Why Do I Need to Be Liked? - Daily Wisdom #61

Welcome back to Daily Wisdom. Today I'd like to talk with you about something almost everyone treats as a weakness and which I think has been badly misunderstood. The fact that we care often a great deal about what other people think of us. I want to say at the start that this will not be an episode about becoming indifferent or about the world being full of critics you must armor yourself against. I do not think that is true and I do not think it would help you if it were. I am Chen Li, author of the blog word of Taoism on Substack and you're listening to my podcast. Let's start with the scene. Picture it with me and see how much of it you recognize. A woman is sitting in a meeting. It is the middle of the afternoon, 12 people around a long table and someone is presenting a plan that has a problem in it. She has spotted the problem. It is a real one and she is almost certain she is right about it and she has been holding it for 20 minutes now. Waiting for the right moment to say it. She is running calculations. Will this sound like criticism? She asks herself? Will it look as though she is positioning herself? Is this the kind of thing that gets remembered later? Is she certain enough? And each pass through those calculations moves the moment slightly further away until it has gone. 20 minutes on, a colleague raises the same objection in fewer words and with less evidence. Several people say it is a very good point. She nods along. She smiles. She says something agreeable about the revision and then she drives home and replays the whole afternoon 304 times. With a low familiar frustration she cannot quite name because the thing that stopped her was not cowardice exactly and it was not stupidity and she cannot find the word for what it was. Let's stay with her for a moment before we do anything clever with it because I suspect nearly everyone listening has been in that chair. The same mechanism runs all through an ordinary week. You leave a message unsent because you are unsure how it will land. You say you are fine when you are not, to someone you would actually like to tell. All of it is perfectly honest and most of the time it is not even conscious. And here is the first thing I want to say because a great deal of the advice on this subject begins by making you the problem and I think that is both unkind and wrong. This sensitivity is not a defect in your character. It is one of the oldest and most sophisticated pieces of equipment you have. For almost the whole of human history we survived in groups. A person alone could not bring down large game. Could not defend a camp through the night. Could not survive an injury or an illness or a hard winter. The group was food, warmth, safety and continuation. And so the single most dangerous thing that could happen to an individual was not a predator. It was exclusion, which means that we are descended from people who were attentive to how they were being seen. The ones who could read a shift in a face, who noticed when the mood of the group turned, who felt the discomfort of being on the edge of things and moved to repair it. Those are the ones who lived long enough to have children. So when your stomach tightens because you think you may have said the wrong thing at dinner, that is not weakness. That is a system doing precisely what it evolved to do. In a body that cannot easily tell the difference between social awkwardness and mortal danger. And it does far more than keep us safe. Consider what a person entirely without this sensitivity would actually be like. They would interrupt endlessly. They would never notice that a joke had landed badly or that someone across the table had gone silent or that a friend was hurt. They would say true things at the exact moment when saying them would do the most damage. They would be in a word unbearable and quite possibly cruel, not from malice but from blindness. Caring what others think is the raw material of manners, of tact, of kindness, of collaboration. It is why we lower our voices in a hospital corridor. It is why we can work with people we do not like. It is a very large part of what makes us decent to one another. Whatever we say next, I do not want us to lose sight of that. The trouble is not that the system exists. The trouble is that it has come badly out of calibration and it now runs in situations where the stakes it is responding to are nothing like the stakes it was built for. Because the tribe used to be 40 people you would know your whole life, whose opinion of you genuinely determined your survival. Now, in some sense, the tribe is everyone. It is the colleagues, the extended family, the acquaintances, the school parents, the several hundred people who can see what you post, and a diffuse imagined audience made of all of them at once whose approval is unwinnable because it does not exist as a single thing. Half of what we adjust ourselves for is a jury that will never convene. And the second miscalibration is the size of the threat. The system responds to disapproval as though it were exile. In the meeting, her body was reacting as if speaking up carried real danger. When the actual worst case was a slightly awkward moment in a room she leaves at five. The volume of the alarm has not been adjusted since the days when the alarm mattered. That is what she couldn't find the word for, driving home. It was not cowardice. It was a useful, protective instinct, running at a hundred times the strength the situation called for. In service of a group that was never going to cast her out. So what do we do about it? Broadly, there are two moves and I want to look at both because most of us have spent time in each and neither one works. The first is to try harder to be acceptable. If the discomfort comes from the possibility of disapproval, then the obvious answer is to eliminate the possibility. Be more careful, be more agreeable, anticipate what each person needs and provide it. Notice which version of you goes over well in which room and supply that version. This might work but only for a while and that's exactly what makes it dangerous. People do like you. You become known as easy to work with, as thoughtful as someone who never causes trouble and the cost accumulates somewhere you're not looking because to be acceptable to everyone you have to sand down everything about you that anyone might object to and what you object to is often the most particular and alive part of a person. The opinions go first, then the preferences, then eventually the sense of what you actually want. I have known people who arrived in their 40s genuinely unable to answer the question of what they would like to do on a free Saturday because every muscle they had for wanting things had been given over to detecting what other people wanted. There is a further trap in it which is that the strategy cannot succeed even on its own terms. The audiences contradict each other. What your family approves of and what your colleagues approve of and what your friends approve of do not overlap, so pleasing all of them requires becoming a different person in each room. And the seems start to show and you start to feel like a fraud, which you are not. You are simply attempting something impossible. The second move is to stop caring, and it is the one our culture currently prefers. Do not let anyone live in your head rent free. Their opinion of you is none of your business, be unapologetically yourself. There is something genuinely useful in this, and I do not want to dismiss it. It is a corrective, and for a person who has spent 30 years managing everyone's comfort at the expense of their own, hearing that they are allowed to displease someone can be a real liberation. But the truth is that almost nobody who says they do not care what anyone thinks actually feels that way. They have simply built something over the caring, and you can hear it in the volume. Real indifference does not need announcing. The person who tells you loudly that they do not care is telling you in the same breath that they care very much. The second problem is more serious. In so far as you succeed at not caring, you lose the very sensitivity that lets you be close to people. You cannot be genuinely open to someone's love, and close to their disappointment. It is the same channel. The armor that keeps out criticism keeps out affection, connection, feedback, and the possibility of being changed by someone else. People who truly stop caring for what others think, do not become free. They become isolated and often rather unpleasant, and the last person to notice is them. So here is where both roads end. One tells you to give the outside world total authority over you. The other tells you to give it none, and both are treating other people as fundamentally a threat, a force to be managed, either by appeasement or by defense. That is the assumption I want to question, because I do not think it is true. What if the question was not how much we care, but who's regard we are letting in and what we are letting it do? Taoist thought has something precise to say here, and it comes at the problem from two directions that seem contradictory until you hold them together. The first is a warning. There's a passage in the Tao Te Ching that runs roughly like this. Those who stand on tiptoe do not stand firmly, and those who take the longest strides do not walk the fastest. Those who display themselves do not shine. Those who justify themselves are not honored. Those who boast of their achievements achieve nothing lasting, and those who are proud of their work create nothing that endures. Sit with the image at the start of it, because it is doing more work than it appears to. Standing on tiptoe is what you do when you want to be seen over a crowd or to seem taller than you are, and the point is not that it is immoral. The point is that it is unstable. You cannot hold the position. Anyone standing on tiptoe is already in some sense falling. The only question is when. That is a fair description of a life organized around managing how you appear. It is not that it is wicked. It is that it cannot be sustained, because it requires constant effort to maintain a position that is not your natural height, and eventually the calves give out. The passage goes on to say that these behaviors are in the way of things like leftover food, or a tumour on the body, superfluous, and excess that adds nothing and drains something. The self-display, the self-justification, the endless small management of how one is perceived is not a moral failing. It is surplus. It is effort spent on nothing, and it exhausts precisely because it produces nothing. Now if that were all towers thought had to say, it would land close to the second move we just dismissed. A council of retreat from the eyes of others. But it is not all it has to say, and the other half is what makes it useful for us. Elsewhere, the Tao Te Ching says something that I find remarkable, and which cuts against almost everything our culture believes about self-sufficiency. It says that the good person is the teacher of the person who is not yet good, and that the person who is not yet good is the material, the raw stuff of the good person. And then it adds the sting. Whoever does not honor that teacher, or does not care for that material, is deeply lost. However, clever they may be. Read that again with our question in mind. Other people are not a jury. They are the material out of which a self is made. This is not sentimentality. It is closer to a description of how a person actually comes into being. You did not construct yourself alone in a room. You learned language from other people, which means you learned to think in a medium they gave you. You learned what a decent action looks like by watching some and being on the receiving end of others. Almost everything you know about yourself, you know because someone reflected it back to you, either in words or in how they responded to you. And here is a fact I find genuinely useful to hold on to. You have never seen your own face. Think about that literally for a moment. Not once in your entire life have you looked directly at your own face. You have seen reflections and photographs and video, all of which are reversed or flattened or caught at the wrong instant. The thing that everyone who has ever loved you looks at every day is the one thing you have no direct access to. We accept this without distress about our faces. It seems obvious, but it is equally true of almost everything about us. You cannot hear your own voice as others hear it. You cannot see the expression you make when you are being defensive. You do not know what it is like to be on the other end of your own impatience or your own kindness. There's an entire dimension of you that is available to everyone except you. So other people are not primarily judges. They are mirrors and a mirror is not an insult. It is the only way you get to see the back of your own head. This is where the two halves fit together and why they are not contradictory. What the tiptoe passage warns against is performing for the mirror arranging yourself for the reflection, living in the image rather than the life. What the teacher passage insists on is that you cannot see yourself without others and the dismissing them is a kind of self-blinding. The error is not in caring about the reflection. The error is in letting the reflection replace the thing reflected. There is one more piece to add and it is the one that makes any of this practical because it explains why so much of what comes back at us from the mirror is distorted. Most of what people say about you is not really about you. I do not mean that as a comfort. I mean it as an observation about how people work. The colleague who dismisses your idea in a meeting may be frightened about their own standing. The relative who makes the pointed remark about your choices may be defending a choice of their own that they are not sure about. The person who is rude to you in a shop has had a morning you know nothing about. Everyone you meet is looking at you through the whole of their own history, their fears, the disappointments, what happened to them at 11 years old, what happened this morning. The Taoist observation that everything arises in relation to everything else applies here quite directly. What comes back at you from from another person is never a clean reading of you. It is a reading of you as processed by them and their weather is in it, which is why the goal cannot be to accept all of it and cannot be to reject all of it. It has to be to read it well. The most useful move I know is to ask three questions of any piece of feedback spoken or implied before deciding what to do with it. The first, does this person want good things for me? Not do they like me and not are they being nice, but is their basic orientation toward my flourishing? A friend who tells you a hard truth wants good things for you. A rival who says the same words does not. The identical sentence carries different weight depending on where it comes from. And this is not bias. It is accuracy. The second, do they actually know? Do they have information about this? Have they done the thing they are commenting on? Are they in a position to see what they claim to see? Almost all of us wait the opinions of people who happen to be present over the opinions of people who happen to be right. The loudest voice in the room is often simply the person with the least hesitation and hesitation frequently correlates with knowing how complicated a thing is. The third, is this about me or about them? Was there anything in that remark that a fair observer would recognize or was it a piece of their own weather that happened to land on you? When something passes all three, it is gold. That is a person who wants your good, knows the terrain and is speaking about you rather than themselves. And what they say is worth more than a hundred compliments. That is the material the tout etching is talking about and refusing it out of pride is the self-blinding it warns against. When something fails all three, you can set it down, not with contempt and not with a speech about how you do not care. Just set it down, the way you would put down a parcel that turned out to be addressed to someone else. And a great deal of what we receive falls in the middle, which is where the real skill lies. There is often one true grain inside a badly delivered remark. Someone says something, cutting about how you handle the situation and the delivery is unfair and somewhere in it is a detail worth keeping. The mature move is to take the grain and leave the rest, which is difficult because our instinct is to accept or reject the whole package depending on how it made us feel. Now you raise something important when we plan this. And I want to address it directly because it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Some remarks are made with the intention to wound. They exist. Not everything unkind is clumsy feedback in disguise. Here is how I would tell them apart. Feedback, even harsh feedback, is about a thing you did and it usually contains somewhere an implication that you could do it differently. An attack is about who you are and it offers no root forward because a root forward was never the point. Compare, you handle that badly with you are the kind of person who always handles things badly. The first has a door in it. The second is a wall and it is meant to be. When it is genuinely an attack, the useful response is not to armor up permanently which costs you far too much elsewhere. It is to recognize what it is and to decline to install it. You can hear something, register that it was designed to hurt and simply not build it into your idea of yourself. Some things are said to you that do not become part of you and knowing which is which is most of the work. There is one more piece and it is the deepest. All of this discernment requires something to discern from. If you have no sense of what you value then every incoming opinion is equally weighted because you have nothing to check it against. The person who knows what they are trying to do and why can hear a criticism and feel it and think about it and still act because the criticism is being measured against something. The person with no internal reference has only the volume of other people's voices to go by. So the antidote to caring too much about what others think is not caring less. It is knowing more clearly what you yourself think which gives the outside voices something to be weighed against rather than a vacuum to fill. Let's go back to the meeting room because there is a version of that afternoon that goes differently. Nothing about her has changed. She has not become fearless and the calculation still run. The breath she takes before speaking is still the small, tight one. What is different is only this. She has been thinking about the plan rather than about herself. And when the moment comes, she is more interested in the problem than in how the sentence will land. So she says it. Perhaps a little clumsily, someone disagrees. And for a moment it is uncomfortable in exactly the way she feared. Then the discussion goes somewhere better and the plan improves and by five o'clock nobody in the room, including her is thinking about it at all. That is really all the freedom on offer here and it is enough, not the freedom of not caring. The freedom of caring about the right things in the right proportion from the people whose regard has actually been earned. So here is something we might each carry this week. Think of an opinion that has been sitting on you. One you have been arranging yourself around and run the three questions on it. Does this person want good things for me? Do they actually know is this about me or about them? You may find, as I often do, that the voice you have been organizing your life around belongs to someone who was never really looking at you at all. And you may also find which is the better discovery that among all the noise, there are two or three people whose eyes are clear and whose hearts are with you and whose reflection of you is the truest picture you will ever get. Those are the mirrors worth standing in front of. The rest is just weather, moving across other people's windows. Thank you for spending this time with me. If something here was useful, I'd be glad to know which part stayed with you and a reminder that life wisdom arrives on Saturday. So I hope you'll join me then. Until then, be a little gentler with a part of you that has always wanted to be liked. It has been trying to keep you safe. (gentle music)