Loud fucking people
Some people are just fucking loud. I’m sitting here in Starbucks and some jackass old man across the room is yapping so fucking loud. It’s as if he’s shouting and the entire fucking room can hear him yapping about some inane topic.
So loud people: are you oblivious to how loud and obnoxious you are? Do you just not give a shit?
I consider people who do this to be trashy, stupid, and obnoxious. Same category of people who FaceTime and watch YouTube and talk on their speakerphones in public places. I have contempt for every single one of you, and I will take every opportunity to be just as rude & inconsiderate to you as you are to everybody around you constantly.
I was once like you. I would feel super frustrated by people I found slovenly or boisterous or vapid. I was fortunate to fall into a meditation group where we did a bunch of different things, but the one that got me was sitting in silence in a dark room in a circle of people for 10 minutes.
I found myself feeling frustrated at the way someone was breathing, or with how loud the AC was, or with something I could hear happening outside the building, but then whoever was leading would remind us to bring our awareness back to our breath, or to an image in our mind, and all the frustration started to melt away. With practice, I realized the only thing making me frustrated was me. All of those things happening around me were inherently impersonal, but I had been taking them personally.
Whether or not you’re in a position today to consider this, I hope you come back to it, because feeling frustrated all the time is exhausting, and there are better ways to be.
good post. I get the whole taking impersonal things personally. I truly do, but can we agree that sometimes… the universe just seems misaligned against you. like timing of small things that you know lead to inconvenience later on. getting caught at a long light when running late, etc. it just feeeeeels ok to be mad at those things happening to a personal being.
one Monday morning, I went to open my car to go to work. the handle broke off. I was mad so I slapped the top of my car and kinda banged my head down a bit. the head down bit caught the car on way down, chipping my tooth.
This was in the span of like 10 seconds.
It’s absolutely ok to feel frustrated. What I’m describing is what you do with that feeling, how you react to it. One option is ruminating on it and lashing out at others, as per this post. Another option is recognizing the emotion, accepting it for what it is, and then moving forward.
I should emphasize that this is a practice, and no one ever will be on their A game 100% of the time. There are always going to be times when someone acts instinctually on emotion and maybe does something destructive. After the fact, it’s again about recognizing what happened, accepting it, forgiving yourself, and moving forward.