It’s ok to offend people

It’s been a minute since I last did an article, sorry I’ve been busy. Wait, not sorry, why am I apologizing? Well, whatever, let’s get to it.

Right off the bat, here’s the truth, offending people is probably one of the easiest thing to do; by just being yourself, chances are there’s someone you are already offending. So far so good, but here lies the problem, we’ve been taught to think(read label) offending people as a bad thing. But really, is it? You see, someone has to be offended at the end of the day. Human beings largely perceive the world as a zero sum game, which means; your gain is my loss and your happiness takes from mine, it’s the reason cowives can never truly like each other. Just google “the ultimatum game” to understand more on this way of thinking. So if this is how a majority of us process the social sphere, someone will have to be offended at some point, it’s like death, sh!t has to happen. The point of this article is that you can’t truly offend someone and I have a theory on why this is the case, allow me to explain.

Here’s my theory, people don’t exist outside of their relationship with others, in other words, when with me, by default, you become what I know and expect you to be, but then in my absence, that “you” ceases to exist. However, in reality, you are not what the different people have labelled you to be. What do I mean, (that line made me sound like my Form one C.R.E teacher), you see, personas are bred not born, by persona I mean the identity/personality you adopt when socializing. Now I’m going to digress a bit but please stay with me; there’s a huge debate on the true nature of reality between the classical world (i.e. the physical world that you and me know about and exist in) and the quantum world (the world of very small things, like electrons and photons), interestingly the two worlds operate with very different rules. I tend to side with the quantum; I believe the nature of reality as we know it has been significantly reduced and oversimplified (by our senses for survival purposes) and as such it doesn’t offer the true nature of reality but rather a view that’s enough to get us food and someone to have sex with. It’s because of this that I’ll borrow from the quantum world.

First is the weirdest physics experiment, the double slit experiment, where we learn that in general, the very nature of a particle differs when observed from when it’s not observed, meaning when you observe it, it behaves differently and when you don’t it behaves differently, shit is weird, check it out sometime. The theory also borrows a bit from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (this is the last one I swear), where we learn that the position and velocity of a particle cannot be simultaneously determined, this is because particles don’t have a definite position and direction of motion at the same time; you see in the quantum world, things are not as deterministic (certain) as they are in the classical world. In short, the nature of a particle is very flexible; and accurately knowing one variable (trait) doesn’t translate into knowing another, in fact, it guarantees you won’t accurately know the other, interesting right? Put this somewhere in your head, I’ll come back to it.

Another bitter truth, nobody really gives a f**k about you, like really really gives a sh!t, no one. You are just a means to people’s personal agendas. Nobody has really ever cared about you, life is an individualistic journey. I know this may sound sad ,doesn’t have to be, but just hear me out, each of us is treading our own selfish paths while thinking of how to collaborate/use others to better our own journeys. Again, nobody, not even your lovely parents really give a f**k about you. You think I’m lying, here’s an idea, if you were still yourself but not a child of your parents, do you think they’d care the same about you? They loved you the way they did because you were their child, emphasis on “their,” not because you are yourself, does that make sense? Having known this, why would you be afraid of offending people who only have private selfish intentions? Why bother to inconvenience your very short life to please (selfish) people? Why would you go through the trouble to live up to anyone’s expectations of you? Bruv, your life is very short, in fact, it’s almost over, wake up.

Do you still remember the physics stuff I told you to put somewhere in your head? Now let’s piece all this together: imagine a person to be a particle, the variables of their nature (i.e. personality, identity or character) is decided and only becomes a reality through interaction and relationship with others, that is to say, “your” personality is only real from the point of view of others. Regardless of your intentions or whatever drives your intentions, the world only has your actions (which is what they can observe) to make judgement. By only focusing on your actions or the result of your actions (which is just one variable), it guarantees that they’ll never truly/accurately know you (i.e. the intrinsic variables). You are therefore under no obligation to conform to such judgement. Now here’s why it’s not possible to offend anyone; people are generally offended when their expectation don’t match reality, it means you can’t – by being true to yourself – offend them even if you wanted to, only their expectations can, same applies to you when you feel offended, did you get that?

Again I preach, you are not the person they describe (have profiled) you to be, and as such you are under no obligation to behave/act as have been profiled (labelled) by them. Your true nature is like the particle, you can be anything or anyone depending on the interaction(s) you are having. Embrace contradictions, that’s the true nature of things, including you. There are people that will describe you as a good person and others as a bad person, embrace both, proudly. Human beings, like the particle, are not as deterministic as we’d like, people are way more complicated, embrace that. Embrace the fact that you’re not perfect (neither are you wholly good or bad) and will never be. Do not bow to the social pressure of a binary world, where things can only be black or white. Even without embracing it, grey has always been the color… now you know why grey is my favorite color. I’m done, you can go buy me something grey, tomorrow is my birthday, and if you’re broke, just wish me a grey birthday ?.