Asshole AlertDon’t be an asshole and don’t be tolerant of assholes.
💋 Bad Girlz Club
Code of Conduct
You may want to adopt this simple Code of Conduct for your company, team, or circle of friends. Only you can precent forest fires.
Were you asked to visit this page?
Perhaps it may be a good idea to reflect on your recent behavior. If you want to live in reality and breathe the same air as the rest of us, you’re going to have to step off your high horse and reevaluate your life. It’s probably going to feel unbearable - like how most people feel about you - and you’re going to have to trace your current shitty emotional and cognitive impulses back to a time before you were an intolerable human being.
Your rage is a manifestation of your sadness. You distrust others because of the emotional neglect you experienced as a child. You feel depressed due to a hateful view of the world, anxiety around intimacy, and insecurities. You need to address your rigid beliefs, false pride, and egotistical views in order to tolerate a world that is barely tolerating you. By facing your own hatred toward yourself, perhaps you can begin to be less callous toward others.
How to be less of an asshole
We are all hopefully working on our flaws and downfalls. Sometimes genetics makes us shitty humans and other times a shitty childhood forces us to create manifold systems and tools, which unfortunately do not help our older selves or the other adults who have the pleasure of coxisting with us. Lets improve personal tolerability by setting some goals.
Stop talking about other people.
If you want to get along with others, stop talking shit about them. This is not necessarily referring to gossip. Although, decreasing the spread of gossip has been proven to significantly benefit everyone, according to science. However, its an overly ambitious goal to restrain yourself from blasting that your frienemy had a restraining order filed on them after being caught attempting to make out with the neighbor's dog on the neighbor's Ring doorbell cam. Unless you’re the Dalai fucking Lama, you just have to post that shit along with a sassy emoji.
This goal is more about times you're sitting with a friend and talking about another friend. Specifically, talking about how this other friend isn't living up to their potential, supporting your opinion with all the things you believe they should fix, and concluding with how their life choices affects you emotionally. It's also about using a social gathering as a public forum to break down every element of why one of your friend's romantic life is a train wreck, being sure to cover each of their prior relationships since grade school, and then concluding with some unsolicited advice.
Even though your words emphasize concern and a strong desire to help, you are actually just being an asshole. Talking shit about people behind their backs and framing it as compassion and empathy helps create the illusion of being better person who leads a more rounded life. However, this behavior only accomplishes that - masking your own sad insecurities. In no way does it help your friend or make you a good person. If you really wanted to be a good person, you would just go help your friend.
Additional Note: if you’re thinking about only talking shit with your spouse or significant other, it still counts as being an asshole. It may be worse because you are reinforcing a toxic dynamic in your relationship and precipitating a lack of accountability and general negativity in the relationship. A couple that just talks shit about others now externalizes their personal AND shared issues onto other people instead of dealing with it like adults.
Advannced Practice: if you find yourself in a loop of criticism about someone else choices or behaviors, which do not actually involve you directly, reflect on why you're so fixated. Make a mental note. If someone else’s deficiencies are fascinating enough to consume your thoughts and concersations, it's likely an indication of subconscious aspects of your worldview or view of self. We all have plenty of on-going shitstorms in our lives to preoccupy our minds. When our minds rumate about someone else's life, theres meaning behind the madness, and meaning lies within the mind that is doing the ruminating.
Stop Hating People For Existing.
Let's be real, there are some people or things in the world who are or have universally irritating qualities. "A crying baby helps sooth my mind," said no one ever! No one gets off a flight that was delayed two hours and writes on the comment card how pleasant the flight was, especially when the delay occurred after the plane was already boarded and was waiting on the runway to take off so everyone was trapped on a giant stationary metal tube. These things may be objectively all bad, but it’s most certainly also libked to bitter judgment and lack of gratitude. Even writing the word gratitude in the same paragraph as the aforementioned scentios or the like is difficult; it feels witchy and annoying.
However, if you become semi-enraged while glancing at the overly affectionate, hipster couple with matching geometric calf-tattoos in the line at Starbucks, or hearing teenagers shout unfunny things to each other in a giant group while wearing idiotic clothing, or watching the woman in front of you at Ralph’s pay for her groceries with two years past due coupons rendering your “quick” dash for oat milk an endless and god-forsaken nightmare, perhaps you, too, are an asshole.
When we're quick to judge, it usually means we have a beautifully sophisticated set of tools that we use to make ourselves feel protected and good and righteous and worthy! Well done us! Except ... these tools are highly outdated. We are likely using these tools because we came from a deeply critical household where WE were deeply criticized, or from neglect around our core needs, or any host of issues from our fucked-up childhoods. There are perfectly reasonable explanations for why we are judgmental assholes. But understanding why you're a judgmental asshole doesn’t make you any less of one. And judging people is a little bit like that axiom about drinking the poison and waiting for the other person to die. It’s US who have to sit inside of all of this judgement and shittiness. And no matter what, it makes us assholes.
If you, too, recoiled at the word “gratitude,” you’re not alone. The writer of this article finds it to be a very difficult idea. But if you ask yourself to simply notice ONE thing a day that you really like or even love, your mind will actually begin to notice things you like or even love, rather than it seeking things you hate. Noticing things you love builds a bridge to a richer sense of yourself in the world. Read this Harvard shit if you don’t believe me.
Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself.
For some of you, the following advice might sound like what you already do. For the rest of you, the ones who describe yourselves proudly as “fiery” and “intense,” you are likely unafraid of conflict, and sometimes, you even seek it. We couch these characteristics in positive little wrappers and call ourselves “passionate!” and “unafraid of confrontation!” when in reality, we are all probably what science would call “emotionally flooded” and “reactive.”
I used to think that it was smart and strong to defend myself when I was wronged. Right there. Right in the moment. Fuck those people. No one gets to treat me shabbily. And it’s hard to argue otherwise if someone is objectively being cruel to you. And for many of us who have clawed our way out of feeling gaslit or diminished for most of our childhoods, it feels incredible, triumphant even, to be able to notice and distinguish when people are treating us poorly, and react with strength and boundaries.
But here’s what I’ve found. It’s better not to. Maybe not forever. But in the moment.
In the moment, there is a reason your good friend didn’t look up from their phone when you told them your huge news about work. There’s a reason your friend gave you a backhanded compliment on a day you looked impossibly chic. There’s a reason your partner made it all about him when you shared your revelation in therapy. And those reasons? They’re not about you. All of them are about them, and their limitations. And in the moment, firing back about how shitty they are typically brings out the worst in them (because look how shitty they were to even say it in the first place) and usually, reacting in that moment isn’t about defending yourself, it isn’t about lovingly drawing a boundary, it isn’t about making your side heard.
It’s about punishing them. Fiery, passionate, unafraid, confrontational, intense, whatever you want to call it, we are balls of combat, waiting for a partner. So, here’s what you do. Just wait a minute.
I have found that I’m 90% less stung the next day. I have also found that most of the situations work themselves out by the person coming to me to apologize, or showing their contrition in their own way. For the few that remain, I have now had enough time to realize what exactly felt bad, why it felt bad, and how to articulate it to truly help the person understand how it made me feel, not to make them feel just as bad.
This method helps to manage any “abreactions” we might have — these are our unconscious responses to current stimuli which may be attached to previous feelings or trauma. And none of this is to say that people treating us poorly is ok. It’s not ok. But if we cultivate in ourselves the choice to wait, and not instantly react, we give ourselves the gift of the bigger picture, and the gift of choice of how we want to deal with it.