Psychology | The passive aggressive patron

“Why are you always here?”

Tom X Hart
Sep 1, 2018 · 2 min read

The person who says to you “you’re always here” in a cafe is projecting their own disturbance that your presence causes by making them aware that they are are always at the cafe. They must be at the cafe as often or almost as often as you to know how often you are at the cafe. They, if they are very discontent with their lives, cannot stand to be reminded that they are always at the cafe – an action that they think is slothful or wrong. They must, therefore, attack the person who reminds them of their own despised actions. The statement “you’re always here” is actually a statement that demands you no longer exist, since you are an affront to their own guilty conscience.

Whether or not you are actually doing worthwhile work is besides the point, since they cannot conceive that it is possible to work with the mind. For them, the cafe is always an empty pleasure and something to feel guilty about.

The implications go deeper than this. A good portion of mankind cannot grasp that mental effort is as strenuous, if not more so, than physical effort. If you are not “looking busy” by working in an office doing make work or causing sweat to form on your brow then you are regarded as not “doing anything”. This idea has been at the root of anti-Semitism and socialism. It is the idea that understanding when to sell stock or buy a house or solve an equation is not “real work”, because it is not work that causes sweat to form on your brow and not the busy work of office life. In this way, envy forms and from envy comes hatred, which is the desire for a person or object not to exist.

Put simply, mankind despises intelligence and wishes to destroy it.

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