Handling Rejection & The Dangers of Bias
Why I Don't Want to Write About Dating Anymore
One thing that continually surprises and amazes me is what people will react to on social media. As someone who's been on it consistently for over a decade and worked in it for the past five years it really shouldn’t.
And yet it does. That’s because people come at it with their own biases, traumas, preconceived notions, and are psychologically separated from other people by a screen.
No matter how authentic you are to other people you are just an approximation of how they feel about you. That word feel is doing a pretty heavy, but crucial lift there.
That’s because most people approach the world from how they feel about things not from the logical side of themsevles. That takes time and training. All information you gather is first filtered through the fight or flight part of your brain.
And if you haven’t trained yourself to recognize that’s what’s happening because you’re used to going off how you “feel” as if it’s a divining rod of secret truthiness than your bias is going to rule you.
Even me who understands in the aftermath that’s what happens, and how social media functions I still get caught up in these kinds of emotions. A troll hits me the wrong way on a response to something I posted, a comment I read in a way that wasn’t intended and my feelings about that experience tend to takeover.
This is about an experience I had on Substack that overwhelmed even me and changed my behavior from that point forward.
I debated on writing this piece. I wasn’t going to publish it but here it is. A lot of it is how I feel about dating, which isn’t really that positive, and some other stuff I really find… well… frankly annoying as hell.
This was definitely one a bad experience on Substack. It changed about what I’m willing to talk about, and even my behavior in the outsides after that.