NM.
There’s your problem right there. This is where you can learn to cultivate the pause. Learn to recognize when you’re overcome by emotion, as the completely illogical can make perfect sense to you, and you end up in crazy reaction mode. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done that.
The next time you post, take a moment to ask yourself if you’re emotional. If you are, walk away for 5 minutes. Or 5 hours. Or 5 days.
When come back, bring post. And mincemeat.
Five, I think (you’re 20, right?). And, yes, that was partly a joke. Probably not a good one.
Right after high school, I tried to change my personality to be more like the people I knew that seemed to be very well liked. I kept it up until about 21, but then I realized I was putting in a lot of effort for little reward. It was too different from who I really was.
You’re laid back. I was trying to pretend to be. That doesn’t work.
Mmm, mincemeat. Time to make some tarts, I think.
Yeah, posting while emotional is usually not a good idea. You overreact, they overreact, everyone overreacts, you feel like an ass, there’s a possibility some of them feel like asses; it’s just messy. One thing I’ve really come to appreciate about getting older is the perspective; you don’t have to respond to everything that pushes your buttons - you can walk away or just stop interacting. I have a sister who is the living embodiment of a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and she’s also argumentative; I don’t know how many times I’ve just shrugged and let her keep on thinking whatever wrong-headed thing she was thinking. I’ve also become a big fan of planting a seed and letting it be - instead of trying to pound something into someone’s head, just plant an idea and let them come to it on their own.
I’ve tried that too. I try not to let things bother me to get me into a bad mood and be all Zen and shit, but I’ve found that the more cheerful and tolerant I try to be the more annoying and assholish everyone else gets.
So, fuck 'em!
Oh, things don’t tend to get me in a bad mood, I’m just short with people when I feel like they’re being dumb shits. I try to tell myself, “Well maybe they’re not dumb shits,” or “Even if they are, I should still be nice,” but sometimes… I just can’t, man. Working on it (kind of)!
I don’t think that being opinionated at all has to mean you’re an asshole. While I think it’s easy to become an asshole because you’re opinionated about the topic, it’s note a foregone conclusion. I think the reason it often goes that way is because someone who is opinionated is often more likely to have difficulty seeing the perspective of the other side or willing to accept a “agree to disagree” position.
As an example, there are political opinions from pretty much the entire spectrum on this board. And for any given position with more than a couple people, there’s plenty of assholes supporting it, but it seems to me that it largely comes, not from strongly holding their own opinions, but an unwillingness to accept benign motives for an opposing opinion. As such, it’s easy to see your opponenty as somehow unintelligent or even evil, which makes it easy to be an asshole to them. If, instead, you examine their positions with those sorts of motives as the least likely, you can still vehemently agree with them, but it’s easier to do it without being a dick.
I also think not being an asshole about a position actually does you more good than it does anyone else. Obviously, if you are less of a dick, others are less likely to respond in kind. So, in that sense, it’s a sort of self-reinforcing cycle where the less of an ass you are, the less others are to you, and so the less compelled you’ll feel to be a dick. Moreso, people who are dicks are going to raise defiance, even if all their facts are indisputable and their logic is solid. In many cases, I’ve seen someone with a rock solid case be completely unable to convince anyone that didn’t already agree with them because they were extremely abrasive in how they were presenting it where, when someone else comes along and argues the same point, but less abrasively, they do a better job of convincing people. In short, you’re more likely to bring people around to your point.
There really isn’t a good reason not to generally be nice to people, even if you strongly disagree with just about every word coming out of their mouth. Disagreement can actually be very intellectually stimulating and enjoyable, provided it doesn’t devolve into bitterness.