Disappointment

Daily Meditation #182–8/23/2022

Those who seek to use others will always exist. They will have their reasons or excuses, and we must have the preparation (and thick skin) to survive being hurt.

There are a few certainties in our lives.

Death and taxes are the common ones we “joke” about.

But, another for our philosophical consideration is this:
There will always be people in the world who — consciously or not — use us.

While, fundamentally, they are high-spectrum narcissists and we could spend a lifetime complaining about them, as always, remember one of our Eudaimonic understandings:

We cannot change anyone.
We cannot change the world.

There will be people we thought wanted to spend time with us and build a relationship…
But then realize they were using us as a rebound.

There will be those who we are assigned a project with, ending up ill and then “miraculously” healthy after we’ve done all the work.

There are always the types who tell us “I just need $100 to fix this on my car!” and we discover they’ve been barflies all week.

Narcissists.
Liars.
Manipulators.

Users.

Call them whatever name you want, but it doesn’t change two facts:

1. These sorts will always exist
2. You cannot change or “fix” them

We can, however, change ourselves.

Control of our perception — one of our Eudaimonic pervasive principles — is an immensely powerful tool.

We can’t (and shouldn’t) wall ourselves off from others on the possibility we could be hurt by them.

We can be and certainly will be hurt by other people.

What we can do is grow our control of the manner through which we perceive the world and our interactions.

We can learn from the interactions.
Become better observers of behaviors.
We can find elements of the relationships, sometimes, that we can look back and enjoy.

While choosing to put up walls is pedantic and will only serve to may you hurt yourself, taking the decades to find the silver linings and accept the fact you will be hurt by others on occasion will make life far easier.

And, after all, like Aurelius said…

“Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been.”

With perception, you can choose to never be harmed by the words or actions of others and instead only grow from them.

Follow for daily philosophical meditations.

These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”