As we talked about with our first piece on misunderstanding, our day-to-day interactions can present many opportunities to be misunderstood. However, sometimes being misunderstood can feel less like having a hater and more like the whole world is out to get you and the people you care about. It’s one thing to feel like your boss or a certain co-worker is treating you unfairly, it’s another to feel like you’re struggling to survive in a toxic/discriminatory workplace culture.
As people, we’re social, sensitive, and sympathetic creatures. We often feel injustice on behalf of so much more than just ourselves. Things that haven’t affected us directly can still cause us intense suffering akin to if we were there. We’re also stubborn, where our values/beliefs can become rigid/unchanged, validated by our past experiences/observations. Unfortunately, discourse these days seems hardly interested in trying to have meaningful/productive conversations. After all, you’d probably have more success finding water on the sun than finding mutual understanding in a Twitter exchange.
Indeed, there is so much to be angry about in the world right now. Regardless of where your views lie, it doesn’t take a lot to feel that there’s unfairness/injustice in the world, whether towards you or others you care about. In the face of such realities, it’s easy to become apathetic, to see your day-to-day life as being meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and to lose motivation for life in general.
It’s true that in so many ways we’re powerless. The sheer scope of global problems, chaos, and suffering is simply too much for any one person to bear, yet we often carry those burdens anyways, causing us despair.
It’s important to remember that the goal of deciding to stand up for yourself once in the workplace is easier than the goal of solving workplace discrimination. The goal of choosing to recycle once is significantly more achievable than the goal of saving the world from climate change. The issue is, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of framing our problems through the highest scope imaginable to where anything you do just seems so small/meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Funny enough though, those baby steps are the only actual way you can even move forward at all. After all, you can’t lose 50 pounds of weight without going through the painstaking process of exercising/dieting today.
Again, humans are sympathetic creatures. It’s very noble to be able to recognize the problems people face, feel their pain, and want to make things right. Yet when we stretch ourselves too thin, we often tend to bear the burdens of so much more than what we’re capable of, causing us to feel despaired and unmotivated. As such, it’s important to recognize your limitations, and to forgive yourself for them. Forgive yourself for not being able to change peoples’ minds, and solve the world’s problems on your own. Instead, operate on your realistic capabilities. The more you focus/worry about the outcomes of your actions rather than the actions themselves, the less content/motivated you will be to follow through. Rather than thinking about the finish line, focus instead on simply moving in the right direction.
