What compels a person to be mean just to be mean?
I am thinking of a couple of scenarios I’ve encountered lately, but when you dial back the vision and look at things 10k feet up in the sky, there seems to be a lot of mean-spirited shit going on at this time. Why?
I mean, people are getting off on someone else’s misery as our country goes off the rails. And it isn’t just my country where certain people are reveling in the miserly of other people… There’s evidence of it all over the place in this world, like 00s 4chan took over everyone’s sensibilities. People are obsessed with keeping score on who pwn’d who.
And sometimes it isn’t as aggressive as “owning the [xxxx]”. Sometimes it is this crazy need some people seem to have to make sure that you know that they think your interests are unimportant. “I went to a flag football match on Saturday…,” might be countered with: “Ugh, how anyone can find joy in that is beyond me.” Was it necessary to inject that comment? Did it somehow add to the conversation? Did you ask yourself if you might sound like an ass before you said it out loud? Do you even care that you sound like an ass?
Or: “Let’s go out for drinks.”
“I can’t, I’ve got stuff to do around the house. Sorry.”
“Why are you such a stick-in-the-mud these days, dickweed? You always have stuff to do. Ever since you moved in with your girlfriend, you never have time for us anymore. Fuck off and die, loser.”
I wish I could say that example was an exaggeration, but I’ve heard something like it (with modifications to protect the guilty even though I owe them nothing and they would never read this anyway).
And maybe I’m just grabbing low-hanging fruit today. But, man, I really don’t get why people are mean, seemingly just to be mean.
I’m very likely misquoting the following, but it is how I remember Death saying it: “It’s just as easy to be kind to someone as it is to be cruel. And it’s a heck of a lot more fun.” [I believe this comes from “The High Cost of Living”, the miniseries of comics about a day in the life of Sandman’s Death, but I could be very wrong. Seeing as I can never find it online and don’t have time to read the books to find it, we’ll just roll with my misquote.]
I don’t have a solution, only questions. Maybe it isn’t my turn to answer. I’m just saying that if Death thought it was important to be kind, why can’t regular folks be at least as kind?
Leave a comment. Markdown use is permitted.