People pleasing is a fool's errand

12/09/24 • 6 min

So, largely, there are going to be two kinds of people in your life—in anyone's life, really. These are going to be people who are good to you and people who are bad to you. People who you get along with and people who you don't get along with. People who care about you and people who don't care about you or actively dislike you.

The mistake a lot of us make is that, like, let's visually imagine them as two different folders: people who are good to you and people who are not good to you. People who are mean and nasty to you, people who are actively working towards your detriment, and people who care about you, people who want you to do better, people who want to help you, and people who do help you. Right? These are the two broad categories.

The mistake a lot of us make is that we want to live in a world where everyone is in this folder, where everyone is our friend and cares for us and wants to help us. We want these people—the ones who don't care about us—to be in the folder containing people who do want to help us. This is a mistake because it is never going to happen. You are never, ever going to live in a world where everyone likes you, cares for you, and wants to help you.

I call it a mistake because I find a lot of people trying to turn these people into these people. They want to spend time making sure that the people who dislike you become people who like you. I'm not saying it is impossible to do so. I'm just saying that the inordinate amount of time many of us spend doing that is mostly wasted time because you are never going to become absolutely successful at it. And even if you are a little bit successful at it, you will want to be more successful at it. And you're not going to be—it’s not going to be, I put in one effort and I got two result. Therefore, I will put five effort and get 10 result. There is an upper limit to it. Some people are never going to become part of this folder.

Ideally, in a sane world, you would spend more time with these people, right? You would care about the people who care about you. You would want to help them. You would want to do things for them. You would want to understand them better and try to do things that make them happy. But because you're fixated on turning these people into these people, you don't do that. Most of your time is spent on the people who don't like you.

The people who care about you deserve more of your attention. I think we can all agree on this. The people who care about you deserve to spend more time with you. The people who care about you deserve more of your attention and more of your love and more of your care. And yet, because you're fixated on the people who don't like you—people who you are looking to bring into this folder—you don't do that. You take for granted the people who do care about you, and you spend your time on the people who don't care about you.

Taking your loved ones for granted is never a good idea because they don't deserve that. They deserve the best of you. They deserve your time, your effort, and your understanding. But your time, your effort, and your understanding is going in the wrong direction. It is going in the direction of the people who don't really care about all that.

Another side effect of it is that, with every action you take, you are sending a message out into the universe. I don't mean this in a woo kind of way. I'm literally saying that if you are a public personality, or even if you are not a public personality and you simply have a great, large social circle, an extended family, or friend circle, then everything you do that is visible to the people around you sends a message out.

And this message is something you should pay attention to because this is not something you're saying, and yet it is something you're conveying with your actions. So what is the message you send out when you do this thing? You tell the people who want your attention that the best way to get your attention is to be mean and nasty to you, because those are the people who you are spending time on. You're literally telling the world that if you want something from me, you shouldn't be good to me because if you are good to me, I will take you for granted. The best way to get my attention is to be mean and nasty to me because those are the people I will spend time and effort on.

We all do this. I myself have done this. But if one thing that age has taught me—I'm 41 years old, in case anyone here on this channel did not know about it—if there is one thing that age has taught me, it’s that there is only so much you can achieve by focusing on all that is going wrong with your life.

There are things that are right with your life. If you focus on those things, if you spend time with the people who are everything that is going right with your life, you might find that the amount of control that the dark forces have on you is reducing. Or, at the very least, that yo...

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Whose jobs will AI steal?

A large part of the discourse on the future of work leaves out huge chunks of the working class. Just as, a decade or so ago, the discourse on the connecting power of social media left out the capitalistic motivations of the corporations running these platforms. Every technology has an ethic of its own, and the ethic behind generative AI has so far proven to be somewhat akin to robbery on a global scale. Maybe things will change. Maybe they won’t. But questions need to be asked of this new system that seeks to govern how we see labour and how we define work.

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The artist in the market

Imagine there are two spoons. You go to decide which one to buy. One is made of aluminum. One is made of steel. One is quite beautiful and ornate. The other is just functional. One, it seems, will not last very long. The other will not only last, but it will also be nice to look at. But they both serve the same function. They're both spoons. They are both going to be used for the exact same thing, putting nutritious items—hopefully—into your mouth and feeding you or feeding the people you choose to make food for.

Two spoons are essentially the same thing. We find that we live in capitalism, inside markets, and the value of an object is decided on the basis of a few factors. In the case of these spoons, it is probably going to be durability because it is not even possible, I think, to improve the spoon as far as design is concerned. There is a book called This Is Not the End of the Book, where the authors—one of whom I think is Umberto Eco—talk about how there are some machines whose design it is impossible to improve. One of those things is the spoon. The other one, ironically, is the book.

I say ironically because the topic of this episode is what differentiates art and why it is not always healthy to describe art as a consumer product or a commodity whose value is only going to be decided by how much people choose to pay for it. While two spoons are essentially the same, two stories are not the same. They may serve a similar function as far as appearances are concerned. For example, for any two stories, the thing you’re going to do with them is read them and get some variety of edification. You’re going to find yourself happier, sadder, more excited, or wiser at the end of reading a story. Or at the very least, you’re going to be entertained, as in the story is going to help you pass the time. That is the function of a story.

But is that all a story is? Like the spoon, is the story eventually reducible to the thing that it does to us? I do not think so. I think that at the heart of art is uniqueness. The reason we go for art, the reason we consume art, the reason we appreciate art, is because we want something unique. We want a unique experience. We want a unique insight from the thing we have read. That is primarily why we go for art. We wish to find something relatable. We are different from other people, and we are looking to find something unique out there that would validate that feeling in us. Something that would tell us, "Yes, you are strange, you are different, but you are also equal to everyone else in the sense that everyone is different, and everyone is unique in their own way."

We look for that. We go out looking for that when we go out looking for art. The trouble is, the place we go looking for art is the market because eventually that is where we are going to find everything. Take this podcast, for example. I record these in order to express myself. I am aware that whatever I make is going to have to compete with other things of the same kind in a marketplace, which is either your favorite podcast player or YouTube or wherever you’re consuming this. But that is only part of the equation. That is not the entirety of it.

When I say that I am expressing myself, I am making art, I am making something that will pass for art at the very least. What I am doing, I would still do even if it did not have to perform in a market. No matter how many people listen to this, no matter how few people listen to this, no matter how good or bad it is, I would still do it. The spoon will not exist if it did not have practical utility. Art is created to express something. From the point of view of the person who creates the art, it is also created to experience the act of expressing yourself.

We are presently living in a time where the value of art is being defined in terms of how much it sells and how much money it can make the person who’s creating the art. This is not completely wrong because artists, at the end of the day, do have to exist inside a market. But whenever I hear talk of AI replacing artists, I’m struck by the fact that whoever says these things doesn’t really understand why people create art and why people consume art.

Imagine two places. One, a temple of creativity into which inspiration is flowing from all dimensions through magical portals. And then there is the market where art is sold. The artist who comes from the temple, who is creating stuff because they’re expressing themselves and experiencing the art of expression, will surely die if they never manage to sell anything in the market. But I think we have convinced ourselves that it is possible to live in the market. Because I am equally sure that the artist who lives in the market will also die if he was not visiting the temple of creativity every once in a while.

Thank you for listening. I hope that made sense. I will see you in the next one.

This is a public ep...