So I guess you're the villain

If you consume any self help for people pleasers, I’m sure you’ve heard this cliché:

No one can get through life without making enemies. Finally set that boundary with Tammy Turmoil, and she’ll spend the rest of her life talking shit behind your back; refuse, and now you’re a villain to every Tammy-trampled innocent you failed.

Of course, no one is the villain in every story. No, no: you’re probably a hero in some, too. Still, no matter who you are, there are probably at least a couple Tammies who sneer whenever they hear your name. It’s unavoidable.

I think we all know and accept this, at least intellectually. What I don’t think we’ve all grasped yet is THIS tragic little irony:

Put another way: the people most likely to fall apart after realizing that they’re “the villain” are also among the likeliest to find themselves so labeled.

Don’t get me wrong: bigots, abusers, and psychopaths still have a much higher per-capita villainy rate. Nevertheless, people pleasers get cast in that role surprisingly often—and the people casting them usually have a point.

The problem is that people like us often prioritize being liked over being real, an inversion that creates the perfect preconditions for villainy. Consider:

• The “nice” manager who fails to give honest feedback to his underperforming employee, who thinks she’s doing just fine until she’s fired

• The spouse who “deals” with chronic marital loneliness by having an affair

• The volunteer who says yes to everything and then flakes

• The contractor who annihilates herself to accommodate a cluster-B customer’s demands, then finds herself on the wrong end of a splitting episode when she can’t keep up

• The 22-year-old who wasted his girlfriend’s and his college years on a relationship he was too chickenshit to end

They find themselves “mysteriously” pulled into personality-disordered people’s orbits. Their affect sometimes appears glib and insincere. They’re high achievers, which can make people jealous. And they’re a little, ahem, high strung.

Add the following together—

• most publishing professionals are people pleasers

• many are public figures

• all are human

• orgy of insecurity

—And you have a field in which most of us eventually find ourselves screaming, “what do you MEAN, they think I’m the bad guy?!?!”

Take, for example, the Big 5 author who blew up on Threads and Instagram this week, doxxing the names and workplaces of women who criticized her online. She claimed there was more to it than that—these people were allegedly “stalking” her—but even if true, what a deranged way to handle stalkers. I’d be shocked if a major publisher works with that author again any time soon.

You don’t even need to be that unhinged to do real damage to your career in a situation like this. For example, sticking it to the (powerless, obscure) haters on one’s popular podcast tends to create more and more powerful haters in the long term. Defensive whining on X and Bluesky makes you look pathetic and fun to bully. Even backroom whispering—shit-talking your shit-talkers in private—tends to make you, not them, seem loony and small, especially when you do it a lot.

At least not right away. Pain like this needs to be brought into triage before the best course of action becomes clear.

In fact, were a client to bring such calamity to me—which any of you people can do at any time, cough cough, as you know I live for drama—I’d sit them down and insist we plot the situation on my Villainy Matrix before doing anything else. Once we know where it belongs on that thing, we’ll have a much better idea of what ought to come next.

And what is the Villainy Matrix, you say?

Behold: