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Optimism

Leave Your Shock at the Door

People will intentionally harm you!

We've all said something like "I cannot believe that person did that to me." Being intentionally harmed is shocking, whether the person is our spouse, a co-worker, a friend or a stranger at the gas station.

Like, the other day I was playing poker and the waitress forgot this man's straw for his iced latte. The guy decided to call her a bit** for this. That is just so incredibly messed up obviously. But humans do stuff like this pretty much every second of every single day, and we have throughout history. That includes you and I, and every human for that matter.

What is remarkable is perhaps not that humans harm each other so frequently, but that we still feel so aggrieved when this happens.

Think about drive by shootings and child abuse.Then think that times like a zillion and we have the Holocaust. We have the genocides in Rwanda, and Septemeber 11th. Sure, we can try to deflect this and be like "these were the products of horrible monsters." But the point is that it was still humans doing these things. And in the case of WWII, the whole freaking world couldn't get along enough to not cause millions of people incredible suffering (millions, like your Grandma, times 1 million!). If this can happen, is it really that surprising that someone lied about you, or stole $20 from your wallet, or lied about you, or whatever else?

People are freaking crazy half the time. I don't even mean this, per se, to come off as depressing or anything. It can, if taken in the right light, be freeing. At the very least, it can save us all that sense of shock/betrayel/hurt if we just expect things like this to happen to an extent.

I'm not saying we should all walk around expecting the worst or anything. Good will happen too (my puppy is licking my face as I type this while laying on my lap) and things are not that bad usually. The sun is like 5 billion for 5 billion at rising, and yes, ice cream tastes good. That won't change.

But, we really shouldn't be that shocked when people do horrible things to us. History proves this will happen, both on a global level, and in each of our lives individually.

On a more optimistic note, perhaps this is useful to be aware of not just to deflect some of the negative emotional effects that come with this sense of being harmed, but also, to create a sense of shared humanity.

If we all accepted that we all mess up and do mean things to each other, that we all can be inconsiderate, mean, pushy, selfish and impatient and even outright mean, then perhaps we would all be a lot less bitter and resentful. We'd also be a lot less likely to harm each other, because research consistently shows that people are more cruel when their own sense of self-worth, or their sense of justice, has been threatened or challenged.

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