I like to tell myself that I don’t care about what people think about me.
This is broadly true; I generally try and speak my mind, and worry about the consequences later, or never. In my mind, there’s very little point in sharing popular opinions. Almost by definition, if your opinion is popular it’s shared by many people. The only reason to share an opinion is if you have something to add, and generally speaking I only have something to add if I have an unpopular opinion, and you generally cannot do that if I give a shit about peoples’ opinion of me.
All that being said, I am certainly not immune to it, like anyone. It’s one thing to roll your eyes at some random asshole on the internet who doesn’t like you, it’s another when it’s someone you know in person or respect who thinks you’re a moron.
Like most people, I care what my parents think about me, I care what my wife thinks about me, I worry about what my friends think about me. I think this is all pretty normal.
Recently, though, I’ve developed sort of a parasocial relationship with a semi-prominent software engineer. I don’t want to say his name, but I’d say he’s roughly in the “B-list” of “software celebrities”.
I signed up for his Patreon, and joined his Discord, and as far as I can tell he immediately disliked me because I wanted to make a NixOS package for one of his applications. Instead of an encouraging “go ahead”, or even a discouraging “I’d rather you don’t make a package because…”, he started going on about how he’s sure that I’ll get bored and give up, and how that’s how people are, and people are going to be stuck with old versions of his app because of it.
I still made the package, and I have been maintaining it, but for some reason I don’t understand, I actually cared what he thought about me. Usually when people get indignant and shitty like that, I roll my eyes and tell myself “Okay asshole…” and move on, but for some reason I wanted this guy to like me.
Over the course of a year, routinely on his Discord, if I said anything, he would give similarly pissy responses, and generally gave some passive aggressive dig at me, and I would give it more weight than it deserved.
Yesterday, I finally had enough, so I stopped supporting on Patreon and left his Discord server. He didn’t want me there, he very clearly actively disliked me, and I was assigning too much weight onto what he said.
As stated, the thing that confuses me more than anything is the fact that I actually gave a fuck. This guy is some nobody. He’s smart enough but not like a hyper-genius, and there are plenty of things he’s objectively wrong about, but despite that I assigned weight to what he was saying, like he was some kind of friend to me.
The term for this is “parasocial relationship”. Effectively, I was an audience member who had developed some sort of one-way friendship with a guy who didn’t give a shit about my existence.
The internet enables a lot of strangeness. The immediate access to someone’s entire body of work can give you the impression that you know the person, and that person knows you. We evolved around small groups of humans; prior to the development of civilization, we likely would only ever meet a few dozen people in our life, and for any work, you would know who did it.
Human psychology is dumb, and I should go back to pretending I don’t care what people think.