21. Creating Confident Individualism

Poor self-image can be the result of multiple episodes where you allow yourself to be dominated or henpecked: you have compromised your integrity holding in higher esteem those you’ve attributed inflated significance and who you believe are more important than you are.

How do I go from being a cool individual to a not-very-smart person? I engage in toxic relationships where I am being neglected and submissive.

Submissiveness is usually required by pretentious braggarts who publicly present themselves as available for service but then withdraw at the slightest request for professionalism or additional information: they want to feel superior without providing actual value (e.g. all those weird online scammers who presumably grew up in an atmosphere of contempt for the people, considering everyone stupid).

Inconsistent behavior creates hesitation and distrust. I want to test their reliability when I sense their lack of self-confidence. Why should they be important to me, unless I feel sympathy for them and am determined to prove we’re meant to be together? 

Wishful thinking is A-w-e-s-o-m-e: they might have something I don’t have, something like a super-position.

Developing dominance in interpersonal relationships is important for manipulative individuals. Those who know how to dominate another become the star of the relationship. Their dominance lies not only in their talent for explaining why they want me to do what they say so that I can't help but agree 💯 and cooperate, but also in manipulative silence. Manipulative silence is the reddest red flag for me. I will often find myself in such situations if I am used to putting authoritative opinions above my interests. So I might agree not only because things are explained impressively, including rude tones, but also because I want to keep my ties with people whose support I value greatly. This means I am convinced I am nothing without them. 

To keep you on their side, they might flatter you for your good taste in people (you adore THEM, isn’t it amazing?) and your understanding of the situation. You accept their flattery as a natural recognition of your merits because, of course, such intelligent/powerful people would not associate with fools. 

But the world is much wider than any circle. I mean, how many people you’d call close friends can there be? According to Dunbar’s number, an individual can easily be friends with about 150 people. When you step outside your circle, you may lose your confidence in communicating with strangers. The insecurity comes from the general inexperience you develop living inside your nutshell. Personally, I find the idea of developing inexperience amusing, 🤣 ha-ha!

The only way to achieve adequacy, in my opinion, is to maintain as few stable relationships as possible. The most important stable relationship for an individualist should be with the self because dealing with 150 close friends would leave me no time for honest self-reflection as I would constantly digest their stuff in my head: everyone comes with a lot of visual, verbal, and gestural information. The life path of an individualist is a constant search for opportunities to develop his or her personality through dominance or creativity.

As I advance the artistry of self-control, I can, if I wish, master any situation, from the most insignificant to the most serious. This is a direct road to world domination, but few can or even want to master it because self-control involves giving up every desire to spoil oneself with all sorts of simple joys of life. And that’s what friends are made for: going to bars and parties and having dinners together.

In my experience, having about eight experts supporting a cause is enough for a positive outcome. Friends can be experts too, but they may not always be profiled for a problem. So, I would try to build close dealings (providing consistent trust and mutual respect) with only that number of people for a situation, a cause, or a project, temporarily leaving my friends to their personal affairs. Collaborating with professionals will be much more fruitful. 

To avoid being overly submissive (in case they want to force their beliefs), I have to learn to be comfortable saying “I don't understand” or “I don't know” without feeling inferior: “I am not sure I understand it correctly, Danny, can you repeat that for me one more time?” I’m sure I won’t look like a fool if I use the right tone: the one that puts me in the parent’s position. I’ll ask them to explain it again because it creates a pathos-shaking vibration and a frustrating loss of enthusiasm. The desire to dominate nerds can't be that persistent: you try to explain once, and they ask again, wanting clarifications, that's annoying! Practicing a parental approach to people in general is what helps you avoid submission. Ah, somewhere deep inside, everyone loves to be called 😚 babe even if they are old.

Freedom in a relationship is as important as interdependence. I should have time for profound reflection. Internalizing someone else's reality, or to give a better example, accepting their strategy without thorough evaluation could make me experience the other four stages of grief in reverse: depression, bargaining, anger, and denial for a long time. When their best is not good enough but you nod in approval anyway, that’s stress and an ardent desire to fix everything ASAP.

The parental approach is not only a genuine interest but also the intention to assess the interlocutor's adequacy, which implies the superiority of your reasonableness. The superiority of reasonableness, in turn, implies expertise, which you may not have. In this case, one can always study the issue before shaking hands. This is a hard kick for an "expert" who uses pressure to establish dominance, but you should find the strength to say “I need a second opinion”. At this point in the game, you may lose the queen, but more importantly, you will lose yourself as a pawn and gain the status of the player, which is the super-position in any game. So you can start focusing on yourself.

However, crappy decisions are not always instant, sometimes they take a long time too🤣 but they are usually the result of collective thinking where everyone disagrees with everyone, and they just want to take any decision to finally put an end to their boring bickering where they make each other inferior by saying that the opponents don’t understand obvious things.

So, stop chasing immediate pleasures and recognition if you want to develop your personality because if you can't resist anything, you’ll lose. Your complaints won't have too much value in the eyes of those who can spin the wheels for you. An individualist needs an unbiased admirer as a yardstick of the correctness of his or her behavior, as a criticist, because, without criticism, he or she may become an outcast.