Why do things bother us the way they do?
What are the psychological reasons behind the things that bother us as individuals both; socially acceptible negatives, as well as personal and individual negatives?
In reality are these things truly negative, or do you make them that way by enforcing them on, or sharing your opinions with others socially?
How influential are you with the arguments that support or defend your negatives?
If you look back over your life, where did these preferences/negatives stem from?
Who gave them to you?
Were they first done to you by someone else, or were they things you adopted to shadow or mimic someone else?
How flexible are you with losing or giving up the things that bother you?
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8 Answers
Dissonance. We don’t deal well with it.
If things didn’t bother us in the way they do, then they’d have to bother us in some other way.
As Emily Litella used to say on SNL (I still miss Gilda Radner), “It’s always something.”
That’s a good question; I don’t know. Of course I let a lot of stuff go, but I still wonder why something trivial like someone’s shitty grammar clicks in my head and just makes me think “It’s not a big deal, chill out…”.
Or when someone is talking loudly on a cell phone in public, there’s another click: “Why do they have to do that? They are perfectly capable of lowering their voice and still getting the message across.”
I’m aware of some stuff: when someone smacks their food, I think of how my mom used to do that and how much I hated it.
Most of the time it’s not the things in themselves, over which we have no influence or control, but the way we think about them. Sometimes we attach personal meaning to things that actually have nothing to do with us. Sometimes we see significance in things that in themselves have no meaning at all (such as weather or the location of inanimate objects). Always we have a desire to manage things that aren’t ours to manage.
Here’s a line I really like in a book I’m just about to finish reading (Prague, by Arthur Phillips, p. 188):
“By then, John understood that some things mattered and some things did not and that the happy people in this world were those who could easily and rapidly distinguish between the two. The term unhappiness referred to the feeling of taking the wrong things seriously.”
I have to think about it some more before I’m sure if I agree, but it is at least worth thinking about.
We can learn to think differently and thus free ourselves of an awful lot of misery.
Because we allow it.
Even if these things were “given to you”, you still had to accept them.
Very true Jeruba. I like that quote.
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