Look, you asked for advice, I gave some advice and suggested you do some introspection, and just based on the evidence of this comment chain alone, we can see the answers to some of my earlier-suggested questions:

- You aren't willing to accept feedback or alternative challenges to your base worldview. You like to twist conversations so that they happen on your terms only.

- You are unlikely to revisit a previously-held belief, or you rarely change your mind based on new information or new perspectives, or you are unlikely to admit mistakes or acknowledging that the viewpoints of others can also be valid (in fact, specifically you seem unable to comprehend that, admitting that someone else's perspective is valid != admitting yours must be wrong... it's not a zero-sum game, but you seem to think it is).

- When you try to ask for help (again, you were the one who asked for advice in the first place...), some people may try once, but they won't want to continue talking to you, because there is no mutual benefit here. Nobody gets anything positive out of talking to you in this manner, if you bring nothing to the table besides negativity and appeal to surface-level pedantry (e.g. definitions from the dictionary? simple acknowledgement that power structures exist?). If you actually learn how to have constructive conversations, where both parties get something positive out of it (aka make it non-zero-sum), then I promise you, you will find more traction with relationship-building, AND it won't feel like "sucking up". But if you can't learn how to do this, then I fear that people will rightfully avoid talking to you, because they get nothing from it except the misery you inflict on them.

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I'm sure you'll want to get a last-word in, so feel free to do that (and likewise, I will exercise my freedom to not respond and just go about my own life). But if you ever have a change of heart, perhaps when you gain a little more maturity or perspective and you somehow revisit this thread, then you may realize that:

- I already agreed with you that power structures exist esp. under capitalism, that essentially yes, "superior" or "inferior" are necessary-but-not-sufficient factually true labels. Nonetheless, these labels fail to capture the complete spectrum of human relationships, and you offered nothing substantive to refute this point either, so I assume you either don't understand it, or are incapable of acknowledging new information or alternative perspectives.

- I tried to suggest, in various ways with a few leading questions, that you lack humility and an inability to accept feedback. IMHO, this along with your reductive stubbornness about reducing working relationships into simple "boss vs underling" power structures, are the most direct reasons for your professional struggles. In other words, you don't need to learn "how to suck up". You need to reframe your entire approach to human relationships, and recast it in terms other than the one-dimensional interpretation of power structures... We live in a multi-dimensional world, but your "mental model" is too simple, because you reduce everyone to a one-dimensional vector embedding with a single boolean flag: "is_superior (T/F)".

- If you think I am over-focusing on one particular phrase like "sucking up", then you were free to offer alternative angles for discourse, if you wanted to steer the conversation in a more productive direction. But what you ended up doing was basically trying to suck me into the same pit of misery that you inhabit, where superiors are evil and holding your livelihood at threat... maybe that's a fun way to pass the time for you, but frankly there's nothing productive about going down that path, so I won't join you there (and I sincerely hope you find a way to climb out of it yourself).

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As a parting gift, here are some random resources for career growth (I don't know if you are an engineer or a manager or what, but perspectives about other people can still be helpful). I hope if you are sincerely trying to grow and overcome personal limitations, that you are willing to engage with curiosity and humility, to learn something new that might challenge your preconceived ways of interpreting the world:

- https://staffeng.com/guides/

- https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineering-caree...

- https://github.com/keyvanakbary/learning-notes/blob/master/b...

- https://www.learninpublic.org/