How to avoid getting offended

​I apologize for the length of this post, but a summary is provided at the bottom for you if you feel too lazy to read it all.

Everybody is getting offended, all the time. People will take a seemingly insignificant remark as a personal insult. Of course we don’t want to lie, but it seems like we have to have a Master’s Degree in Tact just to avoid being hated by a large group of people. It’s very annoying.

Now, there isn’t really isn’t a lot we can do to make people quit walking around with their feeling on their backs, just waiting for someone to touch them. But, we can always try to avoid getting offended ourselves. However, this is this can be quite hard. We need to get a solid understanding of the reason we get offended, and some practical ways to avoid getting offended.

So often, the reason we get offended is simple: the other person said something that makes us feel less important or intelligent, or insults our beliefs, they said that our high view of ourselves is wrong; they hurt our pride. Look, pride is bad.

Okay, moving on: many times we get offended when some ignorant person insults us. They were simply trying to make us look bad and them look good. And, usually, they were wrong. And even if they are right, it usually is about some insignificant detail, or, they themselves have the same attribute (I once had a nerd dismiss me as being a nerd. I mean, “Really?”).

But not always. Sometimes the other person points out something very true about us. Something personal, something embarrassing: a past mistake, a current area of failure. And we know they are right. And we think about how mean it was of them to point it out, especially considering their only reason for doing so was to make us look and feel inferior.

But, regardless of their motives, the rules of logic tell us that one fact remains: Their remark was either true, or it was false. Maybe part of it was true and part of it was false. Just break up the statement above and then apply the rule above.

So, this now lead me to my philosophy of avoiding getting offended: If a remark is false, then there is no reason to waste time pondering it, but if it is true, then we need to deal with it.

So, if someone says to you, “you’re just a country kid, I bet you don’t even know what the internet is”, then you don’t need to waste time thinking about it. If you are a country kid, so what? Living in the part of the U.S. where you can actually see a sunset is not inherently bad. And the fact that you are reading this blog post shows the second part of the statement is false. So, if you you know the insult is false (because you have a solid response to the remark) then forget it. Don’t waste your time thinking about it - unless you want to think up some cool one-liner comebacks.

But, on the other hand, if their remark was true, then you need to decide what to do. If someone told me I had a grammatical error on this blog post (not altogether impossible), I would not sit and sob about how they are so inconsiderate of my hard work to write it, I would fix the error. I might even thank them for helping me out (I mean, better one person sees it, and I fix it, then everyone who ever reads the post sees it).

On the other hand, if someone told me “Your basketball skills are trash”, then I would just agree with them - because my basketball skills are trash! (I score about 1/10 free throws). Now, if I cared about basketball, then I would practice until I was decent. But I don’t want to be a pro basketball player, I just play some with friends, so I am not going to invest hours of time to practice a skill I don’t plan to use a lot.

In summary: (Hello all you lazy people who skipped straight to here!) Usually, we get offended because someone hurt our pride. Pride is bad. And this is my philosophy for preventing getting offended: An insult is either false, and so we should ignore it, or it is true, and we should either fix it or accept the fact that we are limited in that way. Treat insults as constructive criticism. Getting offended is a waste of time and energy.

P.S. If you want me to add something to this post about a specific circumstance, or if you think this post is a bunch of nonsense, please tell me. I will try not to get offended ;)