The Strange Relief of Finally Disappointing Someone

I was standing in the kitchen last Tuesday afternoon, watching my wife unload the dishwasher in this very particular way she has1 where every mug gets positioned with the handle at exactly three o'clock, and I realized I was doing the thing again. The thing where I'd spent the past six minutes mentally rehearsing how I'd tell her I'd accidentally double-booked us for dinner with my mother and her college friend visiting. Not the content of the message (which was straightforward enough: "I messed up the calendar"), but the delivery. The exact tonal calibration required to communicate both genuine remorse and also somehow the implication that this was a fluke, an aberration, not evidence of some deeper character flaw. Which is absurd, given we've been married long enough that she's seen me do significantly more embarrassing things than mess up Google Calendar.2

But what struck me while watching this bizarre internal performance: I wasn't actually worried she'd be angry. She wouldn't be. Mildly annoyed, maybe. More likely she'd just sigh and start rearranging logistics because one of us has to be the adult about these things. What I was worried about was something more slippery. I was worried about the specific quality of her annoyance. About whether she'd think less of me in some small, accumulating way. About whether this would be the data point that confirmed whatever hypothesis she'd been quietly developing about my organizational capabilities or fundamental reliability as a human being.

The dogs were no help with perspective. They were doing what they always do around four in the afternoon, which is lying in exact spots of on the couch, completely unbothered by whether anyone approves of their life choices.3 One of them had spent the morning barking at the Amazon delivery driver with what can only be described as personal vendetta energy, which I'm certain the driver found deeply irritating. The dog does not appear to have reflected on this or adjusted behavior accordingly. She did not spend the afternoon workshopping different approaches to mail carrier relations. She just moved on to the next thing, which was lying in sun, which was apparently more important than anyone's opinion about appropriate noise levels.

This is approximately when I started thinking about Marcus Aurelius, which I know makes me sound insufferable. The guy had a job where literally millions of people's survival depended on his decisions, where every choice he made would be scrutinized by advisors and senators and historians for millennia, and he spent his evenings writing notes to himself about how other people's opinions are essentially vapor. Not in a cruel or dismissive way. Just as a statement of fact about where to allocate your limited cognitive resources. The core insight of Stoicism (which sounds like emotional suppression but actually isn't4) is this brutally simple distinction between what's up to you and what isn't. Your thoughts, your actions, your values: up to you. Pretty much everything else, including what anyone thinks about any of those things: not up to you.

Which sounds great. Until you're standing in your kitchen trying to figure out how to tell your wife about a scheduling conflict in a way that preserves some imaginary score of how together you have your life, and you realize how much energy you've been devoting to managing other people's potential reactions to things that haven't even happened yet.

The research on people-pleasing (which psychologists sometimes call sociotropy, a term that sounds like a diagnosis but actually just means "really, really wants people to like them") suggests this isn't just a personality quirk. It's a survival mechanism, basically. Your brain doing evolutionary math about belonging to the tribe, calculating that social rejection was historically fatal so maybe we should avoid it at all costs, including the cost of ever expressing an actual preference or opinion that might generate friction. The problem is this math is now operating in a context where Susan from book club finding you mildly annoying will not, in fact, lead to being expelled from the village to die alone in the wilderness. But your nervous system doesn't know that. So it keeps sending five-alarm signals about social approval like your life depends on it.5

This part gets a little uncomfortable: the calculation isn't wrong, exactly. I mean, obviously you need some people to not actively dislike you. You need to hold down a job, maintain friendships, not alienate everyone at the PTA meeting. The thing is, the math gets fuzzy at the margins. Because the gap between "being a basically decent, reasonably considerate person" and "carefully editing every opinion and impulse to minimize all possible disapproval from all possible people" is huge. And expensive.

I've noticed this especially in conversations where someone says something I disagree with (not factually wrong, just different values or priorities), and I can feel this whole apparatus activate. First, the instant calculation: how important is this disagreement? How much social capital do I have with this person? What's the percentage chance they'll interpret my disagreement as judgment? Then the editing process: okay, I could phrase it this way, or maybe if I start with validation, or perhaps I just don't say anything and change the subject, which would be easier but then I'm annoyed at myself for not being honest, but also is this really the hill to die on, and—

Stop.

This is why Brené Brown talks about vulnerability being uncomfortable but necessary. Not because being vulnerable is some kind of moral achievement, but because the alternative is this exhausting performance of being whoever you think will be most palatable to the most people.6 And the thing about that performance is it's not sustainable. Or rather, it's sustainable in the sense that people do it for decades, but only by amputating parts of themselves. The parts that have actual opinions about things. The parts that want something specific, or feel strongly about something, or would honestly rather not attend that party, thank you.

A friend of mine has this habit of just... saying what she thinks. Not in a rude way (she's from the Midwest, she says everything politely), but she'll just volunteer opinions that I'm sure someone somewhere finds slightly objectionable. She doesn't agonize about it afterward. She doesn't seem to track some running score of who might be quietly updating their assessment of her. And from the outside, I can see this is obviously healthy. This is what normal, well-adjusted people do. But watching her do it sometimes makes me itchy, because my brain is running all these background calculations about potential disapproval, and she's just... not doing that calculation. Or she's doing it and deciding the answer is "so what."7

This is the actual skill: being willing to be disliked. Not trying to be disliked (that's just contrarianism, which is people-pleasing's rebellious younger sibling). Not being indifferent to whether anyone likes you (that's sociopathy, probably). But being willing to accept that if you stand for anything, do anything, express any preference stronger than "I'm fine with whatever," some percentage of people will find you annoying or wrong or too much or not enough.

The mathematics here are unforgiving. If your goal is universal approval, your available option space shrinks to basically: be as bland and inoffensive and accommodating as possible. Never have strong opinions about anything controversial (which is everything). Never prioritize your needs over anyone else's expressed or unexpressed preferences. Never risk making anyone uncomfortable by being too much of anything: too loud, too quiet, too successful, too struggling, too happy, too sad. Just smooth all your edges down until you're this perfectly round, unthreatening sphere of acceptable mediocrity.8

The cost of this is pretty simple: you disappear. Not literally (you're still showing up to things, still performing all the functions), but the version of you that exists is this carefully curated construct designed to minimize friction. And the thing about that construct is it's not you. It's a composite of what you think everyone else wants, which means it's nobody. It's this weird averaged-out phantom with no real preferences or convictions or personality, because anything specific enough to be interesting is also specific enough to be objectionable to someone.

I started noticing this pattern more clearly after a conversation with a friend who's a therapist.9 She'd mentioned offhand how many of her clients struggle with this sense of not knowing who they are, what they want, what they believe in. And it's not because they never had those things (though sometimes trauma does erase them). It's because they've spent so much energy managing everyone else's comfort that they've lost touch with their own actual preferences. They're fluent in reading rooms, anticipating reactions, adjusting their presentation. But if you ask them what they genuinely want, independent of what would make other people happy or comfortable or impressed, they freeze. The muscle atrophied.

This is where the notes I've been carrying around for a week (about being willing to be disliked) start to make sense. Because the question isn't really "what are you willing to be disliked for?" in some abstract philosophical sense. It's more like: where in your life are you erasing yourself to avoid disapproval? Where are you so invested in managing other people's reactions that you've lost contact with your own position? What would you actually do, say, choose, prioritize, if you weren't constantly calculating the social cost?

The dogs are helpful here as a kind of control group. They want things. Specific things. Walks at certain times, certain treats, certain spots on the couch, whatever the other dog has at that specific moment. When they don't get these things, they're direct about their disappointment (whining, the guilt-inducing stare, strategic positioning near the door). They're not sophisticated about it. But they're also not tormented by whether their wanting things makes them demanding or high-maintenance or difficult. They just want what they want, and they're willing to be briefly unpopular with me for expressing it.10

This doesn't mean becoming a dog (that would be weird). It means recovering some ability to have preferences without treating them as shameful imposition. To disagree without treating disagreement as relationship-ending catastrophe. To say "actually, I'd rather not" without pre-emptively apologizing and justifying and offering three alternative solutions that better serve everyone else's needs.

There's a reason this is hard. The fear of social rejection isn't irrational (it's just miscalibrated for contemporary contexts where belonging doesn't require unanimous approval). But also, some forms of people-pleasing are genuinely adaptive. Being attuned to other people, being flexible, being willing to accommodate others' needs: these are positive traits. The pathology isn't in having them. It's in having only them, with no counterweight of self-advocacy or boundary-setting or willingness to risk anyone's disapproval.11

The shift, when it happens, is less dramatic than you'd expect. It's not this big moment of declaring independence or burning bridges or posting manifestos about authenticity. It's smaller. It's replying to the group text with "actually, I can't make it" without a paragraph of explanation. It's ordering what you want at the restaurant instead of something similar to what everyone else is getting. It's saying "I see it differently" in the meeting without immediately softening it with "but I could be wrong" or "just my opinion" or "I'm sure you've thought about this more than me."

These seem trivial. They're not. Because each time you do the thing that might generate mild disapproval (emphasis on mild; we're not talking about being an asshole, we're talking about expressing normal human preferences and opinions), you're gathering data. And the data, usually, is: nothing catastrophic happens. People don't disown you. They don't secretly update your relationship to "adversarial." At most, they disagree, or they're briefly inconvenienced, and then everyone moves on with their lives.12

The cumulative effect of gathering this data is you start to realize how much energy you'd been spending on preventing outcomes that either weren't that bad or weren't going to happen anyway. And that freed energy can go toward actually figuring out what you think, what you want, what you value enough to be inconvenient about. Which sounds like some self-help platitude but is actually just the basic equipment of being a person instead of a people-pleasing algorithm.

I eventually told my wife about the scheduling conflict. I didn't rehearse it. I just said "hey, I double-booked us, my fault, what should we do?" And she said "okay, let me text your friend and see if we can move it to Wednesday." No drama, no judgment, no evidence of secretly downgrading her estimation of my competence as a human being. Just solving the problem and moving on.

The only real observation I had afterward was how much energy I'd wasted on managing a reaction that never materialized. And how that's basically the pattern: spending enormous resources managing hypothetical disapproval from people who either aren't actually judging you or whose judgment genuinely doesn't matter to your ability to live your life.13

Here's what I'm still working on: distinguishing between reasonable social consideration (don't be needlessly rude, try not to actively hurt people's feelings, show up when you commit to things) and this other thing, this vigilant monitoring of everyone's potential reactions to everything you do. The latter isn't consideration. It's anxiety dressed up as concern for others. And the way you can tell the difference is asking: am I adjusting my behavior because it actually causes harm, or because someone might possibly be slightly less approving of me?

If the answer is the second thing, and you're still doing the adjustment, you're probably not being considerate. You're just managing terror of disapproval. Which is understandable (evolution is a harsh mistress), but not the same as being a good person. Sometimes being a good person involves risking people being annoyed with you. Because the alternative is this slow dissolution of self where you become this agreeable void, palatable to everyone and known to no one.

The dogs remain unhelpful role models for most things (they also eat grass and bark at doorbells). But they've got this one thing figured out: you can want things, express preferences, take up space in the world, and most people will basically accommodate you without making it a referendum on your worthiness to exist. Some people won't (the mail carrier seems unimpressed, the neighbor definitely finds the barking annoying). And life continues. Nobody's love is truly universal. Nobody's approval is unanimous. And trying to achieve it is what costs you everything else worth having.

The question isn't really what you're willing to be disliked for. It's more like: what do you value enough to tolerate the inevitable reality that someone, somewhere, will find your commitment to it annoying or wrong or too much? Because the answer to that question is, in some basic sense, what you actually care about. Everything else is just noise, the endless exhausting task of being nobody in particular to everyone in general. Which is safe, sure. But only in the way that never leaving your house is safe. Technically you avoid all sorts of risks. You also avoid ever going anywhere.