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Swimmer963 comments on How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious - Less Wrong
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Yeah, it's that sort of "annoyance" and "ick" that's the sort of disapproval I'm talking about. When you have one attached to a group stereotype, it means you'll have an aversion to expressing any characteristic of yourself that "means" you'd be one of "them".
For example, at one point I found vegans annoying, and this made it difficult for me to switch to a mostly-vegetable diet, because then I'd be one of "them".
Unfortunately, this ingroup/outgroup signaling by our brains has almost nothing to do with actual morality OR personal utility. Our brains will rationalize like crazy to give us high-sounding reasons for our annoyance, to make us feel we're taking a principled stand somehow, but in actuality the whole thing is moot. You approving of the "ambitious kids" (or your status-cheating valedictorian friend) as people won't actually contribute to some sort of moral decay in society, no matter how much your tribal brain makes you feel like it is.
I think I get that more now...I wouldn't use my annoyance to claim that he was a bad person. What I find annoying is a fact about my brain, not a fact about the outside world...and anyway, intellectually I know that I have no good reason to disapprove of people who try, and that the fact that I do disapprove of them doesn't make me any better a person.
When I try to analyze it in my head, the thought of joining, I don't know, the student council or something doesn't so much turn me off because I'll be "one of them", but because I'll have to be in the same room as "them." I respect the kind of people who do student council, and politics later on...it's a hard thing to do, and someone has to do it. It's just really, really not my thing...and it's possible that some of the unpleasantness I experienced doing certain activities rubbed off, in my head, on the people who did those activities. Which I can now say is unfair to them, but my thinking wasn't that sophisticated when I was 15.
Right - but intellectually knowing that doesn't help. What does is imagining what it would be like to actually approve of them.
Try it. It won't lead to you actually spending time with people you annoy you, but it will either lift the feeling of annoyance or move you towards surfacing your real rejection here.
You might notice that I suggested imagining being approving and smiling warmly at the people in question; you might also notice that it's the one thing your brain has consistently avoided doing ever since. ;-)