Liking Things

Well, this is an interesting one.

I was asked to blog about this, and that means that this is going to be approached as a blog post and not as specific advice to the person who asked.

Hey, I like a bunch of stuff other people don’t like. But sometimes they don’t like those things, out loud, and it can make me feel bad about liking it! What do?

This can be one of two problems: One, people do not like the thing I like, and I want them to enjoy the thing I like. The solution to this is to share with your friends, talk about what you’re engaging with, and see if that interests them, and if it doesn’t, you can either discard them as friends because of their opinion of a piece of media (which is a weirdo thing to do) or accept that your friends and you don’t have to all like the same thing.

Or two, people actively dislike the thing I like, and talk about disliking it, and I do not feel okay about liking the thing. This is a little trickier because the solution to this is to respect people. Specifically, respect that they have tastes and wants and opinions and you can recognise those tastes and wants and opinions without them having to align with or change yours.

That is, however, hard.

Instead, let’s look at some strategies for this.

Establish Boundaries

Other people don’t like the thing you like! That’s a real bummer. Of course, there are spaces where you can like your thing and and they can dislike their thing, provided neither you nor they are forcing one another to engage with one another’s opinions, you should be absolutely fine.

But that’s not what’s happening, is it.

What’s happening is that you’re probably in some general space, like facebook or twitter, and there, you find that the people who are important to your life, shit on something you like, and maybe do it in a way that’s hard for you to avoid. The most important skill here is to take control over your space: You get to choose what you see in your social media space. If people are being rude, refusing your requests, avoiding your mutes or blocks, to talk to you about the thing, then that’s not an opinions-on-media thing, that’s people-being-an-asshole thing.

Reject False Dichotomies

Odds are really good this is about something that has ‘problematic elements’ in it, where you’re upset by people pointing out problems the thing has. The notion is that if this media is ‘bad’ and I like it, am I ‘bad?’

This is an incorrect way to view it, and most people, even media critics, aren’t framing it this way. This is you making analysis of a media object – criticism of a thing – into criticism of you. If they’re framing it as criticism of you because you like the thing, then again: that’s people being assholes. That has nothing to do with criticism.

Still, the other thing here is that your opinions on media aren’t you, they’re things you relate to. I don’t know how many ways to restate the idea that other people not liking things doesn’t affect you liking things. The idea that these things are both that simple and binary – liking ‘bad things’ makes you ‘bad’ – is a simplified view of reality that turns everyone who ever ate bread into Hitler.

Accepting The Infinite

Nothing is perfect. For anything you like, there’s a better version of it that doesn’t exist yet. You can point to almost every piece of media and talk about ways in which it, as a product of a flawed, corrupt, capitalist society, fails to completely decouple itself from it. This isn’t even an attempt at a joke, this isn’t hyperbole: There is always going to be a potentially better version of the best thing.

What this means is that even for criticisms of work that are completely valid, are much more about how to remake the thing if it were to be made again. They’re not useful arguments about the thing that exists before you. It’s okay to know that a thing could be better while still respecting what it is. There’s almost no alternative.