Revenge in the modern world
‘… and Alexa, make sure they don't feel any pain.’
An open letter to our readers:
Dear highly valued book buyer,
First up, congratulations on such an excellent choice of book. We hope you enjoy every last page, even the ones you find challenging. Which is basically this page …
If you found a magic lamp and gave it a rub, these would be our wishes for you …
From time to time in the years to come, we hope you will be treated unfairly. Several times in fact. Frequently enough so that you will come to know the value of justice. We hope you also learn a bonus lesson from your unfair treatment – to move onwards and upwards with a smile on your face.
We hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but we also hope you will be lonely from time to time. Not big bouts of loneliness, they're plain horrible, just long enough that you learn never to take friends and family for granted.
We also wish you bad luck, again, from time to time, so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, which you will (frequently), we hope some of your opponents will gloat over their victory. Indeed, it helps if they actually mock you because during these times you will understand the importance of sportsmanship.
We hope you'll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and we hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion.
We wish you illness, both minor and major. An occasional toothache or bad back is perfect to remind you to appreciate the fact that, most of the time, your body does a marvellous job of getting you around town. Please don't take this next sentence the wrong way, but we also wish you something more substantial, an ailment that's even bigger than man flu. We wish you a recoverable health scare but something that truly knocks you for six. Once you've crawled yourself back to health, we are confident you will have a refreshed attitude to the simple act of being alive.
Mentally, we wish you an occasional bout of something that robs you of your mojo, temporarily of course, but mild depression or a bit of anxiety can have rejuvenating properties. Indeed, learning to cope with your thoughts is one of life's biggest challenges.
Career-wise, we hope you don't nail every job interview and that, on occasion, inferior colleagues get promoted ahead of your good self. There will be a lesson to learn, although we're not entirely sure what that one is. Temporary gnashing of teeth is okay, but contrary to popular belief, the best revenge isn't to let their tyres down, it's to truly shine at work and make your employer wonder how they could have erred in their choice.
And if the magic genie had two more wishes, we'd save the biggest till last.
Firstly, love. We sincerely hope that you fall headlong into it, hook, line, and sinker, and that the relationship ends. We hope it feels like your life has been torn apart, and that's good, because it has. And after weeks of sobbing, we hope you learn to move on, stronger, with lessons learned, and with an enhanced ability to find better, longer-lasting love. We really hope that your bad experience doesn't stop you loving in the future. Rather, it makes you better at loving. Our hope is that you realize that being miserable because of a former relationship just might mean that the other person was right about you.
Which brings us to bereavement. Once again, please take this next sentence in the manner in which it's intended; we hope that, on occasion, someone close to you passes away. Elderly great-grandparents might be the easiest to cope with, but closer than that perhaps. And that it's gut-wrenchingly painful. We hope that, in time, you heal and move on in the understanding that that's how the circle of life turns. And that one day it will be you that's gone and that gut-wrenching feeling will pass down to the next generation like it has since humans were invented.
The point is that whether we wish these things or not, they're 100% going to happen. Every single one of them. Indeed, some will happen several times.
Some may call such instances ‘tragedies’ or ‘plot-twists’. We will simply call them ‘life’.
Life isn't fair but then, if you stop and think about it, nobody ever said it was. Try starting from the position that life isn't ever going to be fair and you'll feel your angst washing away.
Sure, some people seem to have more of it to contend with, but adversity is a consequence of being alive. And whether you benefit from the adversities above will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.
Oh, and one last thing, remember, life also has its ups. Don't forget to relish those.
Oodles of love,
Pouli, Sanj, and Dr Andy
xxx
