When everyone else is listened to but you
If you’re lucky enough to survive bullying in elementary and high school, don’t get too excited expecting that trend to continue. There are numerous snakes in the grass that you will encounter in your daily life. Many of the snakes you meet will be in a place called Work.
At Work, you will be forced to interact with strangers in a tense, unforgiving, and hostile social climate. As the “New Kid,” all (judgmental) eyes are on you. As per their usual routine, each human being will take turns doing absurd things to impress one another. This dance we do to get respect is not obtional. Nobody asked you if you liked dancing.
All of these techniques do not exist in a vacuum, however. Ideally, the respect would be given to you automatically by default, but even when you do everything right you still sometimes have to fight to make sure people know how to treat you.
It is likely that you’re not helping your own cause in some way or another: Maybe you’re a little boring, or negative, or whatver.
But what the previous replies fail to acknowledge, is how deeply, deeply boring the people who get the most attention are, too! It seems then that actual value of thought is not correlated with reward. Why should we aspire for the attention of these people?
If we are not interested in them, how can we expect them to be interested in us?
Recently I’ve caught myself doing this a lot, where I’ll over-self-disclose, with an almost palpable eagerness for someone to take an active interest in knowing me as a person. That sounds terrible but it’s true. It’s been forever since anyone cared to know what made me tick. I’d like it if someday, someone will ask me questions about myself in conversation for a reason that isn’t at least 85% controlled by a penis.
Simple things; impossible demands.
“Get to the point.”
“Find the right time in the conversation to come in.”
“Focus on them.”
The truth is I don’t really want to focus on them in conversation; I think they’re boring, I only wish to interact with them to a) gain their respect, which should at some point involve a process of b) self-disclosure.
In this way, *I’M* being the asshole, because my reason for even socializing with them is backward. I approach it from the angle of what they can do for me, or how they have treated me. It is a two-way street. I cannot connect with people if I am simply not interested in them.
I admit, I’m far more interested in myself and the wealth of entertainment available to me in my own mind. Sitting alone with that is infinitely preferable to having to not only tolerate how boring you are without strangling you, but then also a) making up some bullshit to say to act as if I give even half of a shit, and b) engaging you on topic after topic after topic until you’re so engaged and I’m so bored that we both decide to call it a night.
Socializing sure is fun!
Did I say fun? I mean awful. It is true that if you are ignored by your peers then you might not be helping your cause in some other way — you look like crap, you’re boring, you’re rude*, you’re draining/depressing, etc. It’s not hard to turn other people off. The chances that it has something to do with YOUR personality and how it is offensive to others are actually quite good. Let’s not kid ourselves.
So, there is one sense where it makes sense to be self-conscious…
…but nobody wants to hang out with someone who’s self-conscious either! It’s not easy out there, man. I make six figures conversing with people professionally. I need no advanced degree for what I do. I just know how to connect with people. Having been ignored and invisible (fat) most of my life, I learned how to listen and ask insightful questions. People like this about me in conversation.
BUT, I also know about myself an unfortunate reality, and that is when I am stressed it is pretty easy to turn everyone around me into my personal therapist. This is compounded by not having any partner to let those frustrations out on. If you have just that ONE person to be your “soft place to fall,” that’s all you truly need.
— -
This is not to say however that others are not without fault. People just aren’t great people. It is endlessly fascinating how fascinating everyone else finds themselves to be. I’m one of those annoying people in conversation who has like ZERO tolerance for smalltalk, so just starts saying all types of weird blunt off-topic things and then people just sort of awkwardly wander away until we are no longer speaking to one another and I’m alone once again.
We must assume our fellow human to be woefully flawed in the areas of humility and egocentricity. This is to be expected of me, you, or anyone else — it is merely human. What is this group’s sin beyond selfishness? Are they exclusionary? There is little help to be given if complete social hierarchy impedes your mobility from the bottom of the totem pole.
Believe me, I’m very aware of my position on the totem pole in this company…but I do know SOME stuff, you know.
[completely ignoring my point, as per usual, and only speaking to tear me down]
“Not true,” CW interrupts, a grin of certain Satanic origin washing over his face. “Brian is the bottom.”
Ah yes, true. Thank you for that correction, co-worker. I’m not even sure what you expect me to do with a comment like that honestly so I’ll just force out some nervous laughter to drown out the noise of you respecting a secretary more than me, and in the process unwittingly look like an asshole, since now I’m amusing myself with the lower social standing of someone who, to his face, I treat as an equal.
That makes me a jerk.
At some point in all of the heavy conversation I stopped to say that I may not think CW is a good person but I’d never do to him what he has done to me with me doing nothing to him. He picked on me because he could.
And you let him. When I was bullied for the first 8 years of my schooling, I got used to authority figures not standing up for me. And in the process I saw the people around me become very comfortable with torture of another human being.
The fact is that at the end of the day I am someone who is trying to earn a living. I don’t ask for much. Enough to pay for my lawyers and payment plans and back taxes and all that good stuff. I know you have 4 kids though so you are convinced your money problems are worse than mine, and that’s fine. There’s another area where cross-level respect is hard: Parents respecting the viewpoints of people who have not had children. See, what happens is that when you fuck and the condom breaks, and you accidentally end up with a human life inside you, is that the baby is eventually born and makes you stop being a selfish piece of shit for the first time since…well…since YOU were born.
You’ve been an asshole since birth like the rest of us. Except now, there’s this tiny human that depends on you for its very survival. This changes a person. Eventually you stop being motivated by purely selfish pursuits, and take more pleasure in the sacrifice and work it takes to keep a family together.
This is what separates an adult from a child: If you are motivated by anyone’s well-being other than your own.
And similarly, when we’re in a room of coworkers who are boring and not getting ignored, we have to know that nobody in there is a child and we are by definition ALL out for ourselves in this context. It is our automatic role as human beings in that position of social threat.
- I don’t know what makes a person “rude.” What I find “rude” is likely not what someone else finds rude. I am not offended by things that would deeply offend others. I also have weird hang-ups/pet-peeves and so I have specific beliefs about which flavors of “rude” I can and cannot tolerate or see past in order to get to know the person underneath.
- I have no self-awareness or insight into this matter.
Thinking back to this last job, I never connected with anyone there and I worked there 4 months. The only person I opened up to, wasn’t even a real person, it was just the fake CW persona he created to get on my good side. He figured out how he could get me to laugh and relax and, if all goes according to plan, eventually trust him so that he can take advantage of me for personal gain sometime down the road.
How bizarre it was to spend 72 hours traveling pretty closely with a coworker, not a peer in generation or in seniority but only 12 years older, and not incapable of finding topics of conversation that would be suitable for us.
The first day, I was hopeful that I’d finally have the chance to sit down with him and have a bit of a heart-to-heart about the behavior I had witnessed. I was looking forward to the trip to iron all that out so we could have a harmonious working relationship.
Nah, turns out my inability to talk to him when he’s 50 feet away from me in the office actually doesn’t have to do with his availability or lack thereof. On this trip he actually seemed to actively avoid me, lying and saying he had a few calls to make and then 30 minutes later I spot him at the bar drinking alone.
He said if he had ABSOLUTELY nothing better to do, maybe we should go sightseeing. I thanked him for his impassioned offer to spend time together. I think you have to be trying to be rude at that point, because there’s no way you could do these things and think they won’t come off the wrong way. There was no mistaking a man who spent all his time trying to get away from me. The truth was evident all along but now came with a blinking marquee:
YOUR COWORKER DOES, IN FACT, SEEM TO HATE YOU!
And then? Sometimes there are just those. The people who are terrible despite defying all explanation. There are no words like “deserve” with them — they mistreat anyone who crosses their paths, because they are sick and suffering inside and we are just unlucky enough to have had that misfortune ourselves.
Just like we cannot change our life experiences, we cannot control people either. Even if we were able to influence another’s thoughts, influence is not the same as control. Free will trumps control, given adequate and fair freedoms.
