Don’t be an asshole to strangers, an essay by Paul Carreo
This has been stewing for a while. It’s a stew of anger, contempt, and entitlement packed into a dutch oven, swirling together in its own rich sauce. It’s a stew approaching a point beyond infused blended flavor, into something inedible, something rank. It’s a point of no return, where I descend into that salty curmudgeon of an old man, walking shaky, grimaced and fist balled at those irreverent kids all around me. It’s the worrying unpleasant manifestation of my worst petulant self, defiant to everything wrong with my life and the society around me. It’s my calcification into being an asshole to strangers. It’s someone I don’t wish to be.
I want to change, I desire it deeply. Cut the head off this one dragon before it grows into a hydra. I walk around Dublin in my self-reflective haze. I think about times before in this city, in many other cities across Europe, across the world; trodding about and stewing in my own muck. And I have a vague sense of when it began, not pinpointed, just a feeling. A slow creeping fog of being bothered, and the addictive grip of wanting to be bothered, wanting to maintain and validate the compulsion. Reinforcing it and looking wildly for the confirmation clues that infect me like dark radioactive material.
Those kids shouldn’t be doing that. Those drunk ladies on their hen party look appalling and are acting obnoxious. That woman looks like a miserable cunt. This guy is about to cut me off in line. This neighborhood is disgusting. And then the extrapolations start. Those kids are everything wrong about bad parents and lazy teachers (and it’s only getting worse). That hen party is everything wrong with fashion, consumerism and a social media driven self-absorption. This woman needs to be put in her place. This guy is my competition, stiffen up and edge him out! This neighborhood is a sign of the housing crisis and the greed of man that makes my life difficult. Arghhh, bark, growl!!
Too many voices in my head, too many triggers that disrupt my calm. My stroll, my vacation, my chance for self-reflection and peace of mind… spoiled. What’s more, I was beginning to make my identity wrapped in this entitled notion that it was my right, no, my duty, my whole reason for being to march around and teach strangers some manners. One city wander at a time, one passive aggressive comment at a time. That will put everyone in their place, right? That’s what will balm my inflamed ego. Except it doesn’t. Counterintuitively, it only makes the world around me uglier and my calm further out of reach. It’s all total bullshit and it needs to stop.
So I try a new tactic. I make a choice. I decide to let everything play out and smile at it. I allow everyone their lane, and I offer no judgment. When I feel myself tense up with an observation, or a sneer, I diffuse it with a smile as if I just saw something wonderfully unique I may never see again. I focus hard to ensure I’m not just smiling with false bravado, but as a gentle reminder that this intrusion can not hurt me. Chuckling quietly also seems to work, so long as I’m not allowing someone to feel disrespected. That only serves my own ego and is a ploy for dominance over others. Let that go. After all, there is a delicious delight to be had in absurdism, if I keep an eye out for the comedy playing out all around us. Here is where I realize no one can rob my peace because it comes from a place of emergent self-esteem. And that state is no man’s charter but my own.
This won’t be easy to maintain, emotions get heated, people get ugly. People can rob me of my time or make things more difficult. There are reminders of a broken system and chaos all around me, I don’t have to bury my head in the sand over that. But it doesn’t have to steal my peace. Push past me in line and make me late, fine. Be a terrible person in your own life, that’s your choice isn’t it. Remind me of the starving children in Africa, it’s terrible, yes. And if you’re genuinely being an asshole to me, I’ll let you feel like ‘the big man’. It is absolutely no skin off me. I’ll smile and soldier on with my own prerogatives. I’ll give myself 15 minutes extra time to get to where I’m going. I’ll assume good intent with someone having a bad day. I’ll moderate my expectations for what I think the world ‘owes me’. I’ll save up more gratitude for when special moments and kind people emerge. And you know what? Not only will I appreciate these fragile rare bits more gleefully when they occur, I will lay a bet that through my actions I attract more of them.
Yesterday, I had a good run of testing this out with success. I noticed plenty of triggers around me, walking the rainy streets of Dublin on Easter Sunday. I smiled at a grim neighborhood, because it didn’t affect me. I apologized to a diagonal walker staggering and blocking my path, as I patiently waited then passed. I cheered ‘Happy Easter’ to a grimaced old man blowing vape mist in front of me, because he looked like he needed some cheer. I chuckled a little at his confused expression as I bounced along out of his life. I protected my calm with forgiveness over contempt. I can’t promise or foresee how this tactic will grow, and I’m sure I’ll need more tools to keep it intact. Many feelings in this life like happiness are fleeting and that’s OK. It makes them beautiful, it gives them grace. But my calm is my totem, something to protect and dote on. And my peace of mind is my gardenhouse to foster, more than a feeling, it might just be the powercell of the identity I desire.
In the spirit of an epilogue and quite serendipitously, this morning I brewed my coffee while listening to Nick Offerman’s book ‘Paddle Your Own Canoe’. I can’t say I’m a big fan, and he’s beginning to prattle on into conservative rants, and not always as an ironic ode to his fictional Ron Swanson (Parks and Rec) persona. But I love comedians, especially the ones who seem dedicated to a disciplined and deliberate writing habit, so I soldier on. And there it was, the chapter that made the whole book worth it, entitled ‘Don’t be an asshole’. Just one day after the revelation you see me write above, he perfectly articulates what I was trying to formulate and evolve towards, at a time I needed to hear it reinforced. He goes through a brief empathetic reminder of why, as homo sapiens, we’re inclined to be assholes, and what traps and triggers we’ve been boxed into and how we backlash, suppressed by necessary laws and norms. He then talks about his own conclusion and offers it as advice. It can be paraphrased as such:
“Just be cool, don’t be an asshole. You will encounter tests everyday, you can serve yourself or you can serve others. A technique I’ve found you can use to make your life more delicious: ‘Let others go first’. The calmer I become, the more I enjoy my day, the more others enjoy me. And Christ almighty does my mood improve” – Nick Offerman
Paul Carreo 