I'm Offended

If I write something, and you’re offended by it, that’s your fault.

What?

You heard me. If you are offended by an article, a TV show, a movie, a professor, a co-worker, a boss, or a relative—that is your fault.

Here is the reason. We are humans, not animals. And because we are human, we get to choose how we respond to any situation. If someone makes you angry, it is because you chose to get angry. You could also choose not to get angry. You could choose to ignore it. You could choose to keep on scrolling. I actually kind of like not being angry, therefore, I never choose to be angry. Animals don’t get to choose how they respond to situations—they simply react. So if you react to a tweet or a Facebook post, you are an animal.

I can’t be any more clear.

Seems like a lot of people get offended by things these days, though that seems to be changing. A teacher says something politically incorrect, the students are offended, and they ride him out of town on a rail. That was happening a lot, for a while. What this means is that we are very psychologically unhealthy as a society. And there is nothing better than being offended to give someone a sense of moral superiority. Ego is tied up in this, too. If someone posts a Trump meme and you find yourself going to battle in the comments, you are a very psychologically unhealthy person.

Every two weeks I go on the local radio show, and last time I was there, the host asked me if I was offended by such-and-such thing, and I said of course not, I am offended by nothing. Nothing offends me—ever. There is no single word that could trigger me. This wasn’t always the case. I almost got thrown out of law enforcement school in the Coast Guard because one of the instructors called me a “pussy” and I punched him in the head. I got a perfect score on every exam and was not the honor graduate, and that pretty much says it all. I used to be an animal. I used to react to things, without thinking, which means I probably didn’t have the temperament to be a law enforcement officer. These days, you can call me any name in the book, and my heart rate is not going to go up a single beat.

Being offended means you have righteous indignation. We feel superior to the other person. Elon Musk says something dumb on Twitter, we are offended, we have righteous indignation, and we feel superior to…the richest man in the world. Which is ludicrous! How many people out there feel superior to the guy who just had an astronaut walk in space? Lots of them. You are in dangerous territory whenever you start feeling superior to other people, whether it’s billionaires or Haitians. 100-plus years after Bolshevism, and we are still carrying around this idea of the noble savage, that poor people are virtuous and rich people are vicious. If you are a poor person, and you feel superior to a rich person, then there is a zero percent chance that you will ever be rich. Zero. And if you are a rich person feeling superior to poor people, then you are an asshole.

If you are the type of person to get offended by things, what you are really saying is that other people should have their speech and actions conform to your view of the world. You are the director of the play, and everyone else is the actors. The amount of ego it takes to sustain this worldview is staggering. I know what’s best for you and everyone else. This is election season, and we have two very psychologically unhealthy people running for president, who think they know what’s best for you—in entirely different ways. The thinking here is that people cannot be trusted to think for themselves—they behave irrationally and in ways that are deleterious to their own health and well-being—and government is here to protect you from your own worst instincts. I admire Mike Bloomberg and what he’s built, but the Big Gulps were a bridge too far. The idea that a politician should leave people alone, free to make their own mistakes—or succeed, perhaps—is so out of fashion that we can hardly imagine a time without it. I’d say that the last (and possibly only) president to get it right was Calvin Coolidge, literally a hundred years ago. I read the Amity Shlaes biography, and I don’t think it does him justice. Get out of the way, and let people work and produce and worship and thrive, and what results is a decade of breathtaking technological innovation and the biggest stock market boom in history. And inherent in Coolidge’s worldview was the very psychologically healthy belief that he didn’t know what’s best for you. I can’t possibly know what’s best for you. This blog is about my experience and my journey to be psychologically healthy. I’ve been working on it for decades. I can’t write a blog about being physically healthy, because I am a fat fuck. You can go to David Goggins for that.

Social media is an outrage-producing machine, and when I say outrage, I mean being offended. Just keep on scrolling. I am friends with a whole bunch of people, from all parts of the ideological spectrum, and I’m not in a position to tell people what they should or shouldn’t believe. If they had my experience and my knowledge, they might believe differently, but they don’t. I’m on my path, and they’re on their path. I say that a lot. I’m on my path, and you’re on your path. There are things I see on social media, and I say to myself, well, that was inadvisable, but it has been years since I was triggered by a social media post. And I don’t curate my feed—I’m not “hiding” the people I disagree with. If you can’t handle someone with an opinion different from your own, what does this say about you? That is the thing about social media—people just pour out their mental illnesses onto it on a daily basis, for all the world to see. Their insecurities, their foibles, their fears, their resentments—let me put it this way, if I were actually trained in psychology, I would have a lot to write about. I can tell you one thing for sure—the people who constantly post pictures of flowers are very, very sad people, and possibly suicidal.

Instead of getting offended by other people’s shitty opinions, I often find them to be funny. I find humor in it. My way of joking is to tell the truth. If you laughed every time you were offended, instead of being offended, imaging how much happier you would be? Laura Loomer is in the news these days. Laura Loomer is very, very funny. And Marjorie Taylor Greene is funny. But people like this tweet their shitty opinions, and it’s like feeding a gremlin after midnight—everyone gets triggered, and they get ratioed to the moon. Why do people fall for this again and again? Why can’t you just let someone be wrong on the internet? Here’s the way I look at it--if I say something on social media that triggers a bunch of people, I win. That’s right, I am the winner, because I got 1,000 people to take five minutes of their day to come up with the perfect dunk, and I just wasted 5,000 minutes of time of psychologically unhealthy people. I’m doing the world a service. What I don’t understand is these people who make a career out of political media, the people who are always in the middle of a fight. Glenn Beck, Dan Bongino, Rachel Maddow—why would you want to live like this? Financial media is bad enough. You’re constantly in a state of outrage, whipping up outrage in other people, and your contribution to the world is…what? That has never been my ambition.

I have to reiterate this point, because it is extremely important: if you get offended, it is your fault. Not the other person’s. Yours. You can choose how you respond to any situation, which you would know if you’d ever read Victor Frankl. Imagine if you could just choose to be happy all the time, no matter what the circumstances?  You absolutely can. I am proof that it is possible.