Several months ago, a friend came up to me and said, “Hey, you know how you’re always writing about boundaries and stuff like that? I don’t really get what you’re talking about. That’s never come up in my life.” And I wasn’t surprised, because this friend has great boundaries and is one of my boundary role models, so boundary situations don’t come up very much in his life, and when they do, he doesn’t notice that’s what they are because he has healthy instincts and just, you know, sets boundaries and goes on with his life.
I remembered this conversation when I read the post The Asshole Filter, which is about how you can go about unconsciously arranging your life so you end up dealing with assholes a lot, even when you’re not an asshole yourself. (Warning: that post is yellow font on a purple background and causes my eyes some pain. It may or may not also cause your eyes pain. But it is super interesting.) Anyway, the post is mostly in the context of accidentally developing an asshole filter in an organizational context, but a lot of it is also true in an interpersonal context.
So, here is one way to unconsciously develop an asshole filter in your personal life:
You start out with poor skills at setting and enforcing personal boundaries, probably because your home life as a child was kind of dysfunctional.
Then, as an adult, you meet a random bunch of people. Some of these people are mostly great. Some of these people are mostly assholes. You might be starting out with a few assholes from childhood as well.
What happens next? Well, the assholes will be thrilled to know you. Meanwhile, some of the great people aren’t going to end up being very close to you because the fact you can’t set boundaries makes them uncomfortable. Others of the great people are going to watch you not dealing effectively with the assholes, and this is going to train them into acting more like assholes to you too, because they’re going to think that kind of behavior doesn’t bother you. Also, a lot of people are pretty great overall…except when they’re not met with firm boundaries, in which case everything gets really messy instead. (When boundaries aren’t clear, mess tends to result, even if all people involved are otherwise amazing.)
Finally, dealing with assholes takes up a lot of time and energy. A LOT. So you end up being exhausted all the time, and therefore you aren’t putting that time and energy into your relationships with the great people, because they don’t need that much maintenance, so they gradually drift away. And you become more and more tired, even while you keep making excuses for the bad behavior that seems to be becoming more prevalent and thinking that if you could only be more patient or more kind or more understanding or more [fill in the blank here], everything would improve drastically.
At some point, you maybe stop and look around you and realize your situation is really unfortunate. You might even realize the whole “it’s always all my fault and everything in the world is my responsibility” thing isn’t ever going to bear fruit. But at this point you are incredibly tired, and it kind of seems like everyone in the whole world sucks, or at the very least takes an awful lot of energy to deal with. All you want is to be less tired all of the time.
So then, acting in self-preservation, perhaps you begin to isolate yourself. Which, unfortunately, makes complete sense given the faulty assumptions the data seems to imply but is actually a terrible idea. Because then you are cutting off ways of ever figuring out that actually, there are some really great people out there. All you can see, at this point, are the assholes.
Dark night of the soul time.
Then, if you’re really lucky, the writing community steps up and shows you incontrovertible evidence that not everyone is an asshole. People are unexpectedly kind to you. You start working as hard as you can on learning how to set and enforce boundaries and begin building a community of people who care about you and are good for you.
And then your asshole filter starts working in the opposite direction, and life is infinitely better.
No assholes beyond this point. (Photo Credit: derekbruff via Compfight cc)
The Practical Free Spirit 