A weird concept as an adult nobody really teaches you in school is the fact that every single thing you do is, in some way, offensive to another person.
Here’s what I mean by that: psychologically, the way humans interpret everything affects us in ways we don’t even realize on a conscious level. By the title of this article, “Everything is Offensive,” I am not referring to matters that are blatantly offensive. For example: a shit disturber comedian over the age of 50 making jokes in poor taste about transgender people. Or comedians using slurs like “retard” in hopes of being perceived as a comic who is “edgy” and “pushes the envelope.” That is one thing, but that type of offense is pretty obviously understandable and predictable. It’s a cyclical thing: someone will create controversy by saying something clearly in poor taste, liberal people will get upset about it and complain, and the comedian or content creator personality in question gets the effect they intended by attracting the attention they wanted.
What I mean by “Everything” is a bit more subtle and not always easy to pin down. For every action, there is always a reaction. That could be something as minor as you getting new shoes and somehow making other people feel bad about their old shoes, or it could be something as innocuous as you using a word perceived to be a “big word” in conversation and someone interpreting that as you being pretentious and thinking you are more intelligent than you are. I remember once in high school someone wrote an anonymous e-mail to me attacking my writing, telling me they thought I was completely full of myself because I write things online, and I think I’m god’s gift to the world, among other negative remarks about my personal appearance, etc etc. Of course, that was not my intention, but this person was probably in a dark place and their brain interpreted whatever they read in that manner.
The more you learn about human nature and what people are really like, the more often you tend to see this pattern play out. It is not quite as apparent as the comedian example given above, but almost always just as cyclical. Another example of “Everything is Offensive” would be: if you work at a job and your co-workers are the types who like to go out drinking after work or socialize excessively, and you are the type of person who prefers not to, you will immediately be viewed as anti-social and they might talk about you behind your back and speculate on what you might be doing outside of work. Another example of this concept: if it’s someone’s birthday and you say happy birthday but do not really say much else after that, the person might take offense because you didn’t try hard enough to care — sometimes this concept isn’t even about what you say, but what you don’t say.
There are a million other examples I could give, but it’s best to conclude here. All I’d say is: it’s important to be cognizant of the effect you have on other people, because you never really know what’s going on in another person’s head and how insecure they may or may not be. You can see this dynamic in celebrities and some of their insane fans: cases like John Lennon and Mark David Chapman or Bjork and Ricardo López. One of my favourite examples of this concept: the famous moment drug kingpin Frank Lucas wore a $125,000 fur coat to the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier championship fight without realizing law enforcement was watching closely (in an interview, Richie Roberts, one of the officials on the case said, “You don't go around showing that kind of money when the people who are trying to arrest you are making in those days $25,000 a year, and you're showing a coat that's like five year’s salaries. It gets these guys a little angry. So, it was a bad mistake.”)
Of course, most of us are not like Frank Lucas in this world. But on a lower level, the concept remains the same. Everything you do, every single thing, has an effect on people whether you realize it or not. You could be attracting negative attention to yourself without even realizing it.
