87. When You Take Revenge

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “When You Take Revenge.”

There are few easier ways to shoot yourself in the foot than to get hung up on what's fair. Bad people deserve bad things to happen to them, but the efforts we make to try to make them pay don't always serve us. Maybe someone wronged you, maybe they stole money from you and got away with it, but in our attempts to seek out justice, maybe we're just causing more harm to ourselves.

For example, it could be as simple as them sharing the same friend group as you, and to cut them out of your life would mean to isolate yourself from your friends. Possibly they own some unique property that would really benefit you in some way and couldn't be found elsewhere. Should you refuse to engage with them on principle?

Even though you would actually benefit if you did, or do you leave their wrongdoings in the past so you can improve your life, or at the very least just keep it from getting worse? Certainly, if someone did something wrong, they deserve whatever justice would require, but how much sacrifice is that worth on our part?

If someone publicly embarrassed you? You might feel the urge to go and cause them pain or to key their car or slash their tires, but how would that help you? In the end, they might not even know that you did it. They might not even know that it's a consequence for their actions. So, when life isn't fair, what do we do about it? 

It's not so simple. If a powerful person uses their power to take advantage of you or to hurt you in some way, the cost of revenge is likely to be very expensive. In those situations, it almost never makes sense to retaliate if you're thinking about how it's ultimately going to affect you. But then situations like those might be the most important ones to take action on.

If no one ever did anything. When this man hurt people, he would only be further empowered. Sometimes we don't take our revenge for our own sake, but for others, corruption thrives when people say and do nothing when it comes down to it. I think there are really only three things to consider when you try to decide what to do when you've been wronged.

Number one, will it make things worse for me if I do it? Number two. Will it help other people if I do it? And then third, will it actually succeed in changing their behavior or keeping them from doing it again? At the end of the day though, whether we choose to take our revenge or choose not to act, we need to drop the resentment as soon as possible.

No one that has ever done you wrong deserves to cripple your mind with persistent resentment. Don't let their actions impact the peace of your mind any longer than it has to. When something bad happens to us, it's easy to get caught in a loop of ruminating on what we could do to get them back, or what witty, retort we could have said, and it probably feels productive.

But it is in reality a closed loop of suffering. It's almost as if we believe, the harder we think about how unfair something is, it will make it better, but the reality is it just traps us in our suffering. Now, it may be your moral obligation to take some kind of action. To try and help others in the future, but that decision needs to serve a purpose other than to perpetuate your ruminating.

The sooner we can free our heart from the chains of hatred; the sooner a bad person's influence can stop ruining our lives. Letting someone that hurt us, dominate our thoughts and feelings only gives them more power over us. The greatest revenge ultimately. Is true indifference. Part of the problem with revenge is that it doesn't truly, even the scales, it doesn't make things fair because whatever bad thing happened can't be undone.

At best, we can hope that our revenge helps to protect other people in the future, but more often than not, the things people do to get back accomplish nothing. Sometimes the wrongdoer doesn't even have a clue as to why someone did something to them. And what good is that? It just means someone let that person's wrongdoing fester and haunt them.

It means someone wasted energy on someone that wasn't worth their time. When I got divorced a while back, I didn't think a lot of things were very fair. It might have felt nice to keep my ex from getting anything from me. I suppose I could have argued it was her choice, and so she didn't deserve to get anything.

But at the end of the day, whether she deserved something or not, I knew I didn't want my children to have to live in a slum when they spend time with her instead of fighting for what's fair. I think we need to fight for what's better. It might satisfy our ego to keep up a feud, but unless that feud.

Make someone's life better, and it's really only hurting ourselves. I don't know how realistic karma is, but I find that people that are the most willing to hurt others, sometimes succeed in the sense that they make good money and they have nice things, but that kind of moral bankruptcy doesn't leave a person feeling fulfilled.

They live with persistent emptiness. Their lives have little meaning or purpose. They live in such a way that they're trying to fill a cup with a hole in it, and maybe that is revenge enough. Sometimes allowing a terrible person to just live their lives is more payback than anything. You could have thought of.

This is Skipping Stones - “When You Take Revenge.”  You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonessr.com. And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me at info@skippingstonessr.com, new episodes will be released weekly every Monday.