I was taught that I should care about that and if I dont, I am lacking self co trol and rude and that is wrong. And practically speaking, if you hurt peoples feelings they will retaliate one way or the other or avoid you. Especially insecure people.

Controlling what you say is seen as bad thing online, but it is a thing that majority of people in real world do constantly and are expected to.

I would be careful about the word 'retaliate'. People internalize information differently. If you hurt someone's feelings, they may internalize that, try to reason out exactly what the problem is, and then accidentally project those feelings onto someone random because emotional and empathetic exhaustion is a thing that can happen to anyone. The reason such individuals exist and do such phenomena is because they don't want to hurt anyone.

That's not being insecure in the individual self. Victim mentality ascribes intent. There isn't always intent. Just being human, and not perfect.

Point taken. There are many different reactions to being hurt and possible backslash about me is just one of them.

I may also end up doing harm to hurt person, either because my hurt will influence them to their detriment (they will internalize my angry outburst etc) or because of how third parties will perceive them due to what I say.

I did not meant retaliation as purely bad act on the side of hurt person. It may he just answering in kind. People who don't stand up to insults end up being bullied. If I don't have to care about hurting their feelings, they don't have to care about mine.

There's a limit to what you can believe you have control over.

> If I don't have to care about hurting their feelings, they don't have to care about mine.

That's something you have to assume initially. The problem is it's only true over time. It's something that may be true at the moment of interaction, or it may be something that is true because of the interaction.

Apologies that you found it irksome! When you have authority (which requires an implicit kind of trust to be established assuming individual A can guide individual B) that establishes a unidirectional responsibility over people. It's a balance. If you want that authority you have to police yourself. I personally do not find myself comfortable in such positions. But I'm aware of the dynamic because it forms a feedback loop. If you show signs of 'weakness' and by 'weakness' I mean taking actions orthogonal to the overarching goal of directing, guiding, teaching, counseling, etc - then the group dynamic can easily devolve into a pedantic sorts of chaos. That doesn't always have to be a bad thing (e.g. good dialogue can result, understanding and new awareness can be established).

My perspective in the U.S. we are living in a time where this kind of authority is desired highly by lots of people because it's being reflected as 'the standard' with the current leadership. The problem is it's fundamentally built on principles that operate like a pyramid scheme. If you want that authority, the more you must conform. The more you conform, the more sameness you see. The more sameness you see, the more you can pretend you are the one with the authority. Carrot, stick, etc.

So if you aren't the literal leader that allows you to be manipulated very easily. I'd rather just have the awareness. My individual autonomy of reasoning is not something to be sacrificed because it goes down to my own personal core and it is fundamentally vital for me to believe I am sane, which is absolutely essential when I have time to myself to think for myself (not to mention essential for survival, I reason for a living - software). It's clearly easy to get caught in the waves of group thinking. People all make mistakes.

> This sentence seemed to irk me; because at what point does someone have to police themselves to ensure they don't "hurt someone else's feelings"?

Only to the point they appreciate being well liked by others.

The people I know who do this the least definitely have a much harder time with other people then the people I know who do this the best.

Yea, but it also depends. I'm a developer. I like talking on HN at work because I find it helpful to take intermittent pauses between code. I could be paranoid that people are reading my comments. That's a preference I can't expect everyone to understand why if it was happening, it would bother me. It would bother me because it would be double reinforcing my own perspective, which makes it hard for me to interact fluidly with people around me, because I'm not used to people agreeing with me. I'm used to people shrugging off my introspection as insightful but mostly pointless. Everyone validating my own perspective is a dynamic I am unaccustomed to and would prefer not to engage with if it's not grounded in pragmatism, real data.

Well liked is difficult to define from the perspective of someone who devotes less resources to processing social information. Social information becomes hard to process when there is extreme diversity or extreme uniformity in perspectives. Extreme diversity means, it makes no sense to process social information internally because it's easier to just listen to people when they have things to say. There's the expectation that people will all behave in assertive manners. Extreme uniformity is additionally difficult to process because it's a blind spot. There's always that tiny little margin of error that occurs when people engage in group think. An overload of uniformity compels the individual to establish a difference. These differences add up over time, and can be generalized as 'being difficult' but that trivializes the phenomena and attributes all that build of behaviors to an individual when it really could just be that an individual is manifesting a collected set of behaviors of a group dynamic in the attempt to maintain some sense of external consistency and cohesion.

Furthermore, it consistently doesn't account for the person's perspective who has the hard time with other people. No one bothers understanding that person. Why would anyone try to? It would seem logical to assume having empathy or understanding for that person would lead to social ostracism. But it doesn't always have to - that's a choice people can make when understanding turns into awareness, and that's just the point. It would be nice to feel as though one were not constantly teetering on a balance of everything devolving into chaos.

This duality of categorizing behaviors into well liked behaviors and disliked behaviors, it is a problem that has no solution, because it doesn't have to be a problem if it's not a problem.

Perfectionism, silly. People are people. Can't please everybody. It leads to a lot of inconsistencies. Forming expectations about people. Good or bad. Perspective, hindsight bias. It is inconsistent reasoning. Uses the past to interpret the present. It misses a portion of the present in exchange for an understanding of the past. Future prediction, mind can not work that way. It is perpetually terrifying to live an existence this way, sometimes. Bad things sometimes happen. Can't control everything.