Laziness as a Cure for Bitterness
I keep coming back to conversations I’ve had for fuel to write these things. Today’s particular topic is me again, ego-centric I know, but it’s not so much about me per se, as it is about philosophy again. Yes, philosophy, or perhaps more a sort of guideline for how to live my life in this case. This isn’t so much about the nature of things as it is about the way I choose to react to things. It can be summed up in a single word pretty easily.
Laziness.
Now, this isn’t generally a word that is considered to have positive connotations but hear me out, I’m not extolling the virtues of sitting on your arse all day but rather something far more useful.
Coming back to the conversation in question, we were talking about dealing with people that cross you, dealing with the aftermath of being wronged and how to go about your life thereafter. The general reaction to people doing this is to get angry and resent them for it. If a problem is bad enough, and it keeps reoccurring it’s not an unexpected reaction to want to swear off completely from what or whomever is the cause of the issue.
I don’t get angry, I can’t be bothered. I mean, of course I do get angry, but it’s short lived and I can’t be bothered to put the effort in to maintain it, to run the thoughts around my head that need to run to justify a continued anger. I’ve been wronged once, by the wronging itself, I’m not going to work for the person wronging me to make things even worse for myself by keeping myself angry. That’d just be some kind of retarded double-whammy for wrongness. Likewise, I don’t decide to become jaded at the entire class of wrong-doer. After all, everyone is unique so it’s unfair to generalise. Not only that, but if I did generalise people that way I’d do myself out of meeting a lot of nice people just because I had a bad experience with one of them.
It’s not worth to effort to constantly be on my guard, diminishing my whole quality of life for one person. Sure, I trust that person less, especially in the wrong-doing related situations, but that’s just common sense, like not sticking your hand in fire after the first time you get burnt.
So, I don’t stay angry, I don’t hold grudges and I don’t dismiss I whole range of people for the actions of one because I can’t be bothered to do so. Doing things like that require effort that I could use on enjoying life rather than being negative. The freedom you get from not having to care about all that crap as remarkable and when this attitude first clicked for me, I mean really clicked, rather than just be saying I was going to do this but not really “getting it”, I was practically in tears because it was such a revelation, such a weight lifted. Of course, like any mode of thought, there are downsides.
Not caring about bad things makes it easy to stop caring about good things too. It’s easy to find yourself in a spiral of apathy, not caring about anything at all, which requires a certain amount of effort to avoid. In my opinion, it’s a better problem to have than the ones brought about by harbouring negative feelings for an undetermined amount of time.
I’ve not had a whole lot of bad things happen to me, well, perhaps I have, but since I stopped caring about any of it I find it hard to remember. Some wrongs have been bad and while I don’t maintain any conscious anger, if I happen to see those people again I can feel it reawakening – I’m not some zen guru of peace or anything, I’m human. The core of it all is that I just let things be and say no to the temptation of anger. It seems like a really easy solution to shield yourself behind anger, hate and resentment but those really only work short-term and you don’t even realise the price you pay long-term until you’ve already paid it. Life is too short for that bullshit.
Saying that, I’m quite the pessimist, I actually expect to be wronged most of the time, however, I don’t feel bad about it, I just accept it as a fact of life that things are often unfair and shitty and move pass the bad things and embrace the good things. To follow that Epicurean logic again, if I expect the worse than the normal is sublime and the great beyond measure and the bad not surprising at all. No reason to feel bad about any of that really, that I can see.