Ignore the Dan Bilzerians in your life

Dan Bilzerian is a jack of many trades. He’s a businessman, a stunt double and a professional poker player. He’s in excellent physical shape and he’s stupendously rich.

Dan Bilzerian’s newest capital venture is in the social media business. This time, Dan Bilzerian has chosen to market himself by being a professional jerk on the internet. He posts photos and videos of beautiful women, guns and the luxurious cars he’s driven. For those unfamiliar, think of him as something of a Chuck Norris.

He markets himslef as a shining, chiseled icon of masculinity, and his following is part serious and part sarcastic. To get a better understanding of who Dan Bilzerian is, I recommend a quick visit to his Facebook page.

Dan Bilzerian has something of a cult following. His fans are vigorously devoted to the life and times of this professional-something, who inherited the majority of his wealth from his father. Still, there are people out there who have the confidence to offer their scathing criticisms of Mr. Bilzerian over the internet. What makes Dan Bilzerian unique from other celebrities is that Bilzerian, or at least the administrator of his Facebook page, has spent a great deal of time responding to the haters.

“What a chauvinist douche,” one comment reads. “Fake. You probably paid those women to hang out with you,” reads another. These scathing comments are met with tactless profanities from the lay-Facebooker. However, Bilzerian will often respond himself, replying with a one-liner comeback or a photograph of himself with a bunch of models in bikinis.

The way we react to Bilzerian over social media is an allegory for the way we deal with the more familiar, personal Bilzerians we meet in our life. Whether they’re huddled in a semi-circle on your porch or trying to correct your bicep-curl form in the YMCA weight room, we all have to encounter the over-the-top masculine, obnoxious and woefully unavoidable types of people wherever we go in life. He’s the embodiment of “that one guy.”

Some people see a problem with Bilzerian’s lifestyle. He’s fake, he’s materialist and he’s a misogynist; all of these things are hard to disagree with. However, going out of your way to criticize Bilzerian’s lifestyle is as pointless as idolizing him.

This is partially because Bilzerian will actually harass you back on Facebook if he notices your comments and partially because it creates a stronger backlash from Bilzerian’s fans. Either way, directly responding to Bilzerian feeds his ego and makes him more popular.

That’s because no matter what the reaction, Dan Bilzerian gets off on people noticing and forming judgments on his lifestyle. It’s narcissistic. It’s trolling. It’s downright awful.

But is anybody really afraid of Dan Bilzerian? I’m not. In fact, I’m so woefully unimpressed by Dan Bilzerian’s whole spiel that I’m, with total certainly, never going to go out of my way to instigate Bilzerian over the web. If everybody chose to simply ignore Bilzerian’s antics, he wouldn’t be able to fire up his fans with his incendiary comebacks.

There’d be nothing to work with. He’d get bored. He’d suddenly find that paying models to hang out with him and spending hours editing videos of himself shooting guns and racing cars isn’t as fun.

That’s how you beat a troll. That’s how you beat a jerk. You look the other way. You ignore their antics. You stop worrying about it and find more charming, engaging people to hang out with.