To extrapolate:
People often say that one should not worry about what others think of them, but life simply doesn’t work that way. What other people think of you really does matter; point-in-fact, it can be everything depending on what field you go into.
Like say, for example, you’re a business owner and you’re recorded arguing with an angry Karen of a customer, the video’s posted online, and the internet sides with the Karen. Then, people boycott your business and you’re left without a livelihood.
Or perhaps you say something crass and get cancelled. Or simply anger or inconvenience someone with a lot of influence.
Or, even more horrifyingly, say you were assaulted and you came forward, and were ostracized and shunned by your community as a result.
How could one set up their life such that it would be impossible for people like that to rob one of their livelihood? How could one make it impossible for others to shun or ostracize them?
How could a business owner set up their business so that other people couldn’t simply shut it down on a whim in such a manner?
EDIT: I’ll just “be myself” since that’s what the majority of people in the thread want and repeat what I said to another individual:
Honestly, the way everybody is acting is really, really shameful. I am a person who made a thread and gave it a [Serious] tag because I wanted serious, literal answers to a serious problem that, given my chosen career path, will affect me at some point in my life and could potentially ruin it without good info to prepare for such a crisis beforehand. But all I’m getting is denial, mockery, condescension, lies, put-downs.
And it’s rooted in this desire to either pretend the problem is not real because you’re all secretly afraid it’ll affect you yourselves, or it’s because you know it’s real but you view it as a positive because ostracization and shunning people is an emotional cudgel you wield to silence people you don’t agree with on the internet, and answering the question honestly would require framing such actions as a negative and that would make you question the morality of your actions. And that’s not only sick, that’s just cowardly. If you believe cancelling people is morally A-O good, then at least have the temerity to threaten me with a “Don’t speak your mind and mask up” response like at least a few people were honest enough to do.
But don’t insult my intelligence by thinking you can lie to my face and pretend that something I’ve been personally watching happen to other people for over a decade is not, in fact, happening.
Now I came here for a serious answer to a serious problem that affects everyone. If you can’t participate in good faith and offer meaningful strategies to avoid or fix such problems and want to either misconstrue it as an emotional issue – much as you’ll do with what I’m saying here after the majority of you demanded I just be myself and not worry about the consequences – or outright deny it’s a real problem when it’s been real for over a decade, just don’t participate in the thread. Just go elsewhere.
Okay, I just acted like myself. Everyone happy?
Have those examples even happened? I’m still not sure what cancellation involves and how long you need to be in that state before it counts as cancellation.
The internet told me Louis CK was cancelled, but he won a Grammy last year. Kevin Spacey has been cast in movies this year. JK Rowling is still publishing books.
It does, and it’s a possibility that terrifies me. A lot of the celebrities who are cancelled are cancelled for justifiable reasons, granted (especially scumbags like R. Kelly), but it can happen to ordinary people for unjustifiable reasons, too, meaning anyone who seeks to do anything in life has to live with a sword of Damocles hanging over their head. Meaningful relationships with others can’t be built if the dynamics of that relationship include the fact that that other person has untold, unchecked power over you and you have legitimate reason to be afraid of them, given that it’s a thing.
I want to own businesses in my life and even saying that has earned the ire of, by my count, at least one person in this thread. What’s to stop them from doxxing me and putting my personal information on blast all over the fediverse, or even old social media like Twitter, preventing me from ever being able to pursue my dreams simply because they don’t like capitalism? What’s to stop the right wing from doxxing me and sending me death threats if I gain a following and then speak out against them to that following, or boycotting my business because I put up a pride flag for Pride Month? How can community even be possible with the threat of something like that happening to you in existence?
As others have already covered, everything we do comes with risk. Some people go through life without spending much thought on those risks, and if they’re lucky they never have to deal with these things. Others let it weigh upon them heavily, and it’s fairly evident that you fall into the latter camp.
You’ve caught on to the general theme though, which is that the more of yourself you put out there needlessly, the greater a possibility for negative things to happen as a result of that. I’m not going to ask you to wave a magic wand and become the type of person who doesn’t worry about those things, so here are the best compromises:
Quality over quantity with your friends. Find some good people you can be yourself around, and don’t stress over having fewer people that you hang out with than others. It’s not a competition and it doesn’t make you an inferior person.
Minimize how much you “put yourself out there”. The internet wasn’t around 25 years ago, and when it was young it was common sense to use an alias on the internet wherever possible. Use different nicknames on different websites to minimize the ability of casual bad actors to link your identities between different social forums. The possibility of database leaks doxxing the e-mail address you signed up with is still there, but thwarting the low effort attempts does a lot on its own. You can go through the effort of registering with different e-mail addresses as well, but there is a point of diminishing returns here and you need to decide where to draw the line for yourself.
Remove yourself from online discussions when it’s healthy to do so. Assert your opinion, clarify your points if they need clarifying, and move on. Turn off notifications once you’re past that point. Winning arguments on the internet is not realistically a thing that happens, and notifications on your mobile device from an argument will needlessly pull you back into a place of anxiety. Considering how little those mobile notifications contribute to your positive frame of mind, it’s best to be rid of them completely if you ever find them having a negative impact on your day to day life.
Edit:
You’re an NPC. Stop behaving like one and your fragile ego won’t be hurt.
The fact that nobody cares. Which is what @[email protected] said: https://feddit.de/comment/2037918
I’m not worried about my ego, I’m worried about my livelihood, my dreams and my life. It’s so easy to dismiss the problem by wrongly framing it as an emotional one instead of treating it like the real threat that it is. It’s a lot harder to acknowledge there’s a serious problem here that everyone, not just myself, has to worry about.
Ordinary people get cancelled all the time whether they deserve it or not, too, so we can’t reasonably just assume nobody will care. People clearly do.
It is an emotional problem. I own part of a business and it’s nearly impossible to “cancel” me.
As someone else said, perspective makes all the difference.
Citation needed.
You must have been living under a rock the past decade then.
EDIT: Never mind, I know you’ll purposefully with-hold a straight answer because you think the fact that I am worrying about this is a moral failing on my part and you are trying to condition me to adopt your way of thinking. And that’s sick. It’s also a pretty good example of what I’m talking about so keep going
Simple rule in business: no sex, no drugs, no politics.
Well, I thank you for answering the question, at least.
You seem to have doomscrolled a lot. Our earth is inhabited by billions of people with millions of businesses and you’re thinking a few isolated cases mean you’re in danger of being cancelled 🤣
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_statistics
And this is where you lost me. It’s a very real and very easily observable phenomenon; you can do a quick search on Twitter or Google (such as they are) and see for yourself it’s a very real and very frightening phenomenon.
I’m sorry you don’t take the problem seriously, but don’t jump on me to make yourself feel better over it.
You can search anything on Google and find that it’s a very real and frightening problem. It’s the worlds largest bias-confirming echo chamber of that’s how you choose to use it.
As I said, doomscrolling.