You can’t exist without causing damage

You have to learn to be comfortable making people upset. Let me grab you by the shoulders and yell that you have to learn to be comfortable with people being upset at you. If you live your life guided by an intense fear of people disliking you, you will become miserable. I’ve been getting better at this and you can too.

It’s a fairly simple strategy: whenever you notice yourself flinching away from this interpersonal friction, you can instead run towards it. Oh god, I said no to this person, what are they gonna think—oh wait, this is good, this is an opportunity to embrace conflict.

It helps to remember that ultimately you’re just afraid of a bunch of feelings. The other person doesn’t actually hate you; they’re not even thinking about you. You just have to get comfortable enduring that feeling of your stomach churning in on itself. And then you taste the liberation of not being bothered by someone disliking you, and it is genuinely euphoric.

It also helps to think through some of the edge cases, the catastrophes you’re actually afraid of, and to spell them out fully. Here’s one that often gets me: you’re afraid that if this person dislikes you, they’ll hold a grudge against you, and one day you might need something from them, and then this mistake you made years ago will come back and haunt you.

First just sit with this. Just recognize that this is one of your fears, this hypothetical future scenario in five years is dictating your actions in the present moment. You know that saying about how a butterfly flaps its wings and on the other side of the world a tornado starts? This is you: running around, frantically catching butterflies, with the hope that you’ll prevent a tornado. You’ve fallen prey to the illusion that you can setup a good life for yourself by attempting to control everyone’s perception of you.

The real remedy is to structure your life so that your fate doesn’t hinge on the whims of someone you ticked off five years ago. In fact, I’m sure this is already what your life looks like—for the most part, people you’ve barely interacted with don’t have any actual power over you. You can do more to serve your future self by positively creating a good life for yourself (which will often involve declining other people’s demands of you) than by minimizing the likelihood that anyone could possibly dislike you.

I have come to the conclusion lately that it is physically impossible to do anything important in the world and not have someone in the world upset at you. It’s impossible, but we try to convince ourselves otherwise. Even more broadly, it’s impossible to exist in the world without causing harm. Merely by breathing, eating, and walking around you are causing the death of countless little creatures. If you’ve spent extended time on the internet you’ll realize that it’s possible to say the most innocuous thing, and someone in the world will be inflamed by you, their experience will be made slightly worse by your words. And, well, neither of you are really to blame, it’s just that a particularly shaped match happened to come into contact with the correctly shaped tinder. Merely by existing you are constantly setting off little sparks.

For some of us this becomes a source of guilt, and compels us to make ourselves as small as possible. Don’t state strong opinions, avoid conflict, don’t ever say no to someone directly, don’t criticize people. Minimizing harm becomes your primary mode of operation in the world. This is sad, because it makes us miserable and terrified of being ourselves.

Instead the question should be something else. The question should be: what’s the most good I can do, given the inevitable harm that will result from my actions?