I just figure out who the unfriendly ones are or who is friendly but doesn’t engage in any conversation but the business at hand and try to talk to them as little as possible.
The first type is just unfriendly all the time, when you’re doing business but especially if you talk about something extraneous.
I recommend just shooting their crap attitude right back at them. Package into a nice ice cold popsicle and mentally fire it in their direction.
The second type is interesting. There are a few people who I interact with who are like this, mostly checkers at stores. They can seem extremely friendly as long as I only keep the conversation to strictly the business at end.
If I stray into anything other than that, they either get stone cold or start acting weird, mostly a sort of confused annoyance.
So if you keep it to this total bullshit level of superficiality, you can have a “pleasant experience” in quotes.
I keep screwing up and talking to them once in a while but it never works. I think this is a cope. It’s so hard to accept that someone hates you if you think you’re a good person so you think there must be some mistake.
So a part of you thinks that if you keep talking to them, them being reasonable people, they will figure out what a great, nice person you are and that there’s no reason to dislike you.
The problem is this never works. Once people start out hating or being unfriendly to you, it’s probably never going to end for the rest of your life.
I don’t why but once people start down that road, they’re just gone forever, and they need to be treated as such or at the very least with extreme suspicion and distrust.
How to Tell If People Don’t Like You
People act nervous when you try to talk to them.
At first I thought this maybe meant that the woman liked me, but I’ve since come to realize that this almost always means, “You’re making me really uncomfortable, please stop.”
So when you try to talk to certain people and they always act nervous and weird when they try to talk back to you, that person simply doesn’t like you.
I wish this wasn’t true, and there was some other reason for someone to be nervous when they talk to you, but I’m afraid there just isn’t.
Also, once people start acting nervous when you talk to them, it’s never going to stop. They’re going to go on like that for the rest of your life every single time you try to talk to them.
They’ll never knock it off. The nervousness seems to be a particularly bad sign for some reason, but I’m not sure why. Those people seem to be some pretty serious haters.
An icy tone of voice.
Typically from a woman, often a hot one. This is an absolute catastrophe. This is pure hatred. She hates you so much that she might try to call the police on you. It’s that bad.
Someone with an icy attitude towards you will never be your friend. If you die and come back to life as someone else, they’ll figure out the new person is really you, and they’ll hate them just as much. Icy hate is that bad.
Someone cuts you off rudely, angrily, and abruptly when you are trying to say or ask them something.
This is often also a good-looking young woman. This is utterly disastrous. This is pure hate, over with a serious layer of contempt, which is the worst kind of hate of all.
There’s no compassion at all in contemptuous hate. This person wants to see you fucked and they don’t particularly how badly you get fucked. You’re basically worthless to them.
This is the sort of person who might try to get you banned from a store. You have to be very careful about this one because some of these people do the cynical fake friendliess thing.
Fake friendliness with a weird cynicism, coldness, or iciness in the voice.
This is also an absolute disaster. Once again, often a hot young woman.
Treats you like you don’t exist.
This person knows you but when they are in public near you, they treat you like you don’t exist. They simply refuse to acknowledge your presence. I have a feeling that this is a lot worse than people think it is.
I was at a Palestinian rally a while back, and I tried to talk to some middle aged I suppose Palestinian man, and not only would he not answer me, but he wouldn’t even acknowledge that I was talking to him or that I was even there for that matter.
About 20 minutes later, I was surrounded by cops.
The guy had called the cops on me and made up some fake story that I looked like some guy who was pepper spraying people at a rally some years back. I think he just made that up. The guy literally made up a lie about me to try to get me arrested on false charges.
So that’s how bad it is when someone treats you like a ghost. That person may well be an out and out menace to you, and you need to avoid them at all costs. They might literally call the police on you. That’s how bad they are.
Gives you a “Fuck you’re weird!” look.
God knows why people do this, but a manager who did this to me later banned from his store for no good reason, claiming people didn’t like the way I looked at them or talked to them.
I haven’t the faintest idea what I was doing wrong, but since then I’ve gotten a lot more paranoid about talking to strangers and mostly just talk to them if they look like they’re open to conversation.
This is also pretty catastrophic and most of the time, these people are hopeless. No one ever goes from, “Fuck you’re weird!” to friendly. They’re just gone for life.
And this seems to be a pretty serious thing.
This is the sort of person who might file a complaint against you, complain to management about you, call the cops on you, all sorts of crap as you can see above. I think this is basically a reaction of sheer, pure, contemptuous hate.
Someone shuts down a conversation immediately.
I’m a very friendly person believe it or not, and I’m always talking to strangers about this, that, or whatever. I’ve recently learned that this is catastrophic. But I still do it now and then.
Check and see what happens when you first approach the person and say something. If they act very uncomfortable like they don’t want to talk to you, please try to shut the conversation down as soon as possible.
I’m getting a lot better at this, but sometimes I say or ask maybe one more thing. That’s one too many.
The problem is it’s very insulting to think that someone hates you so much that they don’t even want to speak one sentence to you, but sadly that’s just the way of the world.
That’s where the subconscious cope comes in and you thinks, “Hey, I am a good person. There’s no reason for anyone not to talk to me. So they must be mistaken. If I talk to them just a bit more, they will see I’m nice and harmless, and they will calm down.”
Problem is this never works, and all it is does it make things worse the longer you carry on. Don’t try to revive dead conversations after the other person has driven a stake through the heart of it.
As soon as you get the “Don’t talk to me” vibe, just shut it down right there and don’t say anything more to them. If you can’t shut it down right away, shut it down as soon as possible.
Then quit looking at them and treat them like they’re not there. Then keep a record of that person in your mind so you don’t talk to them again.
Playing deaf - no response. Suppose you say something and people don’t respond. A lot of the time you want to repeat yourself because you assume that they didn’t hear you.
The problem is that in this wonderful adult world, people gaslight you like this all the time. You ask a question or make a remark, and they don’t respond and basically act like they didn’t hear you.
They’re gaslighting you. They really did hear you. They’re just pretending that they didn’t.
It was only in my 60’s that I finally figured out that they really did hear you but they were just pretending they didn’t. Now when someone does that I often don’t repeat myself. I just stay silent.
Usually they don’t like what you said or found it offensive or social rule-breaking in one of a million ways. God knows why they didn’t like the comment or question.
A lot of the time you can figure out why they’re pretending deafness.
I generally try not to repeat myself because I figure that if it was really important then they’ll ask me to repeat it.
Also, if they didn’t hear me then they’re being assholes by not listening to me when I talk to them, and there’s not much reason to talk to them in the first place.
In both cases there’s no need for a repeat.
Playing deaf - “Pardon? Excuse me? Pardon me?”
Another thing I just figured out in my 60’s is what the “What?…Excuse me? Pardon me?” often in an annoyed voice reaction is all about. For most of my life I always assumed that people didn’t hear me.
The problem is that once you repeat whatever you said to elicit this response, people won’t like it at all. You’re simply compounding your error.
A lot of the time they will continue repeating this, “What? Excuse me?” crap. Like an idiot, I assumed they weren’t hearing me, so I’d keep repeating the question, remark, or joke.
Once again this is someone pretending to be deaf. The tendency is to repeat the comment or question because you assume they didn’t hear you. Bad idea. What they’re saying is that your question or comment was offensive on some level.
So when they say, “What?” in that annoyed voice, don’t repeat the statement! Just be silent. If they really didn’t hear you, they’ll ask you to repeat it.
I think of the two kinds of faking deafness, this is worse than not saying anything because the “What?” is an expression of overt annoyance.
I’ll also point out something else. People who go silent or give you annoyed, “What?” questions, in both cases pretending to be deaf, don’t like you very much.
I usually don’t do this unless someone is being hostile towards me. Then I play deaf myself.
Your friends aren’t going to act like they’re deaf half the time you’re talking to them. People who do that are either not your friend or they’re so caught up in the social rules crap that they’re not worth knowing.
If they’re playing deaf over a lot of seemingly innocuous remarks, just give up on them. I think they’re just saying that they don’t like you or at least they don’t like you very much.
So make a note of people who act like they’re deaf a lot when you try to talk to them. That person is not your friend.
Unpleasant Greetings and Farewells
Also take note of how people greet you and say goodbye to you. I run into people all the time who act rude in both cases, especially when they are saying goodbye.
They always act like I’m obviously completely miserable and the rest of my day is going to be miserable too. I get this all the time. The weird thing is I’m generally not miserable at all because I just don’t think like that.
When I’m out in the world dealing with people, I’m usually not thinking whether I’m miserable or not. It doesn’t seem like an important thing to think about. I might be thinking about a million things but “Am I happy or unhappy?” definitely isn’t one of them.
I don’t smile much and I’m pretty stoical, so maybe that’s it. It annoys me when people act like I must be miserable even though I’m not. Sometimes I used to give snotty answers.
People would say, “Have a good day!” as if they assumed that was something I was not going to do.
Well if you don’t think I’m going to have a good day, why on Earth are you ordering me to have one? If you think I’m going to have a bad day, why not encourage me to do that?
Sometimes I would answer those snotty “Have a good day!” orders with:
“Thanks but I already made other plans.”
People invariably act like that is an extremely weird thing to say. Actually it’s not. It’s pretty damn funny to tell the truth.
Another problem I have with this is why must have everyone have a good day or good night all the time?
What if their dog died? What if their Mom died? Why if their girlfriend or boyfriend just dumped them? Isn’t it ok to have a shitty day now and again? Sometimes it’s the reasonable thing to do, right?
When someone greets me in this unpleasant way as if I’m not having a good day, I often just refuse to respond to them. Likewise with the unpleasant departure remarks.
I will just look straight ahead and act like I didn’t hear them. So I play deaf too. It’s actually a pretty good way to react towards someone who’s being unpleasant.
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