If someone has done something bad to you, is it ok to get revenge as long as you are not doing anything illegal?
And if so, what is acceptable NOT-illegal revenge?
Hmm, if somebody does something bad enough to make me thirst for revenge, I’m not going to care so much about legality as my likelihood of getting caught, and there are a lot of fairly safe but illegal ways to get back at someone (which I won’t discuss here).
As to legal methods - hmm. Character assassination is always good, especially if you have really good dirt on someone that would seriously hurt their reputation with people they cared about. I’ve gone that route before, and sometimes the results were bad enough that I almost felt guilty. I probably wouldn’t give information that would lead to an enemy being arrested, the hatred of snitches is deeply ingrained into my psyche - maybe if it was for a crime I found particularly reprehensible, and in that case I probably would make an anonymous call even if I didn’t have anything personal against the person. I definitely wouldn’t drop a dime on someone for something like doing drugs or other victimless crimes, but if that works for you it’s a good way to ruin someone’s life.
Vengeance is your friend.
It’s hard to remember in the heat of the moment, but focusing on ways to revenge yourself has a way of taking its toll on you. Sometimes you end up harming yourself more than the other person originally harmed you, and you certainly give up any high moral ground you may have originally had. If you can either forgive the other person or just drop your relationship with him/her, you end up healing faster from whatever pain they inflicted on you.
So, I’ll ask you the question back. Do you think revenge is okay for yourself in whatever situation you’re in?
This IS the BBQ Pit folks…it’s not GQ, so I reckon revenge is absolutely fine.
As to what is acceptable…it it makes YOU feel good, it’s acceptable!! Go For It…provided you are absolutely sure you want to exact revenge. If you are in any doubt, just wait…anyway, as the old saying goes, “Revenge is a dish best served cold”.
Do it. Do it slowly. Do it over time. Do it so they wish the hell they’d never done what it is that you are exacting revenge for. I’m still doing revenge on one person after about 20 years. It can be fun.
Revenge against flying insects of the order Hymenoptera (actually the suborder Apocrita and the family Vespidae) is completely acceptable (IMHO); anything else is dangerous; He who chases monsters must see that he not become a monster himself.
If you don’t mind me asking, what the hell did someone do to you that you are still getting revenge on them?
My eldest sister is a big one for revenge. She bears grudges for many a year and does anything in her power to make the target of her ire suffer. She’ll do this for the mildest of slights. To paraphrase her, she treats life as a game of chess.
Actually; think about it - ongoing revenge against somebody who did something specifically to irk you is just proving their success.
Revenge, and the desire for it, is not good for you. It does insidious damage to your personality and your happiness. It makes you a worse person.
Living well is the best revenge.
Yeah, I know. I used to think this was just banal, “goody-goody” preaching. But experience has taught me it’s true.
(Mangetout is completely right about flying insects though.)
Futile is right.
A story for your reading pleasure:
My mom is 54. She has held a lot of jobs in her life and has been ROYALLY screwed over in a lot of them. I’m talking really unfair, terrible stuff. (One boss of hers started documenting everything she did wrong on the first day, fired her 10 days later, and then went to the unemployment hearing and flat out lied and said that my mom was fired because she didn’t call in for work one day — and then proceeded to hire someone else to replace her, only the new person had to do HALF the work my mother was doing. This is just one example, there are many more.) I have seriously wondered if she’s not under some kind of curse. She’s a hard worker, very good at what she does but it seems like almost every time she gets a job, there’s always some coworker or boss who makes sure she gets fired.
Anyhow, over the years we have noticed a pattern. Any time someone screws her over, something REALLY bad happens to that person. I’m talking serious stuff … we made a list one day and found that 4 were dead. One woman gave mom a hard time about her back problems and then 6 months after she got her fired, came down with the EXACT same ailment in her back. Another man lost his business and got sued for 6 million bucks. Another man, one who fired her two weeks before Christmas lost a lot of money in his divorce. The list goes on and on (probably about 15 people, total).
No matter how screwed over she has been, she has never taken revenge on these people because she knows that in the end they will get theirs. She doesn’t believe that God is going around smiting all these people for her sake (because let’s face it, some bad people probably never get theirs until the afterlife), but she figures that if they have screwed her over, they have probably screwed a lot of people over and thus karma has simply caught up with them.
Anyhow, the point of this story is to make my point that if you have truly been dicked over, through no fault of your own, you can probably rest assured that whoever treated you badly will get theirs. Chances are the bad thing that happens to them will be much worse than anything you could do, so it’s best to let karma take care of the situation.
I feel very strongly that it is ok to get revenge on someone by doing to them if they did to you. Particularly if they did it to be mean to you or through purely selfish gain not caring how their gain would negatively affect or hurt anyone else.
I have taken the higher ground and just walked away from situations. Sometimes I’m ok with that but other times I have wished that I had at least done something. It all depends on the situation.
I think “(with disinterest)bah, you’re not worth the trouble” is a better way to hit back than “(impotently)I’ll get you for this if it’s the last thing I do”.
One of my friends often says to me, “Tibs, when I get mad at someone, I wanna kill’em. When you get mad at someone, you wanna kill their family.”
Sounds worse than I really am. I dated a girl once and found out that she’d been lying to me. So I bought two tickets to Puerto Rico for New Year’s and invited her. The kicker was that I had only purchased one return ticket - for me. My friends convinced me not to do this. I’m glad they did. Instead, I never told her that I knew about her lying and I simply never spoke with her again. She was bewildered and it brought me more satisfaction than I would have thought.
I think I’m over the revenge thing - I mean, if I have hurt feelings, then I have hurt feelings. If someone were to physically hurt my family/loved ones, then I don’t know what I would think about revenge any more.
Tibs.
Wow, Tiburon, that sounds mean. Mean, but a good story.
You guys are all being very mature about this, which is good, and something that I can’t always do. I hold grudges, but I will occasionally entertain fantasies of revenge, and I think it’s better to keep things like that in fantasies. Usually, the person does get theirs in the end.
To the OP: what did the person do to you? What are you considering doing to them?
What type of revenge are we talking? There’s a huge difference between “He rigged my locker so I’m going to make a crank phone call” and “He stole my girlfriend so I’m going to burn down his house.” The first type can be hilarous, especially if between friends (remember “Pete and Pete”). The second type can lead to couseling or jail time (remember Left Eye). If its’ something like the first type by all means have fun. If its’ something like the second forget it, she/he/(it?) probably wasn’t worth the trouble that plotting would get you into. Unless you construct a doomsday device because that would be cool. When you get done obliterating whomever you’re mad at ship that baby over to the White House with the timer set…
[sub]Kidding, kidding. I don’t wish any immediate bodily harm on “Dubya.” Maybe John Ashcroft.[/sub]
Oh, revenge fantasies. They can be better than any other kind of fantasy, ever.
But most revenge is best left in fantasies. I didn’t have to go shit on my former employer’s doorstep…watching their stock price plummet as a result of their idiotic business practices is just as much fun, and requires no effort and a lot less planning.
Corr
My thoughts on revenge are mixed.
I firmly believe in what Futile said that the best revenge is to do very well in life and let the other person see it. I don’t think taking revenge for ‘little’ things is helpful. I think I would define little things as ones that do not have a significant impact health-wise. However, if an option exists, that can be applied quickly and legally and will have a significant negative impact, go for it. If it will just be a minor annoyance or take much time, forget it. You don’t want to dwell on it over time since it will affect you negatively.
Now, major things done to you that have a big impact on you health wise is another story. If my wife was killed or badly hurt through action (or inaction) of someone else and they were getting away with it legally, I think I would be hard to stop myself from exacting revenge. I’ve never been in that situation and do not know how I would react but it is very possible that I would go after the person.
Speaking of revenge, it must not be popular. I truely do not understand why that CEO from Enron is still walking around… Is there not one person out there pissed off enough? The guy causes people to lose their life savings, their job and he skips to Texas to build a mult-multi-million dollar palace. It actually picks up my spirits in a weird way since people must not be as violent and revenge-prone as society seems to think they are.
My wife recently got revenge on me for something that I did long ago.
In 1992, her best friend gave birth to a baby. She was out of the house when I got the call. I prepared about 30 pieces of paper. The first one said “At” the second one said “8:40” (I don’t remember the time of day, I just made it up), the third one said “Devora”, etc. It wasn’t until the thritieth paper and about five minutes later where I described the baby as bouncing, beautiful, gave the weight, height, etc. that she finally found out that the baby was a girl.
Fast forward to about three weeks ago. My sister-in-law had a baby and I was out of the house when the call came in. She was waiting 10 years to do this to me, and she made me wait and wait until I found out if I had a new nephew or neice.
Zev Steinhardt
Oreo their car.
Its fast, effective, and not illegal. Besides - how do you dust for an oreo?