Enjoy Your Life More!

The Absolutionist.

I’m going to introduce a new term here. The Absolutionist (which is not to be confused with an absolutist, who practices absolutism, which is the principle of unbridled governmental power) is a certain type of person that we’ve all probably met at some point; they’re the type of person that believes the way they think and do things is the “correct” way to think and do things. They tend to enforce their understanding of the world on others simply because they have every reason to think they are correct. We’re going to call this type of person an Absolutionist, because of the way they so frequently speak in very inflexible absolutes. For obvious reasons, it can be very frustrating being around this type of person because their language can be invasive and it’s hard not to respond negatively.

The first thing you should do so that you can enjoy your life more is to bear in mind that until an Absolutionist is actually affecting your life, they don’t have any effect on your life. Quit responding to their egocentrism and move on. Like so much terrorism, bad psychedelic trips, and personal insecurities, they only have power over you once you’ve given it to them.

The second thing you should do is remember that there are a lot of people out there who seem like Absolutionists when they are, in fact, not. It seems like this sometime because of the way a lot of people deal with the inherent time constraints of language. For example, there are two ways to tell somehow how awesome X is. You can say “X is awesome!”, or you can say “I feel like X is awesome!”. The first one takes less time but is technically an absolute statement. The second one is much less invasive, but takes additional time to actually say. In this example it seems like an incredibly trivial amount of time, but like many things, that time adds up. Most people understand this and therefore defer to the quicker, more absolute way of saying things. If you’re the kind of person that cannot help getting upset upset in the presence of Absolutionists, then the least you can do is determine whether or not the person in question is an actual Absolutionist or not! Chances are very high that they are not, and they are simply trying to communicate a personal idea in the quickest amount of time. I realize that in an ideal world we would all have the time and energy to speak in the most non-invasive ways possible, but we simply don’t and the quicker we mitigate the frustration that emerges from this kind of language use, the smoother our days will be. :)

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