You care way too much about how you look; I can help. You look stupid! If you are consoling yourself with the idea that you are at least intelligent, we both know you are dumb as an algae-infested rock! Talking about rocks: MEN ROCK!
That’s the quickest I have traversed the whole spectrum of douchebaggery. If any of the things I said actually pissed you off, this post is for you. And you probably deserve all the shit I said.
How much you value your time, your life comes down to the kind of things that piss you off. If some random-ass blog on the internet manages to irate you and makes you want to punch a wall, you may seriously need to re-evaluate your life.
What pisses you off says more about you and how much you value your life than most other things. And how you get pissed off says if, it – your time/life – or your idea of it, is even worth anything to you.
One way to find the grand purpose is to stare at your navel and remove lint. There’s no proof that that works, yet. Another way is to actually do something and try things. And in the process find better things to be pissed about. That’s what brings understanding. Empathy is not shared sadness. It’s a shared understanding.
Being pissed off often gets masked under critique. The internet’s definition of critique is someone who leaves asinine comments through which the person leaving the comment displays the very bone-headed assolery he accuses the other person of. Think writing workshop meets alcoholics anonymous.
It’s normal for you to be pissed with a statement like “men rock” (and if that didn’t piss you off a little, what the heck, man?) A statement like that screams idiot alert, proceed with caution. But, what’s not normal is you proceeding with your own misguided beliefs, ignoring all signs.
It’s going radical and rage-y about something so inane because the lens through which you see everything is gender inequity (or whatever school of polarization you subscribe to).
Your burning rage at shallow crap is going to be the greatest detriment for the very movement you back. Because you aren’t rallying behind a cause as much as finding an outlet through which you can express anger so you can feel you are actually doing something with your life so you don’t have to confront the fact that you, in fact, aren’t. Your righteousness is your ignorance.
Here’s another example. Relationships. If the things that still make you mad include the other person not answering your call the first time, his/her punctuality, forgetting some unimportant shit that you consider important because you need a reason to be pissed today – if these things are still the things that piss you off, there’s a high likelihood that every relationship you get into will suck. In the time between you spreading gender stereotypes and jumping into another relationship and hoping at least the new person will appreciate your minimalistic hygiene standards, you may want to ask yourself a question that could improve the prospect of all your relationships: what are the things that piss you off and do any of them still make any damn sense? If you are married, put that on your fridge.
Becoming pissed cowers behind statements like, “little things matter”, “this is how it all starts” and the like. But few of us are mature enough to handle the “little things” without turning it into a big deal. And few of us are perceptive enough to understand the difference between little and insignificant, between love and the need to be loved. In being pissed with little things, we only end up becoming small and petty ourselves.
But most people did not have a chance to hack away at each other just because they held differing opinions. They had more important things to take care of. Not anymore. Now, we have the time. We have arrived at this moronic ideal where being pissed-off equates to intelligence. Being pissed, more often, is an over-compensation for your stupidity.
Most things that piss you off are things you tried changing about yourself and failed. So when you see that unchanging quality show up in others, there’s a part of you that can’t handle it. That is the modern idea of improvement. Where the act of being pissed off makes you feel you are somehow better than everyone else.
Anger is a useful emotion. It’s important to get pissed off. A lot of incredible stuff – art, radical change, revived hope – happened because someone was pissed and decided to do something about it. But it took enormous understanding along the way.
The noise has led us into a tunnel. We believe the problem is we don’t listen. But, really, it’s that our understanding has been short-circuited by all the instant information, the speedy train to run over people’s opinions. Information customized for our pissoffery. The noise has become a hope. You forget you are in the tunnel, too.
It’s never been more important to re-prioritize and throw out the stuff that pisses you off to make way for some useful things to be pissed about. Or as the internet version of that self-realization goes: “If you run into an idiot in the day, you ran into an idiot. If you run into idiots all day, you’re the idiot.”
Your idiocy is your only salvation. Now, go yell at a tree.
Meditations 