Being Human

When someone wrongs us, the injury is often not the event itself. The event ends. The story begins.

We create a division: I am right. They are wrong. They create their own division: I am right. They are wrong. Then both sides start feeding the gap with memories, interpretations, assumptions, and emotional energy. Before long, the original offense becomes almost irrelevant. The separation becomes the thing being preserved.

People are remarkably good at turning a finite event into an infinite process.

A harsh word takes five seconds to speak. A grudge can survive thirty years. Economically speaking, it is one of the worst investments ever devised by a species that also invented cryptocurrency and reality television.

The irony is that both people are often trapped by the same mechanism. One is carrying anger. The other is carrying justification. Both are chained to the event, just from opposite ends.

That doesn’t mean right and wrong cease to exist. Sometimes people genuinely do harmful things. Boundaries matter.

Accountability matters.

Truth matters.

But there is a difference between recognizing a wrong and building a permanent residence inside it.

The bottomless pit is rarely created by the offense. It is created by the recursive loop of revisiting the offense.

In systems terms, the injury is the input.

Resentment is the feedback loop.

A healthy minded person will not confuse forgiveness with agreement, nor acceptance with approval. They simply refuse to spend finite years paying interest on an emotional debt someone else created.

The universe already contains enough entropy without humans volunteering to manufacture additional quantities of it in their own heads.

Humans are strange creatures.

Given a choice between tending a garden and replaying a five-minute argument from twenty years ago, many will choose the argument. Then they’ll wonder why the garden died.