On Being Hated

Learning that someone hates us deeply even though we have done nothing ostensibly to provoke them can be one of the most slamming situations we face. Because of technology it's also liable to happen to us more and more. In the past our enemies were restricted to the vicinity. Now they lice scattered around the digital planet. In the past we might once have unwisely read about ourselves in another's diary. Now we can make the baleful error of quietly googling our own name Being hated feels so serious for three central reasons: because we see the hatred as a prelude to genuine practical danger, because we feel that those who hate us might be right that their negative information though unpleasant might have something important to teach us, and because we implicitly trust in the basic wisdom soundness of mind and suggestive the person delivering the attack. But each of these reasons is liable to be badly off the mark. Once upon a time our enemy might have come to bludgeon us in the night no wonder, we were very concerned. But now almost always they can only ever impose a psychological wound. Their ill-will is unrelated to further action. And yet it is as if an ancestral part of our minds had failed to notice our freedom that we no longer live in tribes and that we can flourish independently in the vast and appoints delightfully anonymous cities of modernity. Unhampered by the narrow verdict of a few corrupt judges Part of our vulnerability to hatred stems from the poignant and at origin intelligent way we tend to keep an open mind about criticism. We know at heart rightly that we have so much to learn from other people, so we continue to behave like the trusting school children we once were waiting to receive the opinions of broadly benevolent teachers. But this important capacity to learn may lack the necessary limits. What starts off as a virtue can in time leads to a desperate unnecessary vulnerability to any incoming information and eventually a kind of madness as we leave ourselves open to attack by those who plainly don't have our best interests at heart. We are seldom very good at filtering with our enemies are well-qualified judges of our right to exist. In our panic at the news of hatred we fail to ask ourselves the one important question: whether there is any truth in the attack. But even when criticism is correct, we should never surrender our self-love to anyone who delivers it to us drenched in contempt. There is never any excuse for cruelty. We should distinguish between the critic and the hater. Whereas the critic limits the psychological significance and fall out of their point of contention. The hater takes a small point of disagreement as a way of access to deliver a wholesale bitter condemnation of us as human beings. There is a vast difference between declaring you are full of [ _] and clearing the throat to say I think you are mistaken on this point. The first move suggests that your error is a consequence of a fundamental rottenness. The second leaves open that you could be an honorable soul who just happens to be like so many of us understandably confused on a complicated issue. We should ultimately trust that anyone who deliberately harms us must be a highly damaged and therefore unreliable witness. We should not continue to believe that they may be frustrated but clever like an exasperated but fundamentally wise teacher motivated by a pursuit of the truth however roughly handled. If one were truly wise insightful and mature one could never want to make another person collapse internally. The desire to hurt a stranger can only have big and troubled explanations behind it something distorting their judgment and stripping them of the right to destroy our self-confidence with impunity none of us are blameless we all have so much growing up to do a distinct openness to criticism is key to our self-development. But we should aim for a confident distinction between the hater and the critic we should be worried only by our genuine flaws and otherwise forgive the injured roaring beasts who seek to punish us for their own undevout sorrows.

365

Get up early.

Get up early and work for a couple hours on the thing you really care about. 

When you’re done, go about your day: go to school, go to your job, make your family breakfast, whatever.

Your teacher or your boss or your kids can’t take your work away from you, because you already did it.

 And you know you’ll get to do it tomorrow morning, as long as you make it through today.

“Every day is a new deal. 

Keep working and maybe something will turn up.” 

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