Despite what red-pill influencers would like young men to believe, human beings are not lone wolves. In fact, we are quite bad at surviving by ourselves. Think about it: what’s the biggest animal you think you could beat in a fight, by yourself, without tools? When I ask people1 this question, they often give completely ridiculous answers like “a large dog.” Excuse me? a Siberian Husky’s bite applies a force concentrated at 320-4002 pounds per square inch of pressure. A human kick, on the other hand, concentrates very diffusely, at about 30-80 pounds per square inch of pressure. It is just barely possible that a very well-trained MMA fighter could beat a medium-sized dog, but even then the odds are tilted towards the dog. For the average human, your best bet is probably a chicken.
But I digress. My point is that humans do not fare well on their own. We evolved to survive in groups. And surviving in groups requires being liked (or at least tolerated) by your group. So we have evolved this desire to be liked, which is totally normal and rational, and not something you should feel bad about.3
In fact, around ages 7-8, children naturally start to figure out where they stand. They notice that when they do X, people respond positively, and when they do Y, people respond negatively. Of course, it’s not conscious at first. And for many people, it never becomes conscious at all. In fact most people never develop the language to articulate what they’re doing and why. Regardless, the brain notices patterns and adapts.
What I am describing is the idea of a social defense mechanism. Now, people often hear the word “defense mechanism” and immediately assume it is an inherently negative thing. But it’s not. It’s just a pattern of behavior you develop, usually without realizing, to protect yourself from social rejection or harm. Maybe you learned early on that making people laugh deflects from the things you’re insecure about, so you become the funny one. Or maybe you figured out that if you never voice strong opinions, people can’t disagree with you, so you become the agreeable one. Or maybe you found that being aggressively intellectual makes people respect you or leave you alone, so you became the one who corrects everyone.
In any case, these defense mechanisms often become our personality without realizing it. It is quite difficult to tell if you are being funny because you genuinely find things funny, or because humor is a social survival strategy you learned in third grade. If you really want to know, you could go the therapy route, or the psychedelic route, each of which has its own pros and cons. Pick your poison.
In all seriousness, everyone is conforming to something, even if they’re conforming to the ideal of “being yourself.” Terrible phrase, by the way. What does that even mean, be yourself? Which brings me back to why I’m talking about this at all, given who I am. Everyone who has spoken to me knows how I am. That is to say, quite frankly, very odd. And yet somehow I have friends. And indeed, people with very little personality are also able to make friends. Granted, these people are often conventionally attractive… but looks are not a mystical personal quality. They’re just another form of social capital, like intelligence, or good humor, or social intelligence. And which social capitals are valued most strongly will vary group to group.
And so, nobody is simply “likable” in an absolute, cosmic sense. There is no cosmic scoreboard where people who are more attractive, or more interesting, or more intelligent, or more socially competent score more points. Rather, people are liked because they bring something that matters to a particular group, at a particular moment, and under particular rules of what counts as valuable. A person who is invisible in one room may very well be magnetic in another. What works, works because of where you are standing and who is standing with you.
So, what do we make of all of this? Remember what I said at the beginning? We’re terrible at surviving alone. We need groups. But needing to belong somewhere doesn’t mean you belong everywhere. You’re not supposed to be universally loved, let alone liked. You should, rather, find the rooms where your particular brand of weird or boring or funny or unfunny or stupid or smart is the thing people need. And finding those rooms means actually walking into them. It means talking to everyone, and keeping an open mind. Because yes, some rooms aren’t for you. And that is, for many, terrifying. Rejection feels like death to the part of our brain that’s still worried about getting kicked out of the tribe. But you’re not going to die. You’re just going to find different people. And the only way to find them is to look.
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