Rejection = Freedom
Something you're likely missing
I’d like you to engage in a thought experiment with me.
Imagine a room full of 50 people.
49 of these people are your complete opposite - maybe they’re way too talkative, or way too quiet, or they like celery. Ew.
But 1 of these people are just… your kind of person. They match you so well that you could imagine being friends your entire lives, and have an insatiable desire to talk to them all the time.
The question is, are you willing to talk to 49 other people and be rejected in order to meet them?
In reality, you’re probably not.
Each rejection would probably take roughly 10 seconds. So less than 10 minutes in total. You could even spread it across a month and spend just 0.33 minutes a day to find your BFF. Or, perhaps even your soul mate.
This is your situation right now.
There are 2 things in life that hold fundamental value:
People
Resources
Learning to acquire resources is very domain-specific, and depending on the field can take many years to achieve, paying off ultimately in only that one field.
But success with people?
That scales. With results extending to your happiness, your success, and even your life-expectancy 1.
But the interesting part is: connecting with people doesn’t feel like studying for a physics exam. It feels scary in a way conducting an experiment or learning a trade doesn’t. But therein lies its reward.
In the article I talk about so much it shall henceforth be known as that which shall not be named, Cate Hall says:
In my way of thinking, radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant. These don’t always surface in awareness to the point one is actually choosing -- often they live in a cloud of aversion that strategically obscures the tradeoff.
The ability to find and connect with people you wouldn’t (and couldn’t) otherwise is one of these edges. Talking to people is free, you get to choose whom you talk to, and there is unlimited upside to what any one individual might bring into your life.
And yet (almost) no one talks to people they don’t know.
Modern World, Ancient Brains
The plurality of connections available in modern times is completely unprecedented.
People are online, they’re in the coffee shop, they’re on the train on the way to work - hell, they’re in your apartment block (or on the other side of your wall).
And there’s good news. The situation with 49 complete duds and 1 BFF is way better in real life. In real life, probably 50% of people could be decent friends, 25% would make bad friends, and 2% would make great friends (approximate numbers, of course).
And the ones along the way will be worth connecting with too. Don’t believe me? Then believe commuters in Chicago,2 and London 3.
The studies cited above took commuters and asked them to engage in conversation with their fellow journeymen. It also asked them how much they’d enjoy the interactions (if at all). The answer? They didn’t expect to enjoy it, but they did. And the fact that Londoners can enjoy talking to strangers should maybe convince you it’s more fun than you think.
But what if you start a conversation with someone who doesn’t want to talk to you?
Well, you die.
…
….
……
…….
No.
You live to see another day, and realize that there are more important things in life to worry about than that a random person doesn’t want to talk to you.
You also thicken your skin. Consider ways that may not be a bad thing.
The feeling of being alive
I can’t speak for others, but the times I worked up the courage to talk to a girl still stick in my memory. There’s a movie-like quality to doing things that feel risky, but choosing to do them anyway. And that includes the rejections. I’ve walked away from hearing “I have a boyfriend” with a wide grin on my face - because in truth it doesn’t matter that that particular person is unavailable, or doesn’t like you. It matters that you did something that scared you, or that you’ve always wanted to do, even though it was difficult.
It matters that you took on a worthwhile risk, and made it out alive - your brain needs reminding that people aren’t lions or tigers (at least not most of them!).
Rejection is removing the hay from your eyes
I was thinking about this the other day because a friend and I are making a short film - and we decided it would be a good idea to ask strangers what they thought. We asked person 1 - they gave insightful feedback. We asked person 2 - they didn’t want to see it. We asked person 3, they said “sorry, no thanks”. And then - we asked person 44, a mother and her daughter. And we got brushed off before we could even explain what we were doing. “We’re not interested in this,” the mother said, presumably thinking we were beggars of some kind.
That last one gave us both a bit of a sting. We both felt it. That feeling of low status, of feeling like we’re panhandlers begging for money. But the truth is even pan handlers probably don’t feel like panhandlers - there’s a special kind of feeling where you’re being treated one way but know society generally percieves you in another (when you’re not doing socially unorthodox things, at least).
But we carried on.
It was slim pickings, because we were in a train station semi-late at night, but there were people around - and that was all we needed.
Eventually we asked two guys if they’d be up to give us some feedback - they were skeptical, but said yes. After seeing it (and giving glowing feedback), they asked if they could follow its progress somehow, completely unprompted. And they also provided valuable information - the ending was unclear. Both groups of people who saw it were very confident that they knew the story and what the ending was - the trouble is, they were completely incorrect. As I had suspected, we hadn’t done a good enough job of portraying a certain twist in the story - so really we were telling quite a different (but related) story to the one we wanted to tell.
So - we got people interested in the film and we got valuable feedback. It’s here that - had we done this earlier in the process, I’d invoke Bryan Caplan’s principle of doing 10x more. But it’s too late in the process to make any truly substantial changes, so that will be something for the future (although incidentally I’m using the principle in relation to some of the stuff mentioned in this article right now).
Walls, Walls everywhere
But they’re imaginary
Something that constantly amazes me: seeing someone reach the goal you want, but knowingly objectively they’re worse than you. The ugly guy who gets more girls; the slacker who gets the promotion. In your head, it’s impossible. Yet there they are, grinning wide as a highway stretch - your impossible goal their everyday reality.
These people are important learning lessons - sign posts that you’re missing something. Maybe something big. Sometimes we’d prefer to forget about them: I have an acquaintance who thinks women are just not in the cards for him - because he’s had ‘bad experiences’ and he’s ‘too ugly’ for any woman worth taking seriously. He’s not. But let’s pretend for a moment his physical attractiveness was a 2 out of 10.
There’s something magical about the world you need to understand.
If you understand it - if you truly, deep in your subconscious learn to appreciate it, you can learn to weather any storm on your self esteem.
The secret: people are different.
Like, really fucking different. So different that your 2/10 is another person’s 7/10. Or your 2/10 scores a simple N/A for someone else - it doesn’t even factor in.
Beggars on the street are forced to learn this principle. If one person, two people, five people say no… that’s fine. Person 10 may say yes. In fact person 10 may even want to buy them food, get them coffee, and leave them with money for their hostel for the night. How do I know this? I’ve been person 10. And I’ve seen others be person 10. And I’ve also been (and seen everyone else be) persons 1 through 9. People are different - sometimes the same people are different people. This is one of those edges in life that if you pay attention to it, it can transform your life.
If you really learn to appreciate how different people are, you can start seeing rejections like a free run at a slot machine. Sure, it may return nothing - but it’s free… and it could also return the jackpot of a future spouse, or a business partner, or a friend you couldn’t live without.
People pay to use slot machines. But you have access to a cornucopia of free slot machines in your everyday life. Complete with all the bells and whistles of intermittent rewards in the form of smiles, captivating conversation, and company that people provide.
Most relationships are coincidental and lacklustre
Think about all your friends. Where did you meet them? Work, school, another friend?
Most likely you met them through a combination of coincidence and convenience. Now let’s imagine there’s 10 million people in the world who’d make a perfect friend for you. That’s roughly 0.1% of the population.
What are the chances they live next door, or sit next to you in class, or are a close colleague?
Not likely.
What if you attended groups and meetups with activities you like, and made it a point to befriend everyone there? What are the chances then?
Selection effects narrow down the odds dramatically, and if you couple that with a proactive mindset of talking to everyone there that you can - knowing you’ll hit some duds along the way - your chances get a lot better.
This is the same for dating.
How do people date? They live near each other, or meet through work, or through class, or through a superficial profile on an LCD screen (maybe OLED these days).
Now, I’m all for the idea that relationships take two to tango and require work and conscious thought and all the rest of those well-formed cautions. But remember when we talked about how different people are? If you haven’t experienced meeting someone and being completely bamboozled by how much you like them on almost every level before… you should probably be meeting more people. On a purely practical level, who are you more willing to put in the effort to make something work with: someone you like a lot but who’s a mediocre match, or the love of your life who feels so compatible with you that they’re completely irreplaceable5.
It may take lots of rejections and well-intentioned failures - but there are people out there that you will be crazy about, and some of them will be crazy about you too. Some of them will be such a good match that they truly are 1 in a million amazing. But you don’t meet the 1 in a million match by relying on small slivers of chance. Those are just the appetizers. If you want the full meal, you’re going to have to take a lesson from your ancestors, do the brave thing and fight for your reward.
A very brief tactical note
What I’m talking about - in its fully realized form - is difficult. I know because I’ve tried it, and have recently started trying it again (though not in dating form anymore).
And your success, or lack thereof will depend chiefly on how much you value strong friendships and relationships, and maybe just how much zest you have for life. If you want to succeed, first realize that you will fail. And then create a plan to do better. If you’re just a little bit crazy, implement the stuff in this post and keep a journal of your progress. If you’re my type of crazy, then take the stuff from that post, note down commonly recurring scenarios (or places you attend) where you could talk to people, note down the occasions you struggle to say something despite wanting to, and rinse and repeat. And then find a way to make rinsing and repeating convenient so you can do ten times as much - write (or use ChatGpt) to write a program to feed you these scenarios every 30 seconds, or perform the visualizations while listening to music. Or do both! Find a way. And realize the only ways that work may be more difficult than you imagined.
Most likely, you won’t go to that level of effort. But be forewarned that unless you’re very extraverted already, it’s a level of effort that may be required to achieve the goals outlined in this post.
Life as Adventure
Here’s another perspective.
There was a day the Earth had no life.
Then, there was a day magic happened and abiogensis produced single celled organisms.
These organisms replicated, and eventually evolved into the dogs we pet today, and the cats that like to sit on our keyboards - and, of course, you.
Or your ancestors at least.
Then around 100,000,000 (100 hundred million) potential people died every time your ancestors tried to mate. About 1 in 78 times they were successful6. Leaving roughly 7.8 billion people who could’ve been, but never were. 300,000 generations later, the number of people who could’ve been, rather than you, is:
2,340,000,000,000,000
It took 2 quadrillion people who never were, and 300,000 people who were strong enough to reproduce while staying alive in hostile conditions to produce the person you are today.
You’ve come this far. In a sense, it’s in your blood; you are from a lineage of people 300,000 strong who took the risks necessary to stay alive, find a partner, and eventually produce you.
Are you really going to let the story get boring now?
I hope not.
Until next time.
P.S. The Audacious series will continue soon, but on a monthly rather than bi-weekly schedule. I’ve made some exciting progress in getting myself to do some of the things that have been historically more difficult for me, and in a way that seems to generalize to other things (It’s difficult to overstate how big this discovery/change has been. More on it later). Also - this week’s Weightloss Wednesdays will be published on Friday (but written on Wednesday) to avoid spamming your emails.
Have a beautiful week everyone.
Fine, ‘people’.
People sometimes tell me they’ve never seen relationships like this - where two people are extremely compatible and retain ‘the spark’ years after getting together. I’ve seen it with multiple strangers, and at least one relative of mine.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/parenting/getting-pregnant/the-number-of-times-you-need-to-have-sex-to-get-pregnant/photostory/75451156.cms?picid=75451287 (Although it’s plausible fertility rates were different in ancient times)
Great read! Would love to see the short film! As a business owner, I’ve learned you get very used to being told no. Rejection doesn’t sting as much the more it happens.
Us old farts will recall the "mainstreaming" of the term "Embrace the suck" from the early 2000s. If you want to make progress in your life, you have to learn to tolerate being uncomfortable. Each generation probably has to learn this anew. Well written advice from someone who obviously has learned it.