Productivity Tip: Acquire a Secret Nemesis (12/30)
I'm writing 30 posts in 30 days, this is number 12.
Hating people is usually a waste of time. The common adage serves well in most cases: don't let people live in your head rent-free. However, what if there were a way to collect payment?
Dislike can serve a purpose. It can define values. Jonathan Haidt writes about this in The Righteous Mind: communities gossip in order to enunciate and enforce values that aren't otherwise explicit. Usually, when you call an interlocutor a Nazi, you're not really saying anything specific, you're just making it clear to your community that this particular person's conduct is beyond the pale. When you talk shit about someone for sporting a man-bun, you're confirming your local codes of fashion, which aren't to be found in a convenient PDF.
Spectators of online fighting often correctly notice that the participants are talking past each other. Their mistake is in assuming they were trying to talk to each other at all. They're actually talking to themselves and their in-group.
Speaking of which: what are your values? What are you trying to achieve? It's hard to make this clear without adding a lot of footnotes. "I'm trying to glorify God." Well, so is Jerry Falwell. Do you mean like that? "I'm sex-positive." So, presumably, is the CEO of Pornhub; do you feel totally comfortable with that enterprise?
In such a crowded civilization, with so many almost-identical ideologies bouncing around, clarifying values by opposition is an efficient way to be precise about what you want to do with your life.
I've got a secret nemesis. They're not famous, or even a micro-celebrity, but they're not unknown. Their job description isn't mine, but it's not 100% dissimilar. I won't tell you who they are. I won't tell them either! I don't want to hurt them. They're apparently a super nice person. They're charming, honorable, intelligent, attractive, and successful, as the result of hard and careful work.
And yet. Their mission seems like a frivolous version of a better one. Their premises seem sloppy, their conclusions flimsy. They're doing a great job, but the job is a little stupid.
This feeling is helpful to me. It's productive dislike. It gives me focus. Disapproving of what they do makes my own mission clearer. I don't want to compete with them. They're helping me define the competition I want to dodge, so I can play my own game. They have traits I want to emulate, and other traits that I'd like to avoid.
In the abstract, I hold with Buddhists who point out the artificial nature of the self. I'm a conditioned mess of habits stumbling around longing for what I've been told to long for. But unless I want to go to celibate and spend my life on a cushion, I've got to stumble into some niche in this silly ecosystem, to find some identity, however artificial, and use it with intelligence. And a necessary part of that is picking which people I don't want to be confused with. I thank my secret nemesis for their assistance in this matter.