We give people too much credit sometimes.
Think about the five worst decisions you ever made – the ones that turned out to have the most disastrous consequences in your life. Chances are good that the majority of those decisions weren’t made with a clear head. You made poor decisions because you were exhausted, stressed, drunk, scared, angry, or any number of other things. Of those five decisions, you’d be lucky if one of them was something you could honestly say you’d do again with a clear head and twelve hours to reconsider.
Okay, now think about the last time someone else made a decision that negatively impacted you. The last time someone fired you, or didn’t buy that big sale you were pushing, or broke your heart, or whatever. My guess is that you think they made that decision with a perfectly firm heart and sober head. They calculated the best possible way to hurt you and did it with exactly that intent, right?
Look, people are just bad at… most things, most days. We’re all drunk toddlers waving around swords most of the time. Carrying grudges around because of that will just make you make even worse decisions.
Our whole lives, we have people in authority over us. We grow up with parents, teachers, bosses, all of whom we believe must – by default – be infallible. After all, they couldn’t be in charge of us if there were simply random stimulus-response machines, right? That would be insane! Who would allow that?!
The entire system of barely-functioning stimulus-response machines, that’s who.
At a certain point in your life, I think the point where you truly become an adult, you realize that your parents were just people, trying their best with no clue what they were doing. Your first boss at the ice cream store when you were 15 was probably younger than you are now – heck, they might have been all of 17. The first person who ever fired you might have just gotten divorced that day, but they couldn’t exactly call you up the week after and say that and offer you your job back in most cases. The world makes us double down on our own stupidity, lest we become the scapegoat everyone else is secretly hoping for.
The solution is simple, but not easy. You insulate yourself as best as you can against the failings of others. You rely on yourself for the important things, like wisdom and security. You don’t trust your entire family’s continued survival on whether or not your over-stressed boss holds it together for another day. You don’t place your entire self-image in the hands of a partner who doesn’t know how to change a tire. You don’t believe that your children’s education will be perfectly shepherded by a 22-year-old C student who yes, is absolutely trying their best, but that’s not really the issue.
The point isn’t to be an isolationist. Other people can be wonderful additions to your life. You will sometimes have bosses, hopefully have partners, maybe have children who will maybe have teachers, and all of these things can be amazing. Neighbors and friends and lovers and colleagues and fans and heroes are all part of the rich tapestry of life. But none of those people should hold more sway over your life’s outcomes than you. And that’s largely up to you – people gain that influence over our lives because we give it to them. Because we think there’s benefit to outsourcing that agency.
But on their best day, I doubt it.
The Opportunity Machine 