Why You Actually Fear Rejection

to be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what acceptance involves there are few things as disheartening as romantic rejection on the face of it nothing particularly out of the ordinary has happened we have harbored an affection for someone who does not feel the same way about us what could be more normal than this we do not fancy the vast majority of people that we come across so it was on the face of it pretty likely that we fell into the large category of people our beloved does not want to be with and

not the full of people that they do but despite this UNR remarkability romantic rejection tends to really sting I probably don't have to convince you of this unless you are Henry caval or Joanna lumbley you have almost certainly been or felt dramtically rejected at some point in your life but the question remains why does it hurt so much well to continue this minseries I've been writing on aspects of the philosophy of love we will set to answer this very issue get ready to learn why rejection con stri at our identities how our imagination can turn

into our worst enemy and why there are so many people online bitter about love before we get started I just want to emphasize that love and romance are deeply individual experiences in this video I will draw from philosophy psychology and literature to try to piece together a sort of philosophical theory of rejection but if it does not chime with your personal experiences that is absolutely fine it is largely to serve as an aid to your own thinking let's begin by examining the first arrow in the quiver of rejection the way it relates to our sense

of self one the self belonging and uncertainty in between smoking glasses of red wine and aiding the French Resistance the philosopher Jean Paul satra wrote an awful lot about how we construct our identities as well as our relationships with other people and how these two are inextricably intermingled in Sara's philosophy most of us go through a lot of life in a sort of pre-reflexive State this sounds pretty complicated but in some ways it's very intuitive think of how we engage with the world most of the time we are not viewing ourselves as an object that

other people are aware of but rather we see it through our own eyes that is we are thinking of ourselves primarily as a subject and an experiencer and everyone else as analogist to an object this does not mean that we are objectifying them in the modern sense of the word but rather just that we are viewing them as things that we are seeing and us as the thing doing the being however this state of comfortable unselfconsciousness simply cannot last forever at some point we become hyper aware of the fact that we are an object in

everyone else's world as well just as we make snap judgments of others they do the same thing to us we suddenly realize our own place in the existence of other people moreover we recognize that our own view of ourselves is not necessarily more important than theirs sure in some ways we have access to privileged information about us that no one else has like our inner thoughts but in other ways they can more accurately judge us than we can for instance they can see our actions from an outside view whereas we are an inherently pretty biased

party this moment of realization is known as the look though I'm somewhat simplifying SRA concept here this idea was probably best Illustrated in his play No Exit which I actually end up talking about a fair amount on this channel here three people Estelle inz and gasan are imprisoned in for all eternity but rather than pitchforks and flaming Lakes hell is instead just a ghostly decorated room that has no mirrors in it the characters in the play are forced into the permanent position of seeing themselves only Through The Eyes of the other in fact this is

where the famous quote hell is other people comes from and is also probably the inspiration for the Netflix show the good place in particular the character of aelle becomes very distressed at the lack of mirrors saying when I can't see myself I begin to wonder if I exist at all as a result she pursues the Romantic attention of the only man in the room gasa here she wants to be reassured of a number of things about her self-concept that she is attractive admirable and worthy of love when she initially fails to obtain that from gasan

she is distraught not only is this a straightforward romantic Rejection it is also a rejection of the view of herself that Estelle wants to hold it is not just a blow to her Eternal romantic prospects it is a wound to her ego the word ego has negative connotations in the modern day to do with sports cars Botox and aspersions thrown at one's genitalia but here I just mean it as the way we perceive ourselves when we become aware that we even can be perceived that is our self-concept sra's theme was later picked up by the

psychoanalyst Jack Lan who theorized that an awful lot of our self-image is shaped by our parents or caretakers very early in life and is then refined by others further down the line for him we come out of the womb not knowing anything about ourselves or even that we are a physical object like a table or a chair just one that can write poetry and scream but then after a while we recognize ourselves as a reflection in the mirror and an object in the sight of other people and at this vulnerable stage some ideas about who

we are begin to form they may or may not be correct but they become pretty deep rooted either way the significant dependence our self-conception has on the judgments of other s or the other if you're being technical then allows us to interpret the experience of romantic rejection with a bit more clarity we often perceive a romantic proposal as a relationship between two people the proposer and the propose but I think it might be more helpful to view it as a forpart relation there are two people and then there are the lingering ideas those people have

of who they are for the proposer this puts them in a very vulnerable spot for many of them propositions like I am attractive and I am romantically lovable are if they are held at all likely to be held pretty Loosely this is for the simple reason that we do not walk around being affirmed as adonis-like sex Gods with arrays of eligible suitors falling at our knees that would certainly be nice but apart from a few select enviable genetic masterpieces like the above mentioned Henry caval and Joanna Lumley it is simply not our reality so it

is easy to take romantic rejection as evidence against the truth of those propositions that we are attractive or lovable it lets us know that the very least that person does not view us as attractive or lovable enough to overcome whatever independent reasons they might have for not Desiring to be with us or it may be that they simply do not desire us which is not even that unusual again considering that we do not want to be with the vast majority of people we come across the trouble with properties like attractive and lovable is that even

more so than other attributes they seem defined by how people treat us it seems outright contradictory to say he is attractive but no one is attracted to him or he is lovable in spite of the fact that no one loves him as a result repeated rejection will probably hit significantly harder than even the standard ways we are judged by other people because unlike with properties like intelligence physical strength or Aristotelian virtue it is not just that other people's opinions May indicate whether we have these attributes they arguably constitute us having them and this is a

really vulnerable spot to be in so let's think for a moment about how this clarifies the stakes of rejection genuinely feeling like you are incredibly unattractive or unlovable is a deeply hurtful State even more so now when our methods of communication and connection are increasingly image-based and aimed at exhibition you can check out my video on buun chel Hans the transparency Society if you want to learn more about that the extent of this impact upon self-image will probably vary wildly between people for example a friend of mine from school has been their attractive confident self

from pretty much as soon as they hit puberty they had repeated affirmations of Their Own romantic loveability from this point forward and as a result they are one of the few people I know who have almost no sensitivity to rejection their own self-perception in this regard is encased in iron and cannot be shaken whereas myself and many others who went through a phase between the ages of 13 and 17 looking a bit like a goblin who had crawled their way out of a nearby swamp will likely hold the idea that they might be attractive or

lovable much more Loosely and so plausibly would be shaken by rejection at a much deeper level this is ultimately just speculation I'm only mentioning it because it chimes with my anecdotal experience and may also chime with yours and this is also our first step to understanding why rejection hurts so much more than we think it should the picture we have of it as a relatively unimportant interaction between two people is arguably a drastic oversimplification of the Dynamics at play much of the hurt may have nothing to do with the relationship between the lover and the

rejecting beloved but rather between the lover and their own sense of self but with the the stakes properly set let's look at another essential part of how rejection can sting so much it has almost the perfect recipe to capture our imagination and stick in our minds if you want to help me make more videos like this then please consider subscribing to my patreon for exclusive content the link is in the description two the mystery box and the torture of fantasy in my video on the philosophy of the crush I made extensive reference to the works

of stal and how he thought our ideas of the people we love become distorted in our minds to exaggerate some of their best qualities and downplay some of their worst he called this crystallization and the term and indeed the observation has been Borrowed by psychologists in recent years in the study of limerance a type of pretty unpleasant romantic Obsession in that video we looked at how the imaginative mechanism was partly maintained by the fact that we do not have direct access to what is going on in our beloved's head there is enough uncertainty about their

attributes and whether they feel the same way about us us that it creates an impossibly alluring puzzle firstly this already helps explain why rejection can hurt if we have an idealized image of what our beloved is like then we can also be tempted to imagine life with them would somehow be perfect all our problems would Fade Into the backgrounds and we would Gallop off into the sunset in a carriage pulled by Dreams by contrast rejection then means mourning the loss of this fantasy again it's no longer an interaction between a rejector and a reject but

rather rather a rejector a reject and the reject imagined version of how their life together would be this rather unhelpfully magnifies the perceived consequences of the rejection and makes it hit an awful lot harder however I also want to expand upon stow's point here by suggesting that just as we can use our imagination to crystallize our beloved into an idol we can also use it to torture ourselves about the reasons we may have been rejected or otherwise are failing in our romantic Ambitions of course part of the trouble is that it makes total to want

to know why we have been rejected it might be immensely helpful information if it turns out that we have a dismal fashion sense or come across as needy then this is an excellent data point to take with us into further romantic encounters however comforting as it would be for people like me our rejections are not often accompanied by a wonderfully itemized list of things we did to put them off instead we are often reassured with a vague platitude like it just isn't the right time or I'm not ready right now and these May well be

genuine reasons they are the reasons I've honestly given for rejecting people in the past but they have become so overused and cliche that it's impossible to tell none of this is really the rejecting person's fault they are almost certainly just trying to spare our feelings and we must also remember that rejecting someone is itself a pretty uncomfortable and unpleasant thing to do with some rejectors reporting more distress than the reject which in itself is a fascinating topic and probably worth its own video part of the reason stal says our beloved can occupy our minds is

because the stakes seem extraordinarily High to us and we also cannot directly know what our beloved is thinking but the exact same setup exists for the question of rejection at one end of the spectrum it might be that this truly was just an issue of timing or something else outside our control or character and on the other there is some distressing confirmation of a deep-seated anxiety or insecurity possibly about some immutable characteristic of ours this strikes me as the perfect recipe for a sort of negative crystallization though of course this will highly depend on individual

experience many of us have a tendency to assume the worst when it comes to a question like this in order not to be the fool living in ignorance there can be a dark thrill in the idea that we are uncovering an uncomfortable truth despite all of the cliches that are offered to us as reassurance it is one reason why some social media creators confess to scrolling through their comments until they find one that is cruel the evidence that our insecurities are true can be strangely comforting and we already have a predisposition to believing them either

way the question is then settled if in an unpleasant Direction the archetypal example of this is Heathcliff from Emily bronte's weing Heights upon hearing a conversation by the woman he loves Catherine he immediately interprets it as a confirmation of all of his worst fears about himself he then flees in a rage not realizing he has now doomed any chance he had of being with Catherine who is then marry by the time he returns it is also very easy to waver between the relaxing and unsettling answers to why have I been rejected so that the issue

never gets put to rest this repeated exposure can also make the question of rejection seem even more significant with each time we turn it over in our minds we amplify its importance and thus the likelihood that we will continue to dwell on it even in the huge number of cases where the rejection likely didn't have that much to do with our personal qualities to draw upon another of stow's observations it is notoriously difficult to figure out why we have fallen for someone in the first place what initially Drew us to them there is an old

Buddhist Fable that illustrates the point of this section quite nicely here we are told that sufferings and misfortunes are a bit like having two arrows flung in your direction the first is the event itself which hits us and then immediately causes us some pain however the second is formed from our reaction to the event do we obsess on it causing our upset to multiply or do we carefully watch our own reaction ensuring that we do not get hit by the optional second arrow in my video on crushes we concluded that we might be wary of

allowing our imaginations to run wild to construct an idealized version of our beloved and I think here we can take a similar lesson most of the time we will not know with any certainty why someone has rejected us or even why they might not find us attractive if there is an obvious answer that is fantastic and may be valuable information but if not then we might wish to restrain our imaginations in the same way shophow wanted us to restrain our Wills to avoid crystallizing a version of the reject that is as inaccurate as it is

Dam but next I want to look at the way rejection can reveal a truly ugly underbelly of the human psyche and the way we sometimes use it as a catalyst for a deeply self-destructive cycle three rejection resentment and aggression the Russian author and philosopher Theodore dovi famously remarks that hell could be defined as the inability to love and I would like to draw upon this idea as well because social and romantic rejection has another danger and that is its ability to seow a hateful and resentful attitude in us which can then create a vicious cycle

making us lonelier and more bitter which only guarantees our future isolation I want to clarify here that I'm going to broaden the scope of this section Beyond romantic love to also Encompass social love and friendship because I think they often address similar human needs for connection and companionship but in different ways perhaps the epitome of the resentful figure in dosf writings is the underground man from his Notes From The Underground or just Notes from Underground depending on your translation this character's philosophy is best summed up in his declaration let the world go to hell but

I should always have my tea he honestly hates the universe and pretty much everyone in it dovi explores the many avenues that caused the man's descent into this unenviable state including his personal philosophy as well as his misplaced sense of intellectual superiority but he also examines the underground man's social rejection and how this embitters him to people in general the underground man feels that no one shows respect to him enjoys his company or accepts him in any way this goes well beyond the Romantic though it also does include that sphere in one story we discover

just how little his so-called friends think of him the underground man feels as if they look down on him and he may be right in this assessment they reluctantly allow him to join them for dinner but do not tell him the correct time causing him to get there hour early he again senses their rejection of him and flies into a rage cursing them in the strongest terms which they briefly react to before ignoring him pretty much entirely at the last moment he begs for their friendship but then they reject him again leaving him alone and

desperate obviously this is already a pretty unpleasant situation but I want to focus on what happens next in classic dovi fashion the underground man strikes up a brief friendship with a lady of the night named Liza or Lisa depending on how you pronounce it however the minute he senses they may be becoming close he preemptively rejects her company insulting her and causing her to run off into the night a memory which still causes him unhappiness whenever he thinks of it the order here is important the underground man already Begins the story very resentful which then

puts him on edge with his potential friends this in turn causes them to reject him then with this further rejection he decides to spurn any attempt at connection including with Liza there is a clear downward spiral each rejection only makes him more resentful yet this resentment causes him to try to reject others first to save himself the embarrassment of being spat on again he lashes out at the next person to show him a small kindness interestingly but perhaps unsurprisingly Doo's observations have found a lot of support recently in empirical work around social rejection funnily enough

there are two chapters in the Oxford Handbook of social rejection that contain excellent surveys of the published literature here first the chapter by cavalo and Holmes draws upon a wide range of sources to support the idea that when someone feels devalued by their romantic partner they tend to engage in self-protective behaviors like pulling away from them to avoid further hurt while another chapter by DeWall and tweng point out that rather than seek the approval of others socially rejected people tend to lash out with heightened aggression This lends some Credence to the old proverb that a

child rejected by their Village will burn it down simply to feel some warmth of course the tragic in both of these approaches is that they run directly counter to the sought goals of the rejected person in either case they react to the rejection by striking out at the very thing they genuinely want it runs perfectly in line with Nature's observations that when we feel powerless or helpless unable to achieve what we truly desire we can react in a self-protective fashion by devaluing that thing instead in fact he thought this was the characteristic behavior of the

resentful so to put this back in a romantic context sometimes the rejected party can react aggressively towards the rejector or even towards the concept of romance in general because the powerlessness provokes a resentful response in them to again draw from some anecdotal evidence to illustrate this point you can scroll through some of the screenshots sometimes posted online of so-called nice guys and nice girls becoming standoffish immediately upon being rejected by someone who they almost idolized only minutes before this is not to excuse such Behavior but simply to understand it if we pretend that people respond

to rejection purely by becoming sad then I think we are sanitizing what often happens in the cases of both social and romantic failure which can often be aggressive ugly and fueled by Envy and resentment any philosophical treatment of rejection must confront this I largely bring this up because we pretty much all face rejection at various points in our lives albeit in different amounts we might become Outcast by our friends or face endless roadblocks in our Quest For Love or find our El socially ostracized at work and at those times we may find ourselves beginning to

feel resentful hell at points this resentment may even be justified I know someone who faced endless social rejection at school purely because of his very visible disability however Justified or not this resentment is unlikely to help us the observations of thinkers like dostoevski and n as well as more recent Empirical research can help us understand that while this resentment reaction is somewhat natural and understandable it is nonetheless self-destructive on the one hand it is simply unpleasant to feel and is hardly likely to help us get over the incident but on the other it runs directly

counter to what might genuinely make us happy the underground man could have had a companion but he was already so eaten up with resentment that the thought of a genuine connection with another person seemed impossible he expected isolation so he acted aggressively and made his own prediction startlingly accurate it is not pleasant to acknowledge this human tendency but ignoring it only means it is more likely to take us unawares if there's one thing to take away from the video it is probably this we should be very wary of resentment but lastly I want to end

with some thoughts on rejection that I hope can lend some dignity to the experience and alleviate some of the deep shame at being upset with one's social rejection or romantic failure four dignifying rejection a common theme we've been exploring in this series on love is that despite the hold it has over our culture we often denigrate people for suffering on Love's behalf or how it affects us this is not just a modern idea even the soldiers in shakespear's Anthony and Cleopatra mock Anthony for the effect his love has had on him but I think this

is a shame because for many of us the trials and tribulations of Love friendship and social connection will form some of the highest and lowest points in our lives throughout his work buun Chul Han has talked about the increasing prioritization of acceleration and productivity in our societ societies and how this has led to a devaluing of other things including interpersonal connection but all of this contradictory messaging means we are both given the idea that love is vital for a fully rounded life and that it is a childish side project that we should not let take

up too much of our mental energy I think this is deeply unfortunate it prevents us from acknowledging this aspect of our experience and encourages us to instead be embarrassed of it I think the first step to dignifying rejection may be to recognize its near universality I've been reading an awful lot of shophow recently and one of his most interesting ideas is that we should consider ourselves part of a universal community of suffering schopenhauer was a pessimist and thought that life was largely characterized by displeasure with small breaks for temporary dissatisfying relief he thus advised us

to greet one another as fellow sufferer and take some small comfort in the fact that we are all in the same boat while I am not as pessimistic as schopenhauer I do think that his observation that it's reassuring to know we are not alone in our difficulties is bang on the realization that billions before us have been pained by the same type of event and billions after us will be in the future let us know that we are not uniquely maligned we might even recall some figures we admire who have faced the same issue such

as dovi with his first love whom he was initially rejected by and even when they did wed they found the marriage miserable or France Kafka whose lack of long-term luck in love is almost legendary this can help remind us that social and romantic rejection is not just something that happens to the pitiable and the irredeemable but also to some of the greatest Minds in history it does not by itself denigrate us secondly understanding why a rejection might hurt so much can encourage some much needed patience with ourselves one of the unfortunate side effects of sidelining

the importance of interpersonal relationships is that we treat the pain caused by them as if it were both incomprehensive and deeply shameful we are adults surely we are not reduced to misery over a simple no but realizing that rejection often ties into our conception of ourselves and our lovability can help us realize where all of this hurt might be coming from understanding the role imagination and resentment plays in the intensification of that pain can also make us aware of some of the causal factors involved so that we can do something about it keeping a close

eye on when we are letting rejection become the focal point of our reflection or or where we find our minds becoming ever more resentful and envious can help stop the downward spirals rejection can cause in their tracks giving us back some control when our minds can feel dangerously out of our hands thirdly it's worth being aware of just how strange romantic scenarios in general make us behave as I have emphasized in my other videos on love it is one of the only states that can consistently provoke irrationality and extreme emotional responses in US star's work

on love contains numerous illustrative and amusing anecdotes of this people who are otherwise perfectly normal reasonable and audite suddenly lose their heads and fall into the depths of infatuation despair or both this also makes sense from the perspective of someone like schopenhauer who held that love came from our deepest instincts and the will to life that was fundamentally irrational though Romanticism is often thought to have overemphasized the highs of love it also brought the lows into Stark relief Tales like the Sorrows of young Vera or tur first love both show perfectly sensible young people driven

to Madness by the trials and tribulations of love the point here is not to say that this is a good thing or really even an outright bad thing but rather that it is an ordinary and expectable thing and not something that makes us uniquely pathetic because it is tempting when we realize that we are blowing the impact of rejection out of all proportion to condemn ourselves as idiots but I think this is a little harsh General reasonability in the rest of our lives may be no True Guard in situations of love and romance and it

is worth being aware of this in advance so we can bear its pains without our entire self-image collapsing though it may feel it we are not actually going mad but lastly it is worth noting that there are precursors to the pain of rejection characters like the underground man or Heathcliff from weing Heights take rejection so hard because they feel themselves Outcast by the only people that matter to them in the underground man's case he becomes so insecure that everyone's opinion matters to him in a sort of Twisted way yet he hates them all for this

and as a result drives them away for heathcliffe his love has given him blinkers to the extent that only Katherine's opinion matters and so his rejection by her strikes at the core of his being transforming him into an envious spiteful angry creature this makes perfect sense given what we said in the first section of the video since we are reliant on other people to confirm certain important facts about ourselves if we are rejected by all who do this in a way that matters to us then of course we will become miserable the underground man and

heathcliffe are quite nice examples of this because they lie at two ends of a scale the first values the opinion of basically everyone despite his protestations otherwise and so is constantly hurt by rejection and disrespect whereas the other cares basically only for a single person and so his self-concept is entirely based on her opinion of him perhaps following Aristotle we could find a golden mean between these two extremes as we've seen here much of the pain caused by rejection is to do with what we think that rejection says about us so having a few people

whose opinions we value and Trust can do wonders both for ensuring that we become the person we desire to be and also to reassure Us in the face of less reliable judgments this is one use Aristotle saw for his celebrated friendships of virtue you can rely on them to be honest with you about you relying either on everyone's judgments or just a single person's View sounds like a recipe for disaster But A small collection of people whose opinions we deeply value that sounds like an important guard against the instability of both romantic and social Rejection

it seems like it would serve as a valuable buffer to all of the causes of pain we have examined here it can provide an accurate assessment of our characters from someone who knows us well and as a result can also help stop our imagination woring as to what this rejection ultimately means which may be nothing finally the love and comp ionship of these friends can help remind us that even when we are rejected we are still not alone and are still very much loved it is much harder to feel resentful under these circumstances and so

the prospect of lashing out at the world is significantly less attractive there is also some research to suggest that strong social ties a feeling of power and a feeling of authenticity all help reduce the sensitivity we feel towards rejection of course all of this is open to revision and change and development I largely intend it to be an aid in your own philosophizing about rejection so do let me know your personal Reflections on why it seems to hurt so much and ultimately what we can learn from it but if you want to explore some of

these themes in more detail then click here to look at my analysis of the problems Love Faces in the modern day and some ways we might learn to move past them and stick around for more on thinking to improve your life