I actually laughed out loud at how different this is to the usual "be yourself and to hell with what people think" advice. Can you elaborate on why it's so important to care if people like you?

Not OP, but we humans are social animals. As much as we may want to pretend we live alone just fine, it's not the common case. Sure, some people enjoy solitude and don't have to care about what others think, but most of us enjoy company, and this comes with caring about others and what they think of you.

You surely care about what your partner thinks about you. Your parents perhaps? Your friends? It's part of the emotional connection.

You can be laid back and easy going, but you're still going to care if your loved ones strongly go against your core beliefs and ways of living, right?

Well, people are generally social animals.

Also, whether we like it or not we depend on other people. If you want to get hired, reproduce, sell stuff, or just not be a hermit, it matters what people think of you.

Sometimes that means changing who you are. Sometimes it means finding people who are more like you (I know that I hate living in most rural areas based on the people I've met in them, for instance). Maybe a combination.

You’re the common protagonist in every scene of your personal story.

If everyone prefers not do deal with you, perhaps they are all toxic, terrible people. Or… there is a common element.

There’s a difference between defining yourself based on the expectations of others and being such an individual that nobody can relate.

It’s basic human psychology

The "be yourself" crap generally doesnt work.

Good advice would be "be somebody else".

The self help books that teach various tricks... basically make one be someone else.

Yeah, most of the advice is really bad, because they want to avoid the harsh truth: that things aren't necessarily going to work out. You can't sell a self-help book that teaches "you need people to love you but you might be left alone forever". People want a guaranteed solution but that simply doesn't exist.

However, a lot of people, like the person I originally replied to, choose to remain alone, and that's often because they are scared of rejection or of being left alone. It's kind of ironic, like a contradiction. Longing for connection, but being so scared of rejection that you force the rejection to happen yourself, so that it doesn't happen to you involuntarily, but by forcing that rejection through self-isolation you basically guarantee your doom rather than opening the possibility for flourishing.

At the very least your parents need to tolerate you, because you depend on them for living during your early years. So early on it is a simple survival necessity.

It turns out that this necessity never truly goes away. Aside from merely surviving (e.g. you need your doctor to at least tolerate you) interacting with other human is what makes life more than just surviving. At least it’s like that for most people.

Even hermits and sociopaths need to be liked by at least one person, which is their own selves. Since the number must be at least one, it might as well be 2 or 3.

> At the very least your parents need to tolerate you, because you depend on them for living during your early years. So early on it is a simple survival necessity.

Yep, and even a slight degradation of that trust that your parents that are necessary for your survival will protect you can have devastating, life-long psychological effects. And indeed everything can be traced back to that.

Perhaps controversial but I think this is the origin of most religion: baby is protected by infinitely powerful parents, child has shocking and painful revelation that their parents are not infinitely powerful and have all kinds of insecurities and weakness, therefore a forever infallible representative (e.g. God) is constructed to fill in that gap.

But I think that's just one way to fill the gap, and people engage in all kinds of strange, obsessive behaviours to try and reclaim that illusion of eternal protection and safety.