It’s not insults that upset us. Rather, what’s distressing is the unexpectedness of the insult.
Many years ago I was a somewhat highly-strung twenty-something-year-old working night shifts at a corporate call centre.
As far as dead-end casual jobs go, this one wasn’t too bad. I was a single male living with my parents, so I could afford anti-social hours. My fellow night creatures were mostly pleasant people, provided you were ok with gradually transforming into a vampire. And the work, though supremely mundane, was easy enough if you didn’t mind weekend work.
One night, though, I answered a bizarre call that left me feeling cut up.
It began like any call until the guy mentioned his organisation (which happened to be one of our clients) and demanded I connect him to his bank.
That request confused me. We didn’t do that, so I said I’d check with my manager, just in case it was something obscure I’d somehow missed. Yet before I put him on hold, he erupted. “No,” he yelled. He most certainly did not want to hold, only to inevitably be told that I couldn’t help – he wanted the bank. Right. Now.
I had no idea what he was on about. But I was reluctant to tell him that he might have called the wrong place, thanks to that lingering fear that afflicts most call centre drones (“what if it’s something important that I haven’t been told about?”).
I got halfway through saying words to the effect of “let me speak to my manager and I’ll…” when he exploded.
“You f*****g c**t!” he spat. He proceeded to curse me for all I was worth.
Then he hung up.
Suppose I knew it was coming all along?
At the time, that abusive call upset me for the rest of my shift, though it lasted less than two minutes. It was utterly unexpected and I couldn’t stop thinking about who he was, why he’d done it, whether he’d called the wrong company, whether the number could be traced, and so on.
As I said, I was a bit fragile back then.
Today, I look back with a laugh at this faintest blip in a job from years ago that has no bearing on my present life. In fact, I’d mentally shelved it until I started this post. That’s when it occurred to me that the very reason I did remember it was because, at the time, it was upsetting. It came out of the figurative nowhere. And that’s why I didn’t deal well with it all those years ago.
But suppose things had been different? Suppose I’d been prepared?
This might get a tad metaphysical, so bear with me.
Suppose I knew that this was going to occur. Imagine I had weeks of warning, that I knew in advance that an unknown caller would dish out insults on a particular date, at precisely 2:47am, at whatever work station I was seated at. Let’s say I even had a script that featured every word he would direct at me. And to conclude, let’s say I also knew that he’d hang up afterwards and that there’d be nothing I could do.
Well, if the above metaphysical situation were true, then I assure you that I would have dealt with the insult far better than I had in reality.
Yet, both situations are near-identical if you think about: in both versions I don’t get out of taking the call; I get insulted; and I still don’t know who was responsible after he hangs up. The sole difference is that in one version I was prepared for what would have occurred, while in the other it was sprung on me.
Why does this make such a difference?
Insult invulnerability
Life is full of things that will upset us. Yet for so many of them, the intensity of how we feel about the distress, and the rashness of what we do afterwards has less to do with the actual thing that occurred – and more to do with the unexpectedness of it.
Philosopher writer William B. Irvine in his fantastic book, A Guide To The Good Life: The Ancient Art Of Stoic Joy has this to say about insults:
One of the things that makes insults difficult to deal with is that they generally come as surprises. You are calmly chatting with someone when — wham! — he says something that… can easily be construed as [an insult].
Irvine also talks about how he’s developed an immunity to insults, describing himself as a “collector of insults” and an “insult connoisseur”. Based on his personal experience, he offers several recommendations for countering insults.
One is to respond with a self-deprecating response instead of an angry counter-insult. This shows the insulter that you’re genuinely confident enough to not be troubled by whatever it was they said.
Another is to find ways to remove the sting of an insult. One strategy is to “pause, when insulted, to consider whether what the insulter said is true. If it is, there is little reason to be upset.” Another, “suggested by Epictetus is to pause to consider how well-informed the insulter is… Rather than getting angry at this person… we should calmly set him straight.”
Yet another strategy, this one perhaps for advanced practitioners of the Stoic arts in his book, is to again apply Epictetus’ maxim that “what is insulting is not the person who abuses you or hits you, but the judgement about you that they are insulting.” Irvine goes on to add: “it follows that if we can convince ourselves that a person has done us no harm by insulting us, his insult will carry no sting.”
The goal, he adds, is to become “increasingly indifferent to other people’s opinions of us… Because [if] we are indifferent to their opinions, we will feel no sting when they insult us.”
Prepare for the inevitable
Insult-eliminating strategies derived from ancient philosophy are just some of the many tips in Irvine’s excellent book about attaining peace and tranquillity.
Even so, I think that building up one’s insult immunity can be taken further.
Where the above strategies are about how to prepare oneself for what to do after copping an insult, I believe insult immunity can also be attained by mentally rehearsing what to do before offense is given.
The best way to do this, in my view, is to fortify your mind each day by reminding yourself that people are jerks. This is not only inevitable, but it has always been so throughout all human existence. To wish for an existence free of unpleasant people would be like wishing for the seasons not to change.
I also find it helps to remember Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius’ famous line
Marcus Aurelius
The reason, if it isn’t obvious, points back to my story about the call centre. Just like I would have fared much better with an abusive phone call if I’d known about it beforehand, so too will you deal better with insults if you literally prepare yourself each morning for the near-total certainty that jerks will say to you things that are bad, terrible or insulting.
As I said, how we feel and what we do in response to an insult often has less to do with what was said, and more to do with how unexpected it was.
Bad things and unwanted news will happen. This is certain. But the damage these things do to us – or rather, how they affect us – has a lot to do with how mentally prepared we are.
And that, friends, is one of the keys to tranquillity and contentment.