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gog  6mo ago (text post)   1701 thread views

Advice for disagreeable people

I am disagreeable IRL. Like, everyone I get to know well eventually starts avoiding me. I can find lots of advice for how to deal with other disagreeable people, but not much for people who are themselves disagreeable. Surely some of you lot are the same. Have any of you overcome this? If so, how?

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I wonder if you are in my boat. There a lot of issues now you can lose friends over having the wrong opinion on. I found that I could think for myself, building myself a patchwork set of opinions on various things from first principles, up until around 2017 or so. People would engage me and we had some spicy discussions but we could agree to disagree and move on realizing we still had common ground.

It has all gone downhill from there. It seems all social groups have an unwritten process where you need to check in as being on a right side of a bunch of selected issues. And if you aren't, the best you'll get is the cold shoulder and being treated distantly as an outsider.

I guess, for some people it's always been like this? Or harder times are bringing out tighter collective behaviors in those around us? Or something? I don't know what to do about it either, other than putting on a mask in all social situations and not having close friends or even acquaintances anymore outside my wife and kid.

And so, I suppose this is the way it has to be now, for a free radical sort of mind who sometimes veers on its own to places deemed too naughty by the current groupthink?

interesting idea re: time frame / right side of issues.

I felt freer to argue before 2017, but I was also much younger and people around me did not usually seem to have strong opinions

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