Categories: uncategorized
Date: 05 June 2009 12:38:42
I realized I had a choice. I've been reading a lot of self-help books lately to avoid feeling too helpless, and some are helpful and some are hopeless. And some I haven't been able to categorize; I simply can't work out if they're useful or not, or bogus or not. Anyway, one of these seemed to say, and I need to emphasize my role in interpreting it because this is almost certainly not what it said, that if you set high standards for yourself you are likely to set high standards for others, and be constantly disappointed. So far so plausible. But, consequently, it argued, if you try to be gentle to people then you are apt to get frustrated when people are not gentle to you, and if you try not to annoy people then you will be annoyed when others annoy you. As I distilled this down in mind it seemed that I have a choice: to annoy or to be annoyed, to be brutal or to be brutalized. And I still can't work out if I accept that assessment of the world.