You will never figure out why some people dislike you or hate you.
There are some people around this town who either don’t like me very much or out and out hate me. Wherever I go and have gone in life, there are always some people like this. I don’t have the slightest clue why they felt this way in many cases, though I have been trying to figure it out forever.
In fact, of most of the people in my life who hated me, I still do not have the tiniest clue why they felt this way. And this is going back almost 40 years. Almost four decades have gone by and I’ve been thinking about it all of those years, and I still don’t have the tiniest notion why those people hated me or what I was doing to piss them off. And I’ve looked at it from every angle. I’ve almost done controlled, double blind studies with multivariate analyses on a lot of these people, and I still have no idea at all.
One theory was that I provoked strong reactions in people because for a long time when I was generating a fair amount of haters I was also generally a lot of people who liked me a lot.
If you generate quite a few haters but you also generate a lot of people liking you a lot, I would wager that you provoke strong reactions in people. There may be something about you that seems to challenge other people. A lot of people will like this because it’s bad boy and badass. But a lot of insecure people will feel threatened by you and think you are trying to fight them or say you are better than they are. If you even seem to be objectively better (say better looking, smarter, or any other ways to be objectively superior on some variable) or doing better than a lot of people, you will generate a lot of haters because you are making others look bad by doing so well.
One thing I figured after many years of life is that you are never going to understand why someone doesn’t like you or hate you.
Number one, they’re never going to tell you! If you ask them why they hate you, they will say they don’t hate you and quit being paranoid. If you ask their friends, you might find out, but often your friends will come back and say, “They say they don’t hate you. They say they really like you.”
If you ever get an answer, it will be something, “He thinks you are a geek” or “He thinks you are a nerd” or “He thinks you are weird.” That’s all interesting, but how do you fix it?