Dislike 👎

Someone asked me recently the kind of people I dislike. I’d never really thought about that. But upon encountering the question, I decided to muse on it. So I thought about the people I do not like and I had an epiphany then, which was so simple yet I'd never considered it a unifying factor among the people I dislike. Which is not surprising because I don't normally spend my time thinking about people I dislike. In any case, the grand epiphany was this, that I deeply dislike people who fixate on problems!

It's not so much how we solve problems. I just don’t like people who see problems instead of thinking about the possibility of solutions. Not all problems have solutions. And we don’t often have the answers. But it is a failing in personality, in my opinion, when people don’t care how problems get solved and fixate instead on the problems. More often than not, these are the people who would immediately look for someone or something to blame. That is the main reason I don’t like them.

You can solve 99 of the problems for people and yet they’ll find a reason to blame you for the 1 problem you couldn’t solve for them. Which might actually be out of your powers. Sometimes, the “out of powers” are, in fact, Natural and would require you to be God to solve them. It still won’t absolve you from blame. If people want to blame you, they will.

I deeply dislike these people.

In contrast, I find myself very favourably disposed to people who think of solutions. Sometimes the solutions they come up with do not work. Sometimes they’re actually funny. But I deeply appreciate the effort and the character trait. And funnily enough, even the “stupid” suggestions can be part of the Answer, when you can cross them off the list of possible solutions. By a process of methodical elimination of things that won’t work, you can actually reach the Solution! A basis for collective wisdom, I suppose. A very democratic trait. Perhaps one of the best traits of democracy – collective wisdom.

So there you go. It would not have occurred to me to voluntarily make a mental list of people I dislike just to find a common feature among them. And on thinking about them and finding the common ground, I realise I was smiling. They’re horrible people. It would just be the thing that as varied personalities as they have, that they do indeed have a unifying factor.