If you’re unlucky enough to know “Sybil”—the name I call her in my head—you may find yourself standing in her beautiful home sometime, getting yelled at for no good reason. It happened to me. She was griping about her neighbors being nosy and rude, and they let their dog poop in her yard.
So I chimed in, “They have a tacky yard, too.” Then Sybil turned into a Category 5 hypocrite.
“Dude, my neighbors are awesome. Don’t make me feel bad about where I live. Read the room!”
I’ve since stopped talking to Sybil. I can’t take the instability.
Similarly, I’ve cut from my life another woman I like to think of as “Golddigger McWiferton,” because she told me to “read the room” after I made a joke about Taylor Swift singing about exes—a joke Swift herself has made.
“Anyone who attacks Taylor Swift must hate women!” she proclaimed from her asshat throne. Her outburst of spitefulness was uncalled for, and in the moment, I considered firing back. But I chose not to.
For her part, Sybil is self-aware about how disagreeable she can be. She’s fond of blaming contemporary outrage on her belief that “Americans are mentally ill.” So she once asked me, “Do you think I have a personality disorder?”
I don’t know. But Sybil’s behavior—and Golddigger’s—makes me wonder why people are so uncomfortable with disagreement nowadays? And why does everything feel tribal?
Has Everyone’s Gone Cuckoo?
Sybil is a good case study. She works a lot (stressful). She’s trying to date (intense). And she’s on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook day and night (uh-oh).
Since she’s always online, she constantly takes sides in America’s mind wars—the political and class and culture wars; the gender wars; and the most insidious of wars: “My favorite brands, bands, shows and aesthetics are better than yours.” Sybil’s brain is crowded with more Holy Wars than the ones that ruined Europe in the 1600s.
She also watches too much Comedy Central, so she suffers from what I call “Everyone Thinks They’re a Comedian on The Daily Show Pandemic.” She believes she’s a funny stand-up. She’s not. Her one-liners come off as cruel and sometimes bigoted.
She’s been cracking unfunny snark for so long that performing Opposition Defiance Syndrome has become her inner and outer identity. As a result, any disagreement feels like a personal attack on her identity. This makes her hypervigilant around everyone. Thus, everything in her life seems like a survival moment to her, raising her already anxious heart rate and cortisol stress hormones.
She’s fragile, has low self-esteem and an inferiority complex—which she attempts to mask with a superiority complex. People in her life feel like they’re walking on eggshells around her. But the sad truth is: Doesn’t the entire American landscape seem like one big field of broken eggshells at times?
Aren’t we all treading lightly around one another while also having fits of behavior that are no better than Sybil’s? I know I have. Sometimes it seems we’re all like Julius Caesar, giving everything a thumbs up or thumbs down. We get dopamine highs from punishing whomever we think deserves it at any particular moment we deem, yet we get angry when other people do the same.
Like Sybil, most of us have been know-it-all hypocrites at some point even though it messes up our sleep, hygiene, diet and exercise. It leaves us frazzled, paranoid, anxious, sad and mad that the world won’t enact our preferred political and social ideas.
How I Stopped Myself From Being Sucky
Not that you asked, but I thankfully overcame some of the problems that Sybil and Golddiger haven’t managed to deal with yet—and maybe never will.
Here’s how: First I quit reading Twitter and newsfeeds because I felt my head would get hot just by opening the apps. They’re battlefields designed to keep us permanently enraged.
Next I unisolated myself and reintegrated with friends and strangers who have different opinions and lifestyles. This is my broadband exposure therapy. When anyone says something that would have embarrassed the old me, I now celebrate their differences instead of frowning. Variety is the spice of life.
But I do maintain my boundaries. When people like Sybil yell at me to “read the room” every month for a year, I’m out. More importantly, I don’t vilify them. I wish them well. They’re not my enemies. My actual enemy is my own amygdala, the almond-shaped part of my brain that says: Doug! Everything’s a threat!
Sometimes I wake up grumpy. I tell myself, nothing negative is real. Then I remind myself my life is 99.9% amazing, and I make sure my day is a good time. I’m not saying this will work for Sybil or Golddigger. But it works for me. I am my brain’s supervisor, and no almond-shaped anything will ruin my day ever again.
