Nobody wakes up one day and thinks, my goal is to hurt Dinsdale in particular today because frankly, you’re not important enough to anyone else (not you in particular, everyone!). We’re all just deeply broken puzzle pieces moving through the world and hurt people hurt people and so we all keep trying to do our best and sometimes our best is trying to achieve a private goal where the byproduct is the hurt of someone else. You’ve done it, I’ve done it, they’ve done it too, it’s fine, it is what it is, it’s the human condition.
Empathy is the great leveller. We assume without evidence that other people are living interior lives similar to ours and therefore we impute motives that can only explain their behavior under the worldviews we’ve experienced. I remember reading a book years ago that talked about how the Western paradigm is that the western conception of time is the objectively correct one and everyone is is some combination of trying and failing to meet this standard but that’s actually an incredibly parochial view. They cover attitudes towards time across vastly different cultures and how they’re all internally consistent but friction comes at the boundaries between different expectations. It showed just how varied thinking about time can be, far outside any typical person’s imagining. But more crucially, it demonstrated that people seem to have a genetic preference for certain models of time that are distributed at random so anyone that doesn’t fit into their current culture’s model for time, there generally would be some other culture they would be considered perfectly normal but they’re constantly being judged and forced to fit unnaturally. That there isn’t anyone who is “bad at time”, only people who were unlucky to have the wrong fit.
That book unlocked a lot of empathy for me where I’m like, ok, they’re this, I’m that, let’s work together on this. Crucially, it doesn’t absolve anyone of the consequence to me, I still expect them to live within the realities of physics and capitalism and consequences of their actions. But there’s no longer blame, it’s not “you vs me”, it’s “us vs the problem” and there’s lots of creative ways to solve the problem to both of our mutual satisfaction.
I personally dislike e-bikes - not only on the paths, but also on the sidewalks. Not the bikes per se, but how people tend to use them. Far too often too fast for the situation IMO, and inconsiderately of other users. I do not wish to convince anyone to agree with me. I know the majority of folk think they are fun and all. That’s great.
If you acknowledge that something doesn’t bug other people at all but it bugs you a lot, it’s worthwhile digging into the reasons why. Often, the reason is what clinically is called “displacement”, we want to be angry at one thing but we’re subconsciously afraid to be angry at that thing so we find another channel to target our rage. The classic example a guy whose boss yells at him at work all day and he can’t yell back so he goes home and yells at his wife. Displacement is tricky because the solution to the problem isn’t where the manifestation of the problem is. He yells at his wife and his wife tries all sorts of different ways of changing and he’s still unhappy with her because the root cause was never his wife, it’s that he hates his job.
The job of a therapist is that they’re professionally trained to help you uncover the root of issues like this by helping you explore your own mind. They might start by asking, for example, that they’ve notice you use the word discourteous when describing why they bug you, are there other instances of discourteous behavior that bug you? And then, ok, we’ve discovered a general pattern of behavior that you react negatively to, what do you think will happen if this discourteous behavior runs rampant? How will that negatively impact you specifically? And then, whatever your answer is, they will be like, ok, that’s interesting as a belief, now that we’ve extracted that belief and can look at it rationally, is this a realistic belief about the world (most likely it isn’t because if it were a realistic belief, then you should be convincing everyone that they’re wrong for not caring)? OK, so we’ve identified where you have a belief about the world that you acknowledge is internal, where could that have come from? Is there someone in your life who you had an experience with that reminds you of this belief? etc. etc.
The key is, a therapist is just a professional who you can pay for to do this reliably with a high degree of training for you. We are all capable of doing this for ourselves and via our friends for free. And also that this is a muscle you develop, just like any muscle, where progressive application over time makes you better and better at it. Broadly, this is “introspection” or “self-awareness” and the people you see who are very good at it simply have just done it over and over again for decades of slow progress.
So I would say, given that “ebikes bug me” is a fairly safe topic, use that as a playground to practice some of these ideas and if it uncovers within you actually much bigger topics that “bug” you that is making your life unhappy that you would like dealt with to improve your own life satisfaction, consider hiring a professional therapist to help work through these issues with you.
A lot of the stigma of going to therapy comes from inaccurate stereotypical misunderstandings of what a therapist does but the job is a very mundane one at the end of the day. They just give you the tools to help you solve problems like this and are there to teach you how to apply them and, like a mechanic, you can learn to fix a car yourself or you can go to a professional and each has different pros and cons but even the most ardent car enthusiast is like, yeah, sometimes you need a professional mechanic to fix this.
