Nothing shocks me but electricity

We live in a puritanical society where everyone is offended over irrelevancies.

And it’s not a passive habit, either. People are vigilantly on the lookout for something to be slighted by. Always looking around every corner for what the world is doing to them, rather than doing for them.

Hell, some people are offended when others are not offended by what they’re offended about. It’s the infinite regression of fragility.

Lukianoff explains in his timely book about the coddling of our minds that many of these claims about injustice are usually cognitive distortions. It’s actually not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.

Shakespeare’s words are fitting here, for there is nothing either good or bad but our thinking that makes it so.

Imagine someone at your office lashes out at you, claiming to be offended by your words. Their feelings are valid and real, but it’s also possible that they simply disagree with you.

Something else to consider is, people who claim to be offended are often putting on a show for the tribe. It’s quite possible they feel that they have to act offended, so that they’re not judged along with you for saying what you said and excommunicated from the group.

Here’s the final thing.

Just because someone feels they are offended, doesn’t make them right. They simply have an opinion, as do you, which is extremely subjective and not sufficient evidence of absolute truth.

In sum, we all need to chill the hell out and learn to take a more generous view of other people.

Because that’s what we would want them to do for us.

That means searching for nuance in their behavior before grabbing a pitchfork and taking to the streets.

That means assuming the best of other people because we probably lack full context.

That means seeing everyone as good until proven otherwise, in the hopes that our belief will encourage them reveal their better selves.

That means trusting that what people are saying is not designed to personally torture you.

That means respecting people’s choices and opinions their own prerogative and not a personal affront to our way of doing things.

Setting these kinds of boundaries is extremely difficult. It requires restraint, compassion, curiosity and imagination, which is probably why it’s so rare. Not being offended is a lot of work.

My first boss at my first job used to have a great mantra that comes to mind:

Nothing shocks me but electricity.

He actually died from a lightning strike, but hey, we all make mistakes in life.

In a world where there always seems to be plenty to be offended about, let’s not make things harder on ourselves than they already are. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What if the fact that someone offended you is part of the point they’re trying to make?