“Everyone hates me”
“Everyone loves it”
“Everyone thinks…”
“Everyone knows that…”
“Everyone loves…”
If there is one thing that can bring a fight with someone to a whole other lever it is broad sweeping generalizations such as, “You ALWAYS” or ”you NEVER”. If you don’t believe me find someone that is deer to you and pick a fight and throw out some generalizations and just see what happens….. Wait, that’s a HORRIBLE idea, on second thought, don’t do that… Just trust me, its true.
There is no ‘everyone’ anything. Why does EVERYONE(see what i did there…tricky right?) insist on throwing that word around? Because everyone can’t all agree about anything… well except that airline food is gross and that Joshua Tree was the best U2 album ever.. but other than that consensus is a bit of a misnomer.
People will often come in my office to talk to me about some issue in their life and the very first words that come out of their mouth will be “everyone…”. I’ll stop them dead in their tracks and say, “Who is ‘everyone’”. To which they will give a VERY short list of people. Its funny what the net result of this is. It deescalates the situation from a world wide crisis to a regional or more accurately a personal event. I mean, come on, don’t be an ego maniac. EVERYONE doesn’t even know you exist. Of those that know you exist a bunch don’t care. Of those that care that you exist even fewer have taken the time to formulate an opinion about anything about you. So lets all just take a deep breath and realize we’re not that cool and that EVERYONE isn’t staying up nights formulating opinions about us.
When people say “everyone” what they are saying is “the group of people whose opinion of me matters”. There are a ton of people who’s option doesn’t matter to me and the same should be true for you. I’m not giving you license to be a jerk and not give a flip what people think of you. What I’m saying more over is that you can do EVERYTHING right and there will STILL be people out there that will hate you. Deal with it. Its reality.
I guess the logical question here is, who is your ‘everyone’? Although my family, mentors and close friends are a small number, if they all felt something about me it mine as well be the whole world (everyone). Because, as wrong as it may seem, my little world feels like the whole world. You need to be careful who’s opinion of you matters. When you’re young you want the whole world to love you, but HEY your teen age years called they want their false reality back. If you’re a teen reading this and take a play from the grown ups playbook and concern yourself with the right peoples opinion.
And as i have heard it said, “Above all else, God’s opinion of you makes every other opinion not matter”
