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There are people in this world I thought I hated. And not "people" like some faceless infamous figures out there in the milieu who I'll never meet. I mean people I know personally. They weren't my people. The phrase "to each their own" affords us the freedom to put most incompatible people out of our minds forever. And while the live and let live philosophy fell out of fashion with the proliferation of social media, I still use it as often as I can to keep my priorities in order and my sanity on the level. It's therefore striking to discover that despite such a magnanimous outlook, in practice I'm still capable of such deep disdain. But a recent epiphany revealed a healthier, less stressful, and more productive alternative.
We spend our entire lives judging everything. We differentiate right from wrong, good from bad, healthy from unhealthy, and safe from dangerous, and we bucket everything into neat categories to use as a shorthand reference when our brains are too busy to recall the details. It's no surprise we also apply this to the people we meet. Coupling the knowledge and experience ruminating away in our subconscious, we look someone in the eye, shake their hand, and make an assessment. Every time we interact with this person after our initial meeting, we update our log file with new details about their attitude, behavior, moral compass, intelligence, and dozens of other factors to determine if they still belong in their current category.
Our specific temperament determines how broad the spectrum of our categorization is. For example, I would consider myself on the agreeable side. I tend to see people in a positive light and I fight the urge to hold grudges. Yay for me. So the names of the buckets in which I categorize people go something like:
Adore them
⬇
Love them
⬇
Like them
⬇
I feel nothing for this person
⬇
Tolerate them
⬇
I hope they go away soon
Contrast this with someone a lot more fiery, neurotic, and disagreeable and you may get:
Love them
⬇
Like them
⬇
Tolerate them
⬇
They're out to get me
⬇
Want to punch
⬇
Have to punch
⬇
If it takes until my dying breath, I will do everything in my power, summoning every ounce of dark energy in the galaxy, to guarantee they suffer
Tossing even more variability into the ring, the criteria we assign to move people between categories can be as irrational as the human condition itself. So I started employing a strategy to mitigate these effects.
Instead of lumping a person's details all together and dropping the whole person in a category, I've started trying to abstract the person up a level so I can nest their details in their own categories. The stress usually associated with interacting with certain people is caused by them being placed, as a whole, into one of my negative categories. But putting only our disagreements in those categories leaves open the possibility of finding common ground. This is especially useful as it pertains to coworkers or otherwise necessary collaborators. If we meet someone once or twice and they turn out to be a jerk, then by all means we can put them in Want To Punch and leave them there. But when interacting with people on a regular basis, this alternate strategy allows us to compartmentalize our negative perceptions about them, thus allowing us to stomach the idea of cooperating.
To think, all this time I could have just been hating people's vague incompetence and not their entire guts. Who knew?