right wing instance is going to defend an action that obscenely and blatantly cruel because you do it to people all the time and you don't want to admit what you're doing is wrong.
Don't come crying when your ass loses your job because someone purposefully bullied you in public, got you angry enough to yell at them, then recorded you and put the video on Twitter. Which happens to a lot of people. Just tell yourself what your dumb fuck friend told OP, it's all in your head and you just have anxiety even though it's clearly other people actively abusing you. See how you feel then, genocidal Nazi
Why do you portray suggesting therapy as something nefarious? Therapy is proven to be effective at helping people to have better lives. You're stigmatising getting help right now.
This is quite the summary of the conversation.
you're so angry you're seeing everything red. Your interpretation is completely wrong
Lol dude, calm down. Anxiety about social rejection is normal. If it begins to interfere with life, then OP should consider talking to a professional or a trusted mentor/friend type person. Picking fights online about how hard life is and how mean people on the internet is probably just more proof of need for professional help. For you too bud
The internet isn't real life. Even if you get owned in a video (a very rare occurrence, especially if you are polite and reserved), it's unlikely to put you out of your livelihood. You might, might, have a rough patch, but tomorrow social media will move on to a new controversy and you can work on improving things rather than just weathering the storm.
People say "cancel culture runs the world" but those are people who live on the internet or Fox News and get that feeling from a) being told so by media figures who benefit from such a message as part of their ideological brand and b) being continuously shown fringe cases with extremely high-profile characters, often with those media figures telling you that "you could be next" even though you don't have a 10-figure contract with Nike to lose in the first place.
HR exists so a company can insulate itself from legal threats from its employees. If you work for a company, study that company's policy and follow it. If they fire you or otherwise fuck you over, you can retaliate so long as you actually did follow company policy and they are punishing you for something outside of those bounds.
It means you aren't suited to run a public facing business. There's nothing wrong with that, but speaking as someone with a lot of social anxiety baggage there are things I'm equipped to do well and things that I'm not. I shouldn't let that stop me from opening a business if I really want to, but if I simply don't want to deal with the social rejection elements I have to accept that I'm better off letting someone else run that side of a business.
As for the non-business elements of your question, all you can really do is conduct yourself in a way that you don't believe you'll find yourself regretting later. If you say something in a public place, especially online, consider it part of the public record. It can and will come back to bite you later. Assume your [morally positive family member here] is always watching.
Good advice.
You mean big brother, right? Had me literally laughing tears for over a minute 🤣🤣🤣
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ceiling+cat&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images
When has anyone ever sided with a 'Karen' for anything? Lmao
In a democratic society, there is no way to entirely "proof" yourself from consequences of your own antisocial actions like if you sexually assault people or something like that.
I think the answer to what you're really asking is
do not be in an industry where you are customer-facing or public-facing,
and do not seek a public platform.
That will shield you from arbitrary and exaggerated mob type/snowballing behaviour, such as the Justine Sacco incident (in which a woman lost her job over an ironic joke about AIDS which fell victim to Poe's Law).
Lol, aids
If there was a way to do this, assault and rape survivors would have already used it to be able to come forward with their experiences (per your example).
This would have happened long before businesses had to worry about public perception on the Internet.
I def recommend a book called "so you've been publicly shamed"
It goes over how quickly things online get out of hand, how we used to publicly shame people 100s of years ago until we realized it was cruel and unusual punishment.
(Don't get me wrong, we should def shame alt right racists and push them back into their hidey holes)
Honestly we need more education and emphasis on critical thinking skills. Until then, we're all at the mercy of the dumbest among us with an Internet connection
Well, my first strategy has apparently been to sell all my belongings, immigrate to the developing world, lose every dime to my name.
A wiser person might have focused on doing a less harrowing (but still difficult) thing. If we can excel at something difficult, perhaps the world can forgive our mediocrity in other matters, and if it doesn't... well, at least we have something useful to focus on. For me, that thing is engineering.
I do own and operate a business. Owning the business means I get to invent my own job (which mostly amounts to 'mercenary science hermit'). I'm reasonably good at it, and have the correct legal paperwork to continue doing it, so it's hard to displace me -- I can just go find more customers. If that fails, maybe the problem is me :D
All that being said, I do use a variety of figurative cudgels on people who forcibly inconvenience me with their opinions (although almost entirely offline). Some of these tools are emotional, some are financial or legal, and many are technological in nature. I do this to defend my freedom to think freely about subjects that interest me, which sometimes people feel entitled to encroach on.
Mostly this pertains to 'people who don't want to pay me for work', or 'Asian superstitions', because I am nowhere near North America. The current political situation over there is puzzling and fascinating to me, although I am sad to see it causes so much harm. Maybe come visit Asia someday for a vacation from it?
Oh also I mostly avoid social media, especially for political stuff. I sign on primarily to answer questions travelers have about Vietnam, and help hobbyists choose components for electronic circuits (although Lemmy is not super active in these regards yet). I approach it as training to learn to be more patient with people, and in this sense it has been a rewarding activity.
Anyway, those are some of the habits I've cultivated to try and make peace with the modern world. Hopefully some are useful to you as well.
It's funny to see you here, I found your instance a while back. Do you plan on updating to 18.4 soon? I might come at some point and post some content
Oh, thanks for the reminder! I'll add that to the 'to do soon' list. Check back in a couple of days and maybe gently remind me if I still haven't done it.
I still need to get around to enabling registration, but enabling outbound port 587 for the registration emails causes the datacenter to grumble and complain. So that might take a bit longer. Well, at least we're not a spammer-friendly jurisdiction.
That sounds great, I'll keep an eye on it
OK done! The ansible install never seems to work out of the box for me. Always got to find a slow day at work so I can troubleshoot a bit.
Great to hear!
don't say or post something you aren't willing to 100% stand behind
don't say or post something that you don't want the whole world to hear
You still may say something unpopular and get canceled, but keeping these in mind I think will eliminate most of these opportunities.
There is no rejection proof because nothing is guaranteed in life. To be able to 100% guarantee something means to be perfect at something. Nobody is perfect at anything, perfection is only associated with godhood because it is realistically unobtainable.
You can't rejection proof your life. You live in a society of people. Your freedom ends where the freedom of someone else begins.
The be yourself mentality is an illusion or a trap from liberalism. Liberalism pushes individualism to the extreme. To support individualism, people need the illusion of ultimate freedom, the illusion or the dream that you can do or be anything. But it's not possible in a society, so a caveat is added: money and consumerism will allow you to be or do anything you can afford. But it's still not true, it's an illusion to keep you trapped in the illusion. Because you can't get money by being or doing anything you want. Because you live in a society.
Second point : you cannot please everyone, because it is impossible, and because it will destroy you.
It is impossible because different people have different tastes, expectations and cultures. And those are often not compatible. You cannot please a white supremacist if your not white. You cannot please a misogynist if you're a woman. You cannot agree with flat earther if you know some science. But you don't need to. Worse, trying to please them would be harmful for you. These are extreme examples obviously.
Synthesis: what you want is to find your place in your society. You need to be comfortable with yourself, in a group of people who share your values, and abides to the society's needs. You need the society, so you need to obey its rules. But you also need enough space to stay sound of mind, which is space and a place to be yourself as long as you're not too much of an asshole.
You can sum this up with the idea that you need balance. Be yourself, but don't be an asshole.
This is a quick and dirty writing on the topic. It would certainly need more words to detail some places.
I generally recommend never using social media under your real name. And every business communication (where you need to use your real name) should only consist of bland and necessary stuff. A business, whether as big as Disney or just you, offering a thing from a website or food truck, simply does not need (and imo should not have and not pretend as if it had) values and political views.
The podcast blocked and reported often revolves around your question (or more around the drama after it happened), sometimes they also interview people who had it happened to them, or wrote books about it.
I cannot remember a specific episode now, there are so many. In one, a family-owned(?) bakery lost everything cuz they were falsely accused of racism.
Probably the most interesting and famous case that underlines that simply being a "genuinely good person" is not enough, is the one of Justine Sacco; the woman who tweeted "Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!" and then lost her job etc., almost got her whole life destroyed (she fine today).
While it may not be hilarious to everyone and kinda on the tasteless side, shitposting and making jokes should not destroy your life, so never do it under your real name!
Now that was fucking hilarious. I couldn't believe she would put something like that online! She did kinda ask for that shitstorm to head her way so I don't feel bad laughing at her. Didn't deserve to lose her job though.
Thank you for being the one person taking me seriously here.
You just chose not to listen to the others telling you similar things in words you like less.
Seconding this. OP seems very determined to avoid interacting with comments that don't explicitly confirm their own worldview.
😊glad I could provide some balance to some of the weird answers you got here.
I tried to find the bakery episode, cuz it's really crazy, but could not find it. But what I found is that it has more than just a happy ending ($36M payment, jesus fuck, I wanna get it happening to me in the US too!) 🤯
Can you elaborate which answers you found weird and why?
Uh, pointing out comments and shaming them would now be kinda ironic, so I'd rather not elaborate.
You don't need to shame them. Just explain what is weird to you.
There’s a huge difference between not giving a shit what others think of you, and being a massive asshole. Being an asshole is chewing Karen out and getting caught on camera. Not giving a fuck is politely telling Karen that hers and your goals don’t align, and you don’t think you can do business with each other, and then moving on.
BUT, even if you do everything right, you can still get screwed, both in business, and personally.
Do your best to be a good person, treat everyone kindly, and live your best life. That’s the best you can do.
Idk but when I was kid my sister made a Reject-Proof fort.
Short of total isolation, you can’t.
You can’t control how other people react, as you’ve no doubt picked up. You can reduce the risk by controlling what they see of you, however. That doesn’t mean you should lie about who you are, but there are things that are better left unsaid. Don’t bring up embarrassing things to a new acquaintance, things like that.
Even POTUS makes gaffes. The problem for the holder of that office is that the consequences could be enormous, well beyond a single person’s ego or reputation. You could study what the president’s communications team does to avert damage and control it if it does happen.
You’re also getting advice worth the price you paid - free - so it’s probably not a good idea to get upset with people offering their opinions.
Have those examples even happened? I'm still not sure what cancellation involves and how long you need to be in that state before it counts as cancellation.
The internet told me Louis CK was cancelled, but he won a Grammy last year. Kevin Spacey has been cast in movies this year. JK Rowling is still publishing books.
It does, and it's a possibility that terrifies me. A lot of the celebrities who are cancelled are cancelled for justifiable reasons, granted (especially scumbags like R. Kelly), but it can happen to ordinary people for unjustifiable reasons, too, meaning anyone who seeks to do anything in life has to live with a sword of Damocles hanging over their head. Meaningful relationships with others can't be built if the dynamics of that relationship include the fact that that other person has untold, unchecked power over you and you have legitimate reason to be afraid of them, given that it's a thing.
I want to own businesses in my life and even saying that has earned the ire of, by my count, at least one person in this thread. What's to stop them from doxxing me and putting my personal information on blast all over the fediverse, or even old social media like Twitter, preventing me from ever being able to pursue my dreams simply because they don't like capitalism? What's to stop the right wing from doxxing me and sending me death threats if I gain a following and then speak out against them to that following, or boycotting my business because I put up a pride flag for Pride Month? How can community even be possible with the threat of something like that happening to you in existence?
As others have already covered, everything we do comes with risk. Some people go through life without spending much thought on those risks, and if they're lucky they never have to deal with these things. Others let it weigh upon them heavily, and it's fairly evident that you fall into the latter camp.
You've caught on to the general theme though, which is that the more of yourself you put out there needlessly, the greater a possibility for negative things to happen as a result of that. I'm not going to ask you to wave a magic wand and become the type of person who doesn't worry about those things, so here are the best compromises:
Quality over quantity with your friends. Find some good people you can be yourself around, and don't stress over having fewer people that you hang out with than others. It's not a competition and it doesn't make you an inferior person.
Minimize how much you "put yourself out there". The internet wasn't around 25 years ago, and when it was young it was common sense to use an alias on the internet wherever possible. Use different nicknames on different websites to minimize the ability of casual bad actors to link your identities between different social forums. The possibility of database leaks doxxing the e-mail address you signed up with is still there, but thwarting the low effort attempts does a lot on its own. You can go through the effort of registering with different e-mail addresses as well, but there is a point of diminishing returns here and you need to decide where to draw the line for yourself.
Remove yourself from online discussions when it's healthy to do so. Assert your opinion, clarify your points if they need clarifying, and move on. Turn off notifications once you're past that point. Winning arguments on the internet is not realistically a thing that happens, and notifications on your mobile device from an argument will needlessly pull you back into a place of anxiety. Considering how little those mobile notifications contribute to your positive frame of mind, it's best to be rid of them completely if you ever find them having a negative impact on your day to day life.
Edit:
You're an NPC. Stop behaving like one and your fragile ego won't be hurt.
The fact that nobody cares. Which is what @livus@kbin.social said: https://feddit.de/comment/2037918
I'm not worried about my ego, I'm worried about my livelihood, my dreams and my life. It's so easy to dismiss the problem by wrongly framing it as an emotional one instead of treating it like the real threat that it is. It's a lot harder to acknowledge there's a serious problem here that everyone, not just myself, has to worry about.
Ordinary people get cancelled all the time whether they deserve it or not, too, so we can't reasonably just assume nobody will care. People clearly do.
It is an emotional problem. I own part of a business and it's nearly impossible to "cancel" me.
As someone else said, perspective makes all the difference.
Citation needed.
You must have been living under a rock the past decade then.
EDIT: Never mind, I know you'll purposefully with-hold a straight answer because you think the fact that I am worrying about this is a moral failing on my part and you are trying to condition me to adopt your way of thinking. And that's sick. It's also a pretty good example of what I'm talking about so keep going
Simple rule in business: no sex, no drugs, no politics.
Well, I thank you for answering the question, at least.
You seem to have doomscrolled a lot. Our earth is inhabited by billions of people with millions of businesses and you're thinking a few isolated cases mean you're in danger of being cancelled 🤣
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_statistics
And this is where you lost me. It's a very real and very easily observable phenomenon; you can do a quick search on Twitter or Google (such as they are) and see for yourself it's a very real and very frightening phenomenon.
I'm sorry you don't take the problem seriously, but don't jump on me to make yourself feel better over it.
You can search anything on Google and find that it’s a very real and frightening problem. It’s the worlds largest bias-confirming echo chamber of that’s how you choose to use it.
You just don't want to believe it's real, don't you?
Or it's easier to discredit the problem itself than to acknowledge that it could happen to you, too.
The problem exists but it's not nearly as frequent as you believe.
You’re so wrapped up you don’t even realizing that you’re speaking to a completely different person.
No, I'm talking to you. You really sound like you just don't want to believe it's a real problem as do the majority of people in the thread, which is shameful, because their behavior is proving what I'm saying is real. Stuff like that really does happen to people. It's real.
Honestly, the way everybody is acting is really, really shameful. I am a person who made a thread and gave it a [Serious] tag because I wanted serious, literal answers to a serious problem that, given my chosen career path, will affect me at some point in my life and could potentially ruin it without good info to prepare for such a crisis beforehand. But all I'm getting is denial, mockery, condescension, lies, put-downs.
And it's rooted in this desire to either pretend the problem is not real because you're all secretly afraid it'll affect you yourselves, or it's because you know it's real but you view it as a positive because ostracization and shunning people is an emotional cudgel you wield to silence people you don't agree with on the internet, and answering the question honestly would require framing such actions as a negative and that would make you question the morality of your actions. And that's not only sick, that's just cowardly. If you believe cancelling people is morally A-O good, then at least have the temerity to threaten me with a "Don't speak your mind and mask up" response like at least a few people were honest enough to do.
But don't insult my intelligence by thinking you can lie to my face and pretend that something I've been personally watching happen to other people for over a decade is not, in fact, happening.
Jesus Christ. 🤦
As I said, doomscrolling.
Don't.
If you're worried about being cancelled, the only thing you have to worry about is not being a cunt to people.
Decent people don't get cancelled just because some Karen had a bad day, at most they'll get some fairly minor Twitter bullshit that dies out fairly quickly, or there will be some unhinged motherfucker in your inbox that no one wants to back (feel free to call the cops on those).
What truly damns the people that get cancelled are their own actions, not some Karen with an overinflated sense of self importance. Their attempts to cancel people usually backfire because they think they have a cult of personality behind them, when what they really have are a bunch of people just getting entertained.
If you say something that gets misconstrued, explain yourself politely, understanding how this mixup could have happened. Those that are reasonable will back off, and those that still keep going just look unreasonable and not someone you'd want to back.
What happens when those that still keep going make up the vast majority of the population, including your customer base and/or employers?
What happens when people just lie and make shit up about you, and the population refuses to listen to the truth because the lie resonates with their political beliefs?
They won't. Most people don't have time for that shit.
Then these people were never going to help you anyway. Normal people don't just up and believe anything they are told by some rando. They may however use it as pretext for discriminatory behaviour that was, realistically, going to happen anyway.
Uh... MAGA? Trump? Alex Jones? Hello?
These people weren't randos to their audiences. They spent quite a bit of time building their audiences and engendering trust before launching their attacks on democracy and sandy hook victims respectively.
If only it were that easy.
It...is?
Think about every cancelling attempt that didn't fall flat on its ass. It isn't as simple as some Karen lighting someone up on Twitter or FB.
Think about every innocent black person who was imprisoned and enslaved. They weren't cunts to anyone; all it took to ruin their lives is some rich jerks not liking their skin color.
...that's your comparison to getting cancelled? The slave trade?
Methinks you should sit down and actually think about the differences there.
My point is that it's not enough to not be a cunt to people. They can and will hurt you in all manner of ways for all manner of reasons, many of which you can't reasonably anticipate or control.
Okay, but you're ignoring the scope of OP's question, which is specifically how to avoid getting cancelled or otherwise socially rejected.
It is true that even acting as a good person, there are ways to get someone cancelled. However, not acting like a cunt reduces these methods to false allegations of rape or child abuse, something your average Karen isn't going to be able to pull off without getting charged themselves for malicious false reporting. Whereas acting like a cunt widens the possibilities significantly for a) an opening and b) for it to stick.
Does that not qualify as “hurt[ing] you”?
You kidding? “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” The whole reason false accusations are so scary is because they're easy to make, yet difficult if not impossible to disprove, and in the court of public opinion, the burden of proof is always on the accused.
Only if it's reported to the police. If it's posted on social media instead, the only thing the accuser has to worry about is being sued for defamation, and that's only an issue if the victim is rich enough.
You can't, we live in a society, unless you're prepared and able to live alone off the grid in secret. Get as good at being popular as you personally can be. When people say "be yourself" they mean be a polished, market-friendly version of yourself.
I'm not sure what all the drama in here is about.
I don't want to be my LinkedIn self :'(
Yeah, this is the kind of thing that makes people regret ever coming down from the trees. Healthcare, steady meals and no predators is pretty dope, though.
For me, I've never found it possible. Internet stuff, whatever, but when friends or loved ones turn on you there's not much to be done in my experience. Try and be compassionate to all involved and try to politely explain yourself to anyone, but those who stick with you are the real ones. If folks are liable to turn on you after a social misstep or something as serious as assault, they're bad folks, folks.
I think it's less about "proofing" your life and instead embracing it. Seek it out. All good opportunities (your dream job, the girl you want) require you to take risks with a real chance of rejection. Get good at being rejected, even enjoy it, so that you can persevere and try and try again until you get what you want.
This is a good example of how to deal with someone trying to bait you:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fQvBL1R5nNs
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/shorts/fQvBL1R5nNs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Stop living it.
You could probably go into the woods and live alone for a while. Pollution would reach you eventually, but as long as you're good at hunting, butchering, and cooking meat, you could last until your garden starts producing. If you have money now, you probably want to spend it on a cabin and a whole lot of non-perishable food and a wood-burning stove and as much buy-it-for-life cookwear as you can get. Your mattress will eventually break, but oh well.
If this answer sounds ridiculous, I want you to take that to heart. Your question is just as ridiculous. If you're going to be a part of society, society might reject you. Just be as decent a person as you can be and hope people appreciate you.
I wonder if it's even possible to do that legally in the U.S. anymore.
Probably not. That's why I'll never be there, not even for a visit. It's a dreadful place.
This is not legal advice and I am not your attorney.
I doubt anybody would prosecute you, but on a practical level...
I mean, you need to find a place to do it, and... I don't think any states have homestead acts in 2023, so you'd probably need to buy some kind of land somewhere. Maybe you could manage in Texas, but I doubt it. You could also attempt to petition your state to give you some kind of interest in some unincorporated land... But you can't do it in a national park, and even if you could find land nobody owns, you'd want to own it yourself to prevent others from building society over the land.
You couldn't hunt endangered species, and you'd need to own your weapons and hunt according to whatever law the state has... many require you to get a license to hunt... You don't necessarily need a gun to hunt, and you don't necessarily need to hunt after your garden starts working... Same with any potential environmental regulation, if you're chopping down trees or something, some states might require you to plant new ones...
And theoretically, all your hunting + farming could amount to income, but probably nowhere near enough to actually incur tax liability, and no tax agency is ever going to enforce that against you.
Try to not be reactive. Take appropriate action whenever needed but choose to act after a delay so that you aren't responding impulsively. In my experience 90% of conversations that were problematic could have been avoided if either party chose to walk away or take a break.
Serious question for you OP and I ask it in a spirit of... possible solidarity? Anyway: I tend to word things clumsily, flub delicate social situations, and just generally put my foot in my mouth at the worst possible time. It's worse in high pressure situations. Are you like this too, and if so, do you worry a lot about unintentionally sabotaging your livelihood or relationships?
When you figure it out you can sell it to Elon Musk for billions.
You can't. Furthermore, the consequences of "people pleasing" and "conflict avoidance" can do far more damage than the occasional bad rep. In fact, if you're consistent about setting and enforcing reasonable boundaries, you'll ultimately gain more respect in the long run.
You can't. As long as you live and breathe, no matter how bad your life is, there's always some jerk looking to make it even worse. It's one of my many reasons to not have children.
What you think of others matters equally as much. Be a good person and be careful who you surround yourself with. Be descerning of different groups of people and their beliefs/values/culture. Being rejected by a group of bigots is a good thing, and you wouldn't want to be embraced by them to begin with. There are countless historical examples of individuals led astray by group-think, so don't be too concerned what multitudes think of you. It all depends on context, and wanting to be "rejection proof" might signal too much interest in one's reputation, although I'm not accusing you of that.
I would also love an answer to this question. I have worried about this issue a lot. One of the only answers I have come up with is to have multiple skills. So that if people "side with a Karen" for example, you can hopefully transition into a different industry and leave the previous industry behind. Varied skills in multiple areas are the way I hope to avoid cancellation
Silly, business owners dont argue with their customers, they dont work there.
🤔
It's human nature to do what you said. Just keep being human. Bring back to others what they deserve.
if you try you’ll push yourself into a bad mental space that many therapists make their livelihood off of! I am a big people pleaser so have had issues with over-valuing the opinions of others. One important thing I did to combat this tendency was to come up with a reasonable set of principles for myself so that I didn’t feel like I always had to take what others might think on board (because I’d given myself a reference). Another thing that helped was eliminating anxiety around things I was quite certain one shouldn’t be judged for (in the sense that some things just shouldn’t reflect on your character).
Being worried about having your job taken away and similar is a bit different. I think the things you do to prevent risking this include not voicing “hot takes” except with people you trust and who understand you, avoiding internet arguing, keeping your boundaries up at work, etc. I think most people have a pretty good sense of what ideas might be wildly unpopular in their locale.
As a slight side note, things like tenure (in the US) and anonymous review processes in academia were put in place precisely to ensure that people weren’t blackballed for theorizing things that were unpopular or that would potentially step on the toes of some politician who was threatened by your research. Many things that are popularly supported have and will continue to be wrong, so you need a certain self assurance to fall back on. Preferably your self assurance is supported by logic and reason and not dogmatism—but this entails a fair amount of hard work and study and reflection—you can’t just rely on intuition.
Just come to terms, probobly through traumatic events, that all life is is rejection. Then there is no rejection. There all done!
What you want is something you can't have. Stop worrying about things that don't immediately affect you and take a fucking chance in life. You will fail. You will make mistakes and judge yourself for it. People may judge you for things beyond your control like appearance and personality quirks. Fuck em. There's only a hand full of people who know and care for you well enough that their opinion matters, the rest of em just see a shadow on the wall. Most people don't care about you, they care about comparing themselves to their mental image of you. Who cares what they think. Do you have like severe anxiety of something because this is hardcore catastrophizing. 99% of your fears are baseless. You aren't the center of anyone else's world, nobody thinks about you that much. Sorry to burst your bubble but the sooner you realize this the sooner you can start to chill a little on the worrying.
I do, because those people are either my employers or my customer base, and I need their money to survive.
If we lived in a perfect world where everyone had their own 40 acres and a mule and didn't have to depend on other people to survive, I'd believe you. But we don't, and as a member of society I am dependent on these people to live.
And most people are aware of this, and don't really want to give a meaningful answer to my question because that would mean losing the power they wield over me, so the only meaningful response is to dismiss the reality of the situation or wrongly frame it as an emotional issue when it is anything but. My fear over it is extremely justified. People, including rich and powerful celebrities, have lost everything over this.
Take Sinead O'Connor, for example, who was cancelled in the 90's for opposing the Catholic Church and trying to expose their sex abuse scandal. And she died, her reputation having never really been repaired, in the U.S. at least.
It matters. It's real. And it's a very, very valid concern. What other people think doesn't just matter, it means everything if one wants to live.
I don't agree at all. Unless you are a smelly unwashed hobo with plastic bags for clothes or an absolute batshit insane sociopathic asshole thats a blarant menace to society nobody is going to care if you are a little ugly or not wearing a dress or if you have a shitty opinion about something. this mindset of yours will 100% turn you neurotic if you aren't already. Worrying at the level you are doing is simply not mentally healthy. May you find some inner peace my fellow human being.
Okay. You win the argument. I hope that makes you feel better, and more importantly not angry at or inconvenienced by me in any way.
We're going to find you and we're going to cancel you. You will not be forgiven. /s
Don't be a business person who lives to exploit workers and fuck over the world.
Don't be surprised when the moral code you live by that is founded entirely on the exploitation of others means the exploited need little reason to cheer on your downfall.
You just see the world this way because you've been exploited.
Plenty of small businesses treat their employees very well, or don't even have them.
Being treated nice ≠ not being exploited
I didn't say being treated "nice". I said treat their employees "very well" which of course does mean not exploiting them.
Perspective.
I don't see how perspective can alter the reality of losing your job, your home, or even suffering threats or violence for the slightest misstep, which is how people live nowadays.
Perspective meaning what is the actual percentage of business owners that are canceled out of their livelihood versus the percentage of those that aren't.
Oh. 🤔 That is actually a very good question.
This just in: local business owner discovers the phenomenon of "data>vibes based risk management"
What if we based our concerns off statistically significant realities? 🤔
The Anton Ego perspective. I like it!
Become a hermit and don't interact with people.
People are always going going to give you their opinions, but the best thing about opinions is that they hold no weight in reality, we give these opinions the weight to impact us.
Now, most of those people who were cancled over nothing or what would be minor in comparison to others, they have regained most of what they lost, look at Louis C K, he got cancled, but he's now back doing what he was doing before.
You'll never be able to avoid rejection or criticism unless you block yourself off from the world or only surround yourself people who think identical to you, but where's the fun in that?
I generally don't care what people think about me. They're are obvious exceptions like my employer. If you have shitty views that affect others negatively, like being a homophobe, transphobe, or a hard right conservative, then you're going to justifiably get shit on and hated on. You can choose to not care what people think, but in the real world there are consequences. If you live a life of inclusion and empathy, then most of the work is done towards not caring what others think. Basically, don't be an asshole, and if you are, keep to yourself and don't run a business. Good people don't get "canceled".
I'm sorry but that's just naive.
The people that cancel good people are shitbags. I should say, good people don't get canceled often. It's the cunts with fucked up views that generally do. Don't be a cunt, and you're not likely to suffer consequences.
Relativity remains a factor. One mob's shitbag is another mob's hero. One mob's wish for freedom of thought is another mob's moral depravity.
Cancelling is just an added nuance on gossip and dogpiling, and those have been around since we've been knocking rocks together. It happens whenever a person publicly acknowledges an opinion that angers a tribe enough to single someone out. It doesn't matter whether that person is a long-time resident or a passing visitor. The more it goes against their social values, the more popular it becomes in the gossip, and the more people share it with each other as the story takes on a life of its own. Details get changed. Maybe it started with a lie or misconception to begin with and grew from there. None of that matters when people start shunning you in public or knocking on your door with torches in hand.
The only added nuance of cancelling over traditional gossip is the pervasiveness of the internet, and the distance at which people can socially band together to shun you. Most importantly, gossip has never required someone to be a good or bad person. It just needs someone to be the target of a rumor (truthful or otherwise) that pisses a lot of people off.
About being yourself... That really is the best advice to avoid rejection. The problem is that no one can tell you how to do that in a comment section.
It's likely that something in your life is out of place, making it harder to be "Yourself." You need to learn how to identify it and what to do once you have.
Therapy is great for this if that's something you'd consider. I'd be willing to give a little guidance, if therapy isn't your jam. DM me if you're interested.