Ridiculous Opinions #239
Oh, hello everyone!
It's been a busy couple of weeks. Trying to finish everything up before we left to take students to London, being in London, then dealing with the aftermath of being in London (both Tracey and I have been sick this week), have all kept me needlessly incapacitated on a day-to-day basis. Now, it is the weekend and I am beginning to get my act together to start functioning as a human being. And all of this after rampaging through the school yesterday, writing snotty emails, shooting off scowling looks, and refusing to put up with anyone's crap.
I am an interesting piece of work at the moment.
The older I get, the less inclined I am to put up with nonsense. An example: I was on the plane back from London the other day. The seats were staggered and as I was sitting there, I smelled something. I looked to my left and this DJ-looking guy has his shoes off. He feet stunk and he was sitting there with his feet perfectly parallel to me, emanating a radioactive, doughy smell that made me want to vomit.
I seethed and ignored it for a bit. Eventually, the smell dissipated and I could function without short-circuiting with anger. At one point, he put his shoes back on to go to the bathroom, but when he came back, he pulled them off again and the smell returned.
The Randy of ten years ago would have quietly been angry and not said anything. Fifty-year old Randy will not. I turned to him and said, "I'm sorry, but could you do me a favor? Could you put your shoes back on?"
He looked at me, absolutely incredulous. "My feet are clean," he said with a lilting Irish accent. He had on a designer jacket and his hair was in a ponytail, with a very prominent earring in his right ear.
I said, "Look, it makes me really uncomfortable to ask you this."
He said, again, "But my feet are clean."
I said, "Maybe it's your shoes."
"My shoes are new."
I looked him in the eye and said, "You know, it's really uncomfortable to ask you this." and that was that. He put his shoes back on.
But the GALL of the guy. Taking off his shoes on the friggin' plane? Does he not realize that other people exist? What in the world makes him think that's okay?
Post-Covid, we seem to have moved into a phase of cutting corners and operating solely for ourselves. There's a certain abandonment of any pretense of working for the good of the community anymore or any sense of empathy for other human beings.
This is a bit of a Donald Trump effect. Trump achieved power on a platform that said, "Hey, it's okay for you to only care about yourself! I do! You should, too!" And a large portion of the country (and the world, really) sat back and said, Hey, he's RIGHT! What's in it for ME? and they ran with it.
So now, we have jerks like that guy on the plane taking off his shoes. We have people who don't signal when they change lanes (Sociopaths, folks. Sociopaths). And you get people at work who operate with a "don't seek permission; ask forgiveness later" approach at work. I'm getting a LOT of that as of late.
It's weird. This all came to head yesterday afternoon, as I was reading Dave Pell's Nextdraft newsletter. I've been a Nextdraft subscriber for almost ten years now. Basically, he posts daily links to news stories throughout the course of the week. It's a great way to go a bit more in-depth in terms of news and seek out things that I might have missed.
But Wednesday's newsletter was a bit too much for me. You can read it here. As I read through all of the news stories in that particular issue, all I saw was how crappy the world has become because of this "me-first" attitude. Every single horrible news story that he linked to has its roots in a "me first" mentality that has poisoned this world. I could barely handle my anger as I was reading through all of it.
So, I'm going to change my approach.
I'm not putting up with people's nonsense anymore. Life's too short. If you're going to act in a selfish way, then I'm going to tell you. If you are lying to me and I know it, I'm going to tell you. And if you have wronged me in any way, shape, or form, then I'm putting you on a little list, categorizing you in an "unfavorable" section of my little black book and never giving you the benefit of the doubt again.
My approach to life right now is this: If you're not doing something to benefit the community, you no longer exist.
And this will cause people to cluck their tongues as I walk past them. This will cause people to huddle in corners and say, This guy is a jerk. This will cause people to not want me to be involved.
Good.
We have to think as a collective. We have to think of other people. We have to work for the community good. We have to seek to lift EVERYONE, not just ourselves. I will not be perfect at it, but I will try.
The funny part of this email is that I originally intended this to be a more positive offshoot of why I felt this way. I have spent the week in my idea journal coming up with ideas for businesses that I could create. In all honestly, I've come up with some pretty good ones that were tailored to what I, as a human being, was capable of doing! You would have enjoyed them!
But I think I'll save that email for next week, when I'm feeling a little less salty; a little less angry; a little less like the kind of person who could write a gargantuan newsletter about how pissed off I am at the world around me.
So if you want the fun stuff, come back next week. And if you get pissed off at me over the next couple of months, then ask yourself, Why would Randall be pissed off at me? What have I done that benefits ONLY ME that would make him mad?
Am I the asshole?
And you can rest easy, knowing that I have put your name down in my ledger in a category that says, Forgive, but don't forget.
Ciao, suckers!
