My opinions are mixed. Despite being fairly solitary, I prefer people to have a generally positive, or at least neutral opinion of me, but at the same time I don't get bothered by people disliking or outright hating me, unless it's someone I'm fond of or have a lot of respect for, for whatever reason. Of course then again as my longest running jobs could be basically described as a combination of "holding up a uniform and taking the blame for things that go wrong" and "telling people 'no' when they really don't want to hear it" I'm kind of used to having people dislike, or at
least strongly resent, me. I'm pretty thick skinned when you get down to it.
As far as going out of my way to get positive reactions, I prefer not to, but then again nobody does, yet it is part of life if you want to even have a chance of getting anywhere. As nice as it is to be a misanthrope and say "I don't care what anyone thinks" you kind of have to in order to get by in society (if that's what your getting at with this query) so I don't want you to take what most people seem to be saying about not caring for the most part (including me) too seriously or a piece of life advice.
See, for a lot of reasons I won't go into, actually having a "life" is kind of over for me, I'm pretty much where I'll be forever (if not worse) so being a cynical, pessimistic, anti-social, misanthrope who keeps to himself and tends to annoy people a bit by saying unpopular things on The Internet isn't any big deal. But for a regular person who hasn't been forced into a pathetic "retirement" due to brain damage, you very much do need to care. While I rarely talk about positive things, and mostly rant about the "interesting" or "messed up" aspects of my former profession as they related to things, even doing what I did (Casino Security) meant having to be on as good a terms with as many people as I could and save up as many "brownie points" (so to speak) as I could, especially given how disposable employees could be. Make a good impression, get as much training as possible even when it's annoying, and make yourself as close to as indispensable as you can where you can. It's not glamourous, not fun, and outright annoying, but the bottom line is in the real world, and the real workplace, you DO need to care what people think because at any given time you never know when you'll need someone to have your back, even if it's a simple matter of someone being willing to tell the truth and say they saw something during an incident, as opposed to just staying out of something because it's not their problem and they don't want to get attention drawn to themselves, everyone, in every workplace, winds up needing something from someone at some point.
All that rambling is probably pointless though, I'm simply guessing the context you brought this up in.
