You are waiting in line to buy a cup of coffee, and suddenly a man cuts in right in front of you.
Before you have the chance to reason with him, he says in your face first – “Dick”.
Ok, now your blood is pumped up and you are so pissed off.
If you really think about it, this actually happens a lot in life. You haven’t done anything wrong, but someone suddenly pops out and curses you. So, what should we do? How should we process this kind of stuff?
Let’s start by listing all the possible responses.
❤ All 4 possible ways to respond
1. Curse back
This is our default reaction.
First of all, if you are angry, you have already lost the battle. Because anger will produce cortisol and other hormones that can hurt the body.
Then, he cursed you and made you angry is already a past fact. You cursing back will not reduce the amount of anger he just caused you, instead, you will get angrier and hurt your body even more.
Now let’s see his response. If he accepts your curse, then the incident is over, this is one of the best results. But If the verbal war escalates, or the two of you get into a fight, you will pay more of your time, energy, or money for it. Remember:
It doesn’t matter how much he pays, what matters is how much you pay.
Because your life is yours.
To sum up, cursing back is a path that is doomed to fail, the further you get involved, the more you pay.
Damn, this hurts. But this is reality.
2. Revenge
You don’t curse him back immediately but find other ways to get revenge on him.
First, taking revenge on him requires you to invest even more time and energy than cursing his ass, as you need to dig into his life to find an attack point first (dark, I know).
Second, revenge also doesn’t undo the damage that has been done to you.
More importantly, revenge does not really generate the pleasure which can offset the pain he caused you, instead, it often makes you feel guilty. Now it’s anger plus guilt, more negative results.
3. Reasoning
Reason with him, hope he will realize that what he did was wrong, and then apologize to you. It’s also one of the best results.
Except it is highly unlikely. Because there are generally two reasons for a person to act like a dick: either the person’s just bad, or something bad just happened to him and he is angry. In both cases, reasoning with him is of little use.
4. Ignore
Ignore him, forgive him, and move on with your own life.
These are the four possible ways of responding, the later, the more rationality required, but also the less loss you suffer.
❤ So what to do?
“Wait, so you are saying that no matter which way I take, I always end up losing, is that it? “
Unfortunately, yes.
There will be no gain when this kind of thing happens, all you can do is to minimize the loss.
Curse back and revenge will not solve the problem, only escalates the conflict, and in the end, everyone loses. Loss is guaranteed, and the deeper you are involved, the greater the loss.
Reasoning generates much less loss, but the possibility of success is low.
In most cases, the best choice is to just ignore him. By ignoring it, your loss is the least, and the possibility of success is the greatest.
Encountering something like this is like being bitten by a stray dog on your way to the grocery store.
Cursing back is like kicking the dog. The result is that your injury will not heal, but the dog is almost guaranteed to be more angry and bite you even more.
Revenge is like killing the dog (just a thought experiment). The result is that you kill the dog in a moment of anger, but after you calm down, you will actually regret it, and for a long time after that, you will keep dreaming about its bloody body.
Reasoning is like soothing it and letting it calm down. But it’s not very likely, and you may get bitten more.
Ignoring is equivalent to admitting that you are unlucky (accepting that something has happened), you just go to the hospital to treat the wound, and then return to your life with the grocery.
❤ An Epitome of Your Entire Self-Healing Journey
How is all this even matter? Well, it may seem like a trivial thing, but it’s actually the perfect epitome of your entire self-healing journey.
Because the bad mindsets that you are carrying now comes from the trauma you received when you were a child, and those traumas are exactly the same as being cursed by strangers – you are just an innocent child, you have done nothing wrong, but someone just hurts you.
And the way to change these mindsets and become happier is exactly the 4 mentioned above-cursing back, revenge, reasoning, and ignoring.
Ignoring actually means two things—acceptance and forgiveness. Accepting and forgiving is the only way to heal yourself.
Accept your upbringing and forgive those who hurt you as a child, so you can let go of the past and start living the rest of your life.
❤ The Core of It – Fairness
The core of this cursed-by-stranger thing is – fairness.
“Why? Why I am the one hurt, but the best solution is to forgive him?”
Fairness is a central topic in the process of changing your mindset and being happy. The biggest difficulty in accepting and forgiving is understanding fairness. This is why the Diamond Sutra and the Bible emphasize “forgiveness”.
I’ll talk about fairness in a later article. Later as we talk about how to change the mindsets that make you unhappy, we will often turn back to fairness and forgiveness.
❤ What’s the right mindset to handle this?
- You have done nothing wrong.
- His cursing you actually has nothing to do with you, you have never even met before.
- Most people are not bad in nature, they just encountered something bad. Even if they ARE bad, it is the environment in which they grew up that made them that way. They are actually quite unfortunate.
- When things like this happen, you are doomed to lose, so your goal is to minimize losses, not win the fight.
- You choose to ignore him not because you are a coward, but instead because you are mentally strong and unhurtable.
- It is very easy to hurt someone, even a kid can kill the president. You choose to not harm not because you can’t, but because it’s not worth it.
- The biggest harm this kind of incident will do to you is not that someone curses you, but that you keep thinking about it afterward and keep hurting yourself. Every time you think about it, it is equivalent to him curing you again.
Walk your own path. There are billions of people in this world, if each time someone gives you a touch and you just follow him for a while, then you will never get to where you want to go.
❤ Keep it real, what I will do in real life
In real life, my rule of response is only one word – cost.
Most of the time when this kind of thing happens to me, I really choose to laugh and let it pass.
But if I think the cost of cursing back will not be high, and there will be no serious consequences (for example, the man is not a gangster), then I will fack them back instantly.
But generally no physical fight.
Life is short, fight when it’s right.
Run when it’s wrong.
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