To extrapolate:
People often say that one should not worry about what others think of them, but life simply doesn’t work that way. What other people think of you really does matter; point-in-fact, it can be everything depending on what field you go into.
Like say, for example, you’re a business owner and you’re recorded arguing with an angry Karen of a customer, the video’s posted online, and the internet sides with the Karen. Then, people boycott your business and you’re left without a livelihood.
Or perhaps you say something crass and get cancelled. Or simply anger or inconvenience someone with a lot of influence.
Or, even more horrifyingly, say you were assaulted and you came forward, and were ostracized and shunned by your community as a result.
How could one set up their life such that it would be impossible for people like that to rob one of their livelihood? How could one make it impossible for others to shun or ostracize them?
How could a business owner set up their business so that other people couldn’t simply shut it down on a whim in such a manner?
EDIT: I’ll just “be myself” since that’s what the majority of people in the thread want and repeat what I said to another individual:
Honestly, the way everybody is acting is really, really shameful. I am a person who made a thread and gave it a [Serious] tag because I wanted serious, literal answers to a serious problem that, given my chosen career path, will affect me at some point in my life and could potentially ruin it without good info to prepare for such a crisis beforehand. But all I’m getting is denial, mockery, condescension, lies, put-downs.
And it’s rooted in this desire to either pretend the problem is not real because you’re all secretly afraid it’ll affect you yourselves, or it’s because you know it’s real but you view it as a positive because ostracization and shunning people is an emotional cudgel you wield to silence people you don’t agree with on the internet, and answering the question honestly would require framing such actions as a negative and that would make you question the morality of your actions. And that’s not only sick, that’s just cowardly. If you believe cancelling people is morally A-O good, then at least have the temerity to threaten me with a “Don’t speak your mind and mask up” response like at least a few people were honest enough to do.
But don’t insult my intelligence by thinking you can lie to my face and pretend that something I’ve been personally watching happen to other people for over a decade is not, in fact, happening.
Now I came here for a serious answer to a serious problem that affects everyone. If you can’t participate in good faith and offer meaningful strategies to avoid or fix such problems and want to either misconstrue it as an emotional issue – much as you’ll do with what I’m saying here after the majority of you demanded I just be myself and not worry about the consequences – or outright deny it’s a real problem when it’s been real for over a decade, just don’t participate in the thread. Just go elsewhere.
Okay, I just acted like myself. Everyone happy?
No, not really. I am just very cognizant of the fact that this is a very real possibility, especially given my chosen career path (I’m going to be a business owner). The possibility that something that will take me many years to build can be lost in the timespan of a day, all because one person or a group of people got mad at me, terrifies me. The whole point of being a business owner is to be independent and free from the influence, and negative behavior, of others, but, at least the way our media portrays life, everyone is extremely vulnerable to being “cancelled” in that sense at any time for any reason. It even happens to people just working regular jobs. It’s a very real threat to one’s life that needs to be addressed and planned for, I just don’t know how and hoped others on Lemmy would.
Ridiculous perspective. Get outside your own bubble and realise that getting ‘cancelled’ rarely has any real material consequences.
Your question seems to be ‘How can I be a cunt to people and suffer no consequences for those actions?’
Tell that to the poor victim of the Steubenville, OH rape. She was cancelled by that entire town because of what was done to her, not because of what she did. Other townspeople burned her house down because she came forward. Stuff like that happens to people all the time, even if not under such extreme circumstances, either through no fault of their own or they’re actually in the right in a confrontation but just face a determined group of bigoted people, like the Bud Light boycott.
Being ostracized or cancelled or whatever you wish to call it has demonstrably and nightmarishly gruesome consequences for its victims, and it can happen to anyone over anything whether justified or not. It is very much something anyone who seeks to participate in civilized society has to prepare and plan for, hence the thread.
It doesn’t happen to people ‘all the time’. you’re talking about a teeny tiny minority of events that are over reported exactly because they’re such outlandish examples. The Bud Light boycott is notable exactly because it’s unusual. The vast majority of boycotts do not work.
https://www.theguardian.com/vital-signs/2015/jan/06/boycotts-shopping-protests-activists-consumers