Responding to Pettiness with Kindness is Stupid, Don’t be stupid.
I lost a friend yesterday. To be honest, I considered him an acquaintance at best, and regarded him a nuisance most of the time. This fairly uninteresting person (to everyone but himself) has lived off hand outs from wealthy patrons and snarky commentary about everyone who bothered to address his narcissism and frankly self destructive behavior.
While I think humans are stupid, I also believe until a person’s actions validate your thoughts and impressions of them, they are simply that, thoughts and impressions. So precluding a person for behavior they haven’t exhibited yet makes you ignorant, and I’m not trying to be that either. Plus I’m a fairly accommodating person. So I generally kept my distance and made his acquaintance when the occasion called for it.
This person is an avatar for a lot of young Nigerians whose lives oscillate around Lagos’s ‘highbrow’ towns, still firmly attached to a parent/patron’s tit, coddled from the terrifying poverty that drives everyone else and insulated from the consequences of their actions. And my, do these people do a lot of stupid things. Stupid things they are never called out on, because that is the way the millennial social scene works. Person A does stupid petty shit, person B responds with either kindness or pettiness or does nothing and instead talks behind person A’s back. It is a pointless tiring cycle and I am done with it.
Back to this person, yesterday he, I and a mutual acquaintance were having a talk and joking around. The conversation turned to slightly barbed jokes about their personal lives, and this person under the cloak of humor said something very damning. It was a direct attack on our mutual acquaintance, vicious enough that the both of us stopped joking. Now this person has a long history of using pettiness as a tool to win arguments and prove himself superior, and he has burned quite a few bridges this way. Coupled with a oedipal need to curry favor by claiming victimhood and a congenital inability to let another person finish a thought before he tries to insert his own often unrelated ‘experience’ and turn the discussion back to himself, many times before I have had to step away from discussions with him so I wouldn’t give in to the urge to repeatedly punch him in the throat.
Normally I would let this slide, or volley back an even more petty insult, but instead I decided to do something I practice with Imobong, I addressed the slight. I pointed out plainly, how said person’s statement, however humorous, was also quite malicious, so much so we could tell the difference. In response to my candor, he flailed, trying to attack the logic of my point, to hide under the cloak of ‘we were joking, how dare you take offense?’. I didn’t care at this point. I repeated, emphatically that while I didn’t expect contrition from him, I was going to make sure he understood what exactly he did. Before long, he went from flailing to insults, then he ordered me to shut up, or he would end our friendship and never speak to me again. To which I said:
Our friendship summarily dissolved, he went full monty, insulting my appearance and my life. The usual high-school petulance. But the speed with which it all came out of him, told me two things; he had said those things about me to people in my absence; he would burn bridges rather than accept that he was caught in a moment of unprovoked pettiness.
He also dissolved his friendship with our mutual acquaintance, while screaming about his ‘heart being broken’ by our ‘betrayal’, more juvenile theatrics.
But that is also by the way. This is what I learnt from that whole episode.
Responding to deliberate pettiness, or negative behavior from people you actually care about with benevolent silence solves nothing. It doesn’t make you a better person, it merely gilds your high horse, so you can look down, all glittering with benevolence, because you were the ‘bigger’ person. It denies the person the chance for growth/redemption (in the off-chance they were being ignorant) and you the chance to forge a better friendship with them. That’s stupid.
Descending to pettiness in response to pettiness has its own place and time, and when the time is right, go all the way out and be deliciously evil. Some bridges are meant to be burnt. But otherwise, it is stupid too.
What isn’t, is calmly addressing slight, from a place of measured empathy. Communicating your feelings will often help you identify your own prejudices and keep you and the people who surround you accountable. Too much pettiness goes on in our social circles because we never say anything. You might(will) lose friends, but the ones who remain will be people who will keep you and your happiness a priority. And better that, than frenemies.
To quote my fave Olutimehin in this article, https://medium.com/athena-talks/i-didnt-get-raped-someone-chose-to-rape-me-ca32ef7f89bd#.gfrgvxtjw
I have nothing to lose by speaking up when someone is harming me. If they truly care about me, they will listen and adjust their position. If they don’t, they don’t truly care about me and I’m better off alienating them by insisting on being treated well.
Nuff said.
