I am impressed by the amount of ingenuity people put into avoiding learning how to like more kinds of people. Genius-level IQs laser-focused on avoiding expanding the 'like' zone. Not tolerate, like. As in enjoy their presence in the world, all foibles included.

Paradoxically, liking involves being too lazy to get to know people very deeply. You accept a sort of core of chaotic, messy, muddling-through motivational swampzone at the core of people. This is not "love" in the non-romantic Christian-idealist sense of "love thy neighbor"

The only people I am able to actively dislike is people who fight their own inner "people are complicated" illegible cores and almost try to colonize their own minds with an authoritarian aspiration of who they should be. This is a fairly tiny minority.

Be like Bilbo Baggins. "“I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”"

The need to be "respected" is a big part of the inability to like. Respect is a toxic and useless hangover tribal concept in modernity. Wanting to be effective and taken seriously is adaptive. Wanting "respect" is a recipe for failing at both. https://twitter.com/twofifteenam/status/1391810495213043717

Liking tends to be granular. You pick up on random partial aspects of people that seem alive and generative to you and like that. Trying to like "whole persons" or wanting to be liked as a "whole person" is beyond stupid. Nobody is entirely likable in all their aspects.

A "whole person" relationship is properly the domain of "love" and that's a much narrower set. If you want random people outside your intimate circle to know and like the whole of you, you're setting yourself up for mutual contempt and hatred.

Not coincidentally, the people I find it hardest to like are the ones who attempt strenuously to be Whole Integrated Personas to everybody. They refuse to be in bits and pieces. "You either like ALL of me, or you like NONE of me" is their demand of the world.

Love is a project. Typically a lifelong project. Seeing the whole of someone in ways that positively harmonize with the whole of how they see themselves -- that's an Apollo project of interpersonal relationships. Save it for like 3-4 people tops. Expect it from 1-2 people tops.

Liking is much easier. Almost everybody has at least a tiny foothold for likability. Even the extreme Integrated All-or-Nothing types tend to have slight cracks in their facade.

Even Trump, among the public figures I have been most unable to like, had his few seconds in four years where a slight foothold of likability showed through the Integrated Scream Void.

For liberals, GWB is a good litmus test. Yes, WMDs, Iraq wars, and various illiberal governance things. But if you can't find a foothold for likability even in his earnest and not-terrible paintings of people and pets... your liking-ability needs work.

Most of getting better at this is things NOT to do

-- Don't try to understand people too much

-- Don't try to have a single integrated mental model of them, let it be a pile of junk

-- Respond to fragments of behaviors and little tics, not theorized "personality traits"

What makes people likable is a little bit of human aliveness peeking through the layers and layers of strenuously maintained dead self-presentation... look for that, respond to it, ignore almost everything else.

This extends to yourself. Liking yourself is more important than "self-esteem" or "loving yourself." Being able to like others is actually dependent on that. When you dislike something about someone, it's a sign you're too attached (in an integrated way) to a part of yourself.

And don't make a project of this. Don't expect to like everybody. But you can go from liking 1% of the world (a typical subcultural tribal snob) to say 2%, or even 10%. Even 25% is not unreasonable. You just have to lower your standards for how coherent you need people to be.

Godwin fork, for those interested :D

Corner cases make for poor law. Don't try to include Hitler in your theory of liking. https://twitter.com/stefanmgolas/status/1391815045454221312

I find it helpful to focus on my personal agency in a relationship. Unless you're in some sort of Saw movie or locked up by Hannibal Lecter, you always have some agency in a relationship, including the agency to leave. https://twitter.com/twofifteenam/status/1391816020583534597

There was a book that was doing the rounds a while back, "the courage to be disliked." It was okay, but I felt meh about it. Too hedgehog. Some sort of humorless, lofty, heretic-contrarian posture of weathering a world of dislike.

Fine, sure. Do that if you feel like playing martyr. I think it's much more important to cultivate the "courage to like and be liked." And the trick to that is to do it piecemeal. No integrated posture.

This btw is one reason the idea that people should be able to bring their "whole person" to work or any other situation is fatally flawed. That's asking for universal love. Plan on taking a basket of likable bits of yourself everywhere you go. Can be a different basket each time.

A lot of the shit I get is due to people I like, and who want to like me back, objecting to the fact that I also seem to like other people (this is not a culture war left/right thing... more granular, often specific, "how can you be friends with X" complaints)

Like by default, dislike by exception is a good thing to aspire for. Comes very easily to some, and nearly an impossible state to get to for others. Partly a function of early childhood trust experiences etc. Not saying it will be equally easy for everybody.

I'm probably middle of the curve. Not primed by early experiences to either be a default liker or default disliker. Flip side, I am also roughly neutral between spoiling for fights and serious conflict aversion.

Okay, maybe I'm mildly conflict averse. And this is probably also why I'm generally interested in conflict strategy, because that's about learning to win without a fight as much as you can, by outmaneuvering Courageous People Spoiling For a Fight.

Interestingly, there is a strong correlation between inability to like widely, and high ambition. High ambition means you need to marshal ALL your inner resources to do something. Which means brutally cutting down and colonizing your Inner Amazon Rainforest.™