Most People Are Not So Bad
They just don’t tend to make the news.
It’s all too easy to look at the world and the people in it and think the worst. Like everywhere you turn, you learn about someone doing something terrible. The latest shooting, crime, greedy billionaire, or similar awful human is paraded before you on the news, social media, and so on.
Looking at the big picture, and the world of politics, big business, and celebrity, bad people doing bad things appear to be abundant. It’s disheartening, sad, infuriating, frustrating, and crazy. Why are people so terrible?
The thing is, when you get right down to it, most people are not so bad. Why don’t you hear about them? Because they don’t tend to make the news. Especially when the news is increasingly all about propaganda and/or selling things by weaponizing fear and loathing.
People, in and of themselves, are generally not so bad. And I can prove it.
Random strangers, friends, family
Unless you’re a hermit and never interact with the outside world, you come across people all the time. To be fair, many are frustrating in one way or another.
Let’s leave the big picture world behind and dial into your world. People you interact with all the time. Friends and family can and will do things that drive you mad. Sometimes they’re the most infuriating, because you care about them (and they care about you). Yet they make choices and decisions that leave you scratching your head.
Maybe a friend won’t leave a toxic relationship. Your sibling has a gambling problem. A parent can’t see the world past their own nose. Another friend always finds things to complain about. These people are not so bad in general, but that doesn’t mean they don’t drive you nuts sometimes.
Let’s look at the strangers you interact with regularly. Some are still fairly removed – drivers on the road who don’t know how to merge, the person in the “10 items or fewer” checkout lane with clearly double that, or the person in front of you in a drive-thru lane who seems to be ordering for 150 people. You get very little impression of them, personally, but they still make you crazy.
But then you get the person who holds the door for you as you leave the convenience store, the driver who flags you to merge before them, or that individual on the bus who gives you their seat when they see you struggling to stand. No reward, no expectations, they just do the thing.
This is why I say most people are not so bad.
People will surprise you
Most people desire the same intangibles in life. This is not “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” What it is, instead, is to receive kindness, compassion, and empathy. When all is said and done, what people want most is to see that other people give a fuck about them.
Everyone can be empathetic. Some have a greater or lower ability, but everyone is capable of empathy. And I have never met anyone who doesn’t desire to receive empathy.
Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. If person “X” did “Y” to you, how would it make YOU feel? Empathy is your ability to comprehend that to one degree or another.
Sympathy is not empathy and often attaches judgment to it. Unlike empathy – which involves trying to relate to how another feels for yourself – sympathy is more external and detached. Sympathy, because of its potential for judgment, is something most people don’t desire.
Kindness and compassion have no cost. Giving and receiving them always feels good. Knowing that, people tend to perform acts of kindness and compassion with little to no prompting because they want to receive them, too.
The people you see on the news who are unkind, uncompassionate, and frankly cruel, are the exception, not the rule. Most people are not so bad; you just get more exposed to the awful because that gets your attention. Your attention then makes money for those who are presenting you with these terrible people. All hail the almighty dollar!
When all is said and done, however, I think people will surprise you. That’s because most, like you, desire good in their lives, not harm or bad.
It’s all about choices and decisions
All 8 billion people on Planet Earth are equipped with the ability to make their own consciously aware choices and decisions. Unfortunately, mindfulness and situational awareness, coupled with self-awareness, are frequently neglected in formal education. Humans might be naturally wired to be kind, compassionate, and empathetic, but we are also so distracted that we lose sight of this.
You can’t make choices or decisions for anyone other than yourself. Mindfulness can only be applied by you, for you. Likewise, choosing a positive approach is not something you can do for others. People can be infuriating, frustrating, mind-boggling – but in the end, the majority are not so bad.
To work with this, you have the power to make choices and decisions about your life and your interactions. Hence, when you encounter someone bad for you, due to toxicity, frequent disagreement, or general incompatibility, you can choose to cut them off, decide to avoid them, or otherwise steer away from them.
Remember that consciousness creates reality. Because of this, if you see people as the worst, you’ll probably find more and more to confirm that belief. You get to make choices and decisions regarding your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions that reflect in your associations with people.
When you decide that most people aren’t so bad, you can choose how you interact. That can be applied, by you, via mindfulness, in the choices you make when you relate to them, whether friend, family, coworker, or stranger.
Seeing that most people are not so bad isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing active conscious awareness (mindfulness) of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and the positivity or negativity of your approach to direct your actions.
When you recognize and acknowledge that the awful people you are constantly seeing on social media and in the news are the minority, and not the norm, you become aware that most people are not so bad. Knowing that most people seek and desire kindness, compassion, and empathy – just like you do – makes it easier to make mindful choices and decisions about your engagements with and approaches to them.
This empowers you. When you’re empowered, that can, in turn, empower others around you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity — from the vast cylinder that exists between them — shifts life in ways that open you to more potential, possibility, and the like. From there, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you in the here and now.
The better aware you are of yourself, here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you and empower them, too. That is an amazing conduit to help reason overcome fear in the collective consciousness.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the six-hundred-thirty-seventh (637) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, reblog, and spread the positivity.
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