Other people

Good morning, God, and thank you much for this new day.  As I write, it's dark and cold outside, but here in the house we have heat and light to keep us comfortable and allow us to be up so early on such a day.  I do want to thank you for the things that allow us to live our lives in comfort and relative ease--had we been born into a time period in the past, we would have experienced life with very few of these things.

Today I'd like to ask you about the role of other people in our lives.  This perplexes me, because no matter how hard I try to be positive, no matter how hard I try to accomplish things and contribute to organizations and groups, someone always seems to sabotage my efforts, in any of a multitude of ways.  It's important, I know, to go into life with a good attitude and to do our best at all we do, but it's very hard to do this when there are so many people who seem to be doing their best to bring other people down.  We seem to be at the mercy of other people's whims, other people's likes and dislikes, other people's moods.

And when these other people are in positions of influence over us--bosses, supervisors, teachers, parents--they can really make our situations difficult.  Even if they're on the same level we are--colleagues, fellow students, friends, acquaintances--they can make things difficult for us, too.

Of course, there are those people who try to lift up, encourage, strengthen, and brighten.  They seem to be rather few and far between, though.  I think that I would like to be this kind of person, but I'm not sure I have it in me to be.  I try, but I don't think that I succeed all that often.  And I don't want to be one of those people who are "false enthusiastic," who say how wonderful something is even when it's not wonderful.  Honesty is too important to me for that.

So why, God, are others so important in the ways our lives go?  Is it possible to live without giving them too much importance, even if they're our bosses and they can have a strong influence on things like our livelihoods?

A reply:

There are people who want to bring you down, either to their level or lower.  They think that doing so makes them feel better about themselves, but it really doesn't.  Even after they put you down, they still fear you and they still feel fear about their own weak self-esteem.  The problem with this becomes exacerbated when they are given some form of control over other people, such as when they're promoted to a position of authority and they can do things like assign hours, hire and fire, or give performance reviews.  They tend to use these things not to be accurate or honest, but to fulfill their own needs for building their sense of self, for making themselves feel better by "taking care of" anyone who seems to present a threat to their authority.

You live in a time when things are getting worse, too.  Think for a moment of what it would mean for a subordinate to tell his or her boss "I disagree with that."  Now, there are many bosses out there who are able to deal with disagreements just fine, but they're not in the majority.  Most bosses will see this disagreement as a threat to their authority, and they think that it's necessary for them to "do something about" this threat.  And you know the results of this.  As life gets more fragmented and more people spend more time with their technology than with other human beings, the feeling of being threatened by others is going to become even more common.  The defensiveness that comes with the feeling of being threatened will increase.  And given the lack of human interaction, people will have learned fewer strategies for resolving conflict, and will more often resort to the exercising of their "power" over others--e.g., firing or writing people up--in order to deal with their own insecurities.

The bottom line is that it truly is important that you keep working on not letting other people's actions affect you as strongly as they might.  Of course, it's impossible to not let them affect you at all, especially when it affects your paycheck or your job or your personal relationships, but you can minimize the effects a great deal by keeping in mind the fact that you are doing your best to be open and honest, and a bad reaction shows much, much more about the person reacting than it does about the person who has spoken the truth as he or she knows it.

Hang in there.  Things may not get better, but you will get stronger.  People are people, and while they are wonderful overall, there's much about them that can be annoying and even harmful to others.  Learning to deal with them is one of the most important lessons in life.