There are some people who impose their values and beliefs on others.
In our lives, we’ll meet people who will affect our lives. Some are genuine friends while others just pretend to be friends in order to impose their ideals on us.
Some of these types of people are seeking validation and constantly need compliments. Here are some examples of what you might here from people like this.
“My dress looks nice, doesn’t it?”
“I’m a good mother to my daughter, aren’t I?”
“I made this documents by myself, aren’t I great?””
“I’ve studied bla bla bla… for acquiring this qualification. I’m great, aren’t I?”
And so much more you can imagine. They must push their thoughts on others and then force their agreement?
Generally speaking, people aren’t normally interested in other people’s personal matters except for people special or close to them. Realistically speaking, we don’t care so much about what other people wear, how much they love their child, or how much money they earn. These matters don’t affect us in any way and appear trivial to people that are merely acquaintances.
There are even people who show interest in other peoples bragging or “success” stories which might be because they are waiting to see them fail.
There’s a common Japanese proverb which translates directly to mean, “Others’ unhappiness tastes like honey.” This can also mean another person’s tragedy is someone else’ excitement. In other words, people are prone to curiosity about others’ bad experiences or miserable matters. But, this is a story for another time…
From my point of view, these kinds of people lack the virtue of empathy. I’ve unfortunately, met way too many of these people. They share a common denominator which you may agree with me on if you’ve ever met anyone like this; they are all full of themselves and they make everything about themselves. I’m talking about egocentric individuals.
Let me share one of my stories with you. A long time ago, after I just got married, I was sitting in a morning briefing at work and started to share that I just celebrated my wedding. There was one of these egocentric type colleagues who had to be the center of attention. Everyone started to congratulate me but she soon took over and changed the topic to be about herself. She started rambling about when she got married. “When I got married….my married life is…I’m very happy because…” and so on. And she was engrossed in her own story, and never once mentioned my wedding at all, nor celebrated with me.
After this incident, I stopped talking with this colleague because I realized that even chatting with her was a waste of my time. It became apparent to me that she never asked about my life or listened to my and only talked about herself. As a result, only I became tired when talking with her.
In my opinion, this type of person will become lonely eventually. Their circle of friends will grow smaller and smaller. Others normally tend to distance themselves from such egocentric or narcissistic people. Which seems natural because who would want to be involved with such people.
Everyone is busy living their lives. People would prefer to spend their precious time with those who matter the most to them instead of listening to the useless chatter from someone whose not really a friend. Lovers, colleagues, friendships, everything must be two-way. If it’s only one-way or one-sided, then these friendships and relationships will implode and lead to destruction.
One-way communications have no clean exit, or in other words, it’s not easy to end the conversation and be on your way.
Photo: Everyone is different. The taste of design, style, etc. are also different. I like this classic type of living room and I know some people don’t, haha