In a recent interview about his new book The Tyranny of Clichés, NRO’s Jonah Goldberg told Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie when asked why he wrote the book that,
…the best muse there is, is being annoyed.
This post isn’t a review of the book, although it sounds very interesting, (click the link above to watch the interview) it’s about that quote. It struck me in a completely unrelated way. Let me explain:
For Mr. Goldberg, a political thinker and writer–and in the interest of full disclosure, a person I agree with 99% of the time–it is part of his job to be annoyed. It gives him the impetus to write about the annoyance in a critical way. And by critical, I mean in the sense of thoughtfully dissecting the issue.
Because I am easily distracted—bird!—I was instead struck by the realization of how prevalent the howling of annoyed people is in our world. When I say annoyed, I am not talking about the airing of real grievances in public discourse related to crime, moral decay, injustice, inequality, etc. What I mean is aggravated, put out, cheesed off, peeved. It seems that being annoyed has replaced baseball as our national pastime.
Any time we experience the least inconvenience in our life, our first instinct it to complain to management. We become angry at the sheer effrontery of the other who so blatantly—to us—disregarded our wants and needs. It never occurs to us that our wants and needs are exaggerated beyond all proportion, often in direct relation to our exaggerated egos.
Is this always the case? No, of course not. Sometimes others will treat us badly out of their own exaggerated sense of self, and disregard for us. This appears to happen frequently in service situations when we feel that we have not received our perceived value for the money. But even in this case, we all too often use this excuse to escalate a situation into an all out war of egos, which leads to anger, perturbation, and loss of peace for all involved.
At a bare minimum, a restoration of good manners would cure some of the more deleterious effects of being annoyed. May I please?… Yes, you may… What would really cure it is a dose of humility. Putting others before me. Maybe that salesperson has so many customers right now that they simply can’t be everywhere at once to take care of me. Maybe the person who just cut me off in traffic is ill and needs to get to a hospital right away. Maybe that person didn’t answer my email because their computer crashed. Maybe that person is not empowered to fix my problem. Maybe they didn’t call me back because their parent just died.
Maybe, I should cut them some slack and get over myself!
One of the holy elders of Mt. Athos, I forget which one, said something like this,
Be kind to everyone you meet, for you don’t know what battles they are fighting.
