sparr | The outcome of being rejected by default. (Reply)

Over the last few days and weeks someone close to me has indulged my need for deeper conversation about my behavior and led me to realize something that I've been doing for a while but had not previously nailed down.

People often tell me "If you do X thing, you make it unlikely the other person will interact with you again, heed your future advice, etc, and thus reduce your overall success rate in your goals".

Ten or twenty years ago I wasn't as much of an asshole as I am today. I wasn't an asshole at all. I don't think I did or said a single thing to anyone in high school that would be described as unfriendly. I can't recall ever driving someone away during college. Moving into adult life, the trend was mostly the same as I started socializing at video game events and geeky conventions.

What I do recall is being a social outcast, being bullied, being made fun of, being ignored (at best) by the people I was attracted to, etc. Some of this was due to not being attractive. Some was due to being neuroatypical. Some was due to being short, or white, or always the new kid at school, or other factors outside my control.

I think the turning point was when I started taking on responsibility for accomplishing things. I volunteered, then staffed, then directed various events of various sizes. Based on my previous experience, I knew that no matter what I did, most of the people I interacted with would choose not to interact with me again, to ignore what I had to say, etc. This left me making decisions where that variable wasn't relevant; I knew that whether people were happy with my decisions or not wouldn't change how they responded to me personally or in the future.

That led to me making decisions where the decision itself made people respond in those ways. As far as they know, it was my decision and action that led to that outcome, and if they are capable of perceiving cause and effect they perceive this as a divergence from the default neutral outcome they would have expected.

At this point I have a decade of ingrained habit of basing my world view on this prediction. No matter what I do, people are going to avoid me, disengage from me, ignore my feedback, etc. That means that nothing I do is going to cause those outcomes, even if someone might perceive that to be the case. It means that when someone tells me my efforts are "net negative", they are probably comparing the observed outcome to their default predicted outcome based on neutral default reactions, while I am perceiving my efforts as net positive compared to the default negative outcome.

What has changed in the last few years is that I might have an opportunity to surround myself with people who might actually be welcoming IF I behave the way I did twenty years ago. What stops me from doing this is the uncertain timeframe, and my confidence in the continued negative outcomes along the way to that goal. Is it worth a year or a decade of going back to the default-negative results in order to eventually be surrounded by people with whom I have a default-neutral outcome?