What is exactly "bitterness" and why isn't everyone bitter?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In another IMHO thread, it was posited by multiple posters (including me) that everyone lacks something they want and as a result feels angst about it.

But not everyone is overtly bitter. Sure, I can believe that everyone has a sense of inadequacy over something. But it doesn’t seem to me that everyone is fixated on their inadequacy to the same degree.

What makes someone “bitter”, in your opinion? How are they different from “non-bitter” people? Have you ever met a bitter person in real life? How do you deal with them?

Additionally, it was posited in that other thread that a sense of entitlement goes hand-in-hand with bitterness. I don’t know if I agree with such a blanket statement. Seems to me it’s possible to feel bitter not because you think you deserve better, but because everyone else is judging you harshly because of your failure despite your best efforts. For instance, a person who is stuck in lifelong-term unemployment may grow bitter after the millionth rejection not because they feel entitled to a job, but because everyone keeps telling them that only lazy idiots can’t find work. Or, a person may grow bitter after failing to maintain their weight loss not just because they believe they work sufficiently hard at it, but because everyone around them assumes they aren’t working hard enough.

Do you think a sense of entitlement is at the root of bitterness?

2

I think that Dallas shooter was bitter about something regarding her family life, but don’t know if she had a sense of entitlement. Maybe so.

3

Emotions are not tasty little bonbons to nosh on, nor frothy entertainments provided for your emotive pleasure. They are cognitions, conveying information to the person experiencing them.

Bitterness is best described as the set of emotions attached to being fully thwarted — where there is something you want more than anything (not merely “something you want”) and there is nothing you can do to make any progress towards attaining it nor even towards ameliorating that state of affairs in such a way that future people wanting what you want would have an easier time of attaining it either — so that your craving has absolutely zero productive outlet and leads to absolutely no possible productive activity.

Well, obviously the person feeling it may not be able to know any of the above with certainty but they’ve reached the point where that’s how it feels to them.

4

Bitter people dwell on the bad thing(s) that happened in the past and, to a large extent, expect bad things to happen in the future. Non-bitter people learn from/look beyond the bad thing(s) that happened in the past and have a generally optimistic outlook on the future.

IOW, attitude is the difference.

5

Bitter is when you refuse to put it behind you. When you keep coming back to your grievance, like a fool returning to his folly. When it is obsessive, and unpleasant.

6

I had an uncle who got divorced, 20 years later if you saw him the first words out of his mouth were about the “bitch” that divorced him. Bitter people don’t make good company.

7

Firstly what evidence is there for this idea?

Secondly, since clearly not everyone is bitter, perhaps lacking something does not correlate with bitterness.

8

My personal take is that bitterness is a form of grief over an overt or perceived insult. Some people grieve for long or short lengths of time, and in rare cases, some people are unable to move on.

I agree with everyone who said that bitterness as an inability to let things go. Most people don’t stay bitter perpetually because it takes effort to hang on to bitterness.

Bitter people make it a point to stoke continuously the fires of their anger and hurt.

9

One of my favorite lines from the new Sherlock series is in the first episode, when Holmes is talking to the killer and says said killer can’t be bitter because “Bitterness is a paralytic.”

Bitterness, like most “negative” emotions, gets a bad wrap. People are so against it that they don’t let you process it and move on/forward.

10

Bitterness implies to me a degree of ugliness, it’s more than mere frustration.

Someone who is bitter over some negative event maybe displays anger and annoyance towards those who succeeded, or who denied them their goal. Even if they do not know any objective reason why those people did anything wrong.

That said…

Well, I think it makes sense for society to discourage bitterness, but also, yes, if someone feels bitter it’s much better for them to face up to it, than go into denial and potentially dwell in that state for years.

11

*Todos queremos más,
todos queremos más,
todos queremos más,
y más, y más, y mucho más.

El que tiene un peso
quiere tener dos,
el que tiene cinco
quiere tener diez,
el que tiene veinte
busca los cuarenta,
y el de los cincuenta
quiere tener cien…*

We all want more,
we all want more,
we all want more,
and more, and more, and a lot more.

He who has one dollar
wishes he had two,
but he who has five
wishes he had ten,
then he who has twenty
wishes he had forty,
and those who have fifty
a hundred long for.

The song is very much tongue-in-cheek, but like many jokes it wouldn’t be funny if it wasn’t grounded in reality. It is common to want more of certain things (I’m reasonably sure those who are in pain right now don’t wish they were in more pain), but there are people for whom it’s an obsession and others who will be able to say “wow, nice car” and go on enjoying what they do have. Bitterness is a form of obsession and yes, I think that feeling that “someone owed you” is often a big chunk of it.

12

In my experience people are willing to let go of disappointments more easily when they didn’t feel entitlted to something. Like, it would have be nice, but, oh well, such is life. Like not winning the lottery.

It’s a lot easier to grow bitter and be unable to let go of it, when you really feel like you deserved to get into Harvard, or be head cheerleader, etc. When they are telling you all about how unfair it was years later, it’s because they thought they had it all sewed up, but lost out. They might not want to own it but, they kinda felt entitled to it. Like they’d earned it, they were a shoe in.

Resentment and bitterness often go together. Resentment is closely related to not getting the outcome you expect from your actions. So if I invite you to dinner, anticipating a return invitation, but don’t receive one, that produces resentment. Whereas the person who has you over to dinner without expectation of reciprocity, never gets resentful though no return invitation is ever offered. The difference is in the expectation.

If you think inviting someone to your wedding obligates them to gift you something grand, and they don’t, it can really lead to resentment. If you thought you were entitled to more of your Dad’s estate than your step Mom, but that’s not what’s in Dad’s will, then it’s going to lead, very likely to resentment.

Often, when resentment isn’t met with the desired reparative action, (which is most often!), it festers into bitterness. How wronged the person feels is clearly related to how righteously entitled they felt to whatever they have been denied, in my opinion.

“I deserved better than I got!” Opens the door, in my opinion. Sometimes we get what we get, because that’s how life is. Bitterness and resentment are choices that stem from believing we deserve/have earned/ are entitled to better, in my humble opinion.

13

Agreed. My aunt has been bitter all of her life. Like **HoneyBadger’s **uncle, you barely have to scratch the surface to hear her litany of ills that have been visited upon her for her entire life. And she always throws up her hands and looks at me with such a “Woe is me” look. Is she correct? Yes, a lot of people have hurt her. But she nurses the hurts and holds them close, and she’s also an enabler. She goes back to the people who have hurt her, over and over, and gets hurt, over and over.