Do you ever interact with someone who's mannerisms are so confrontational, it is impossible to have a normal conversation with them? It is rare for me these days, but today, I had an interaction with someone like this and no matter what I said, they took offence - it was IRL trolling, where rather than assuming best intentions, they assumed the utter worst, and I was there to help them.
They can go get...
I found it funny and highly interesting from a human behavior perspective, but if I was perhaps someone else, I wonder how they would have found this kind of personality and, would they have been able to "cope" with it? Essentially, I think someone would need to be a type of masochist in order to enjoy this kind of communication style, but the world is full of subs, so perhaps it works for them.
Thankfully, I don't have to subject myself to it
But I do wonder, do these people have some process of self-reflection and if they do, what is their definition of success? I assume that most people feel that they are at least partially good (whatever that means), but how this is defined seems to vary massively across populations. I think most of us want to be good, but in practice, I expect that we don't live up to our own expectations - unless we are wholly narcissistic and have a view where we are infallible.
I definitely don't have that view, but a colleague of mine today asked what my definition of success was in my work role. For me, that is pretty easy as it is an enablement position, which means that for me to see myself as successful, I need to become obsolete. This means that the milestones to success are experienced through the successful development of skills of those I enable to the point that they are able to no longer need me - at least in the capacity of my enablement role.
Do people spend time really thinking about this though, and should they? I tend to believe that they should, because if we do not work out what success looks like for us, we run the risk of being influenced by external sources in ways that might not actually help us feel successful. I think that this is why so many people can for example, earn very large salaries, yet still feel like they are failing - their definition of success is "wrong".
And, I don't mean that they should redefine their definition to match conditions, but I do think that a lot of people are fooled into what constitutes successful living, without actually working if that works for them as an individual.
I have everything I wanted, but am still not satisfied
Some will say that it is a lack of gratitude and we should focus on what we do have, but I am not sure about that, as I think that might set up a sunk cost fallacy situation and rather than improve the situation long-term, just delay the invertibility of failure at doing the wrong thing. This means that we "waste" even more time doing what doesn't work for us, when what we could be doing is working out what does.
However, it is far easier to crowdsource success definitions than work out what is intimately suitable, so most people defer the decision of what path they take to the group. This way, not only do they not have to make the decision, but when they fail, they can also have the sense of, "I did all I was supposed to do", without seeing that it was their decision to do this, that led them in the wrong direction to begin with.
When it comes to the person I was dealing with today however, it could be that they are just in a bad way today or in a period of their life that encourages them to act this way. The problem with this kind of behavior though is, while today might just be "a bad day", relationships are not that granular and a bad day of behavior can do irreparable damage.
Saying "sorry" is not a fix-all for bad behavior and at some point, it becomes so commonly said, that it is not meaningful at all. And as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words - but it doesn't mean that the words can't lead to action. Sometimes, the only action left - is to walk away from bad behavior, and not look back.
There are plenty of tools in this world.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
