Periodically I come across a reference to, or am otherwise reminded of Siderea’s 2015 essay “The Asshole Filter”. It’s about boundaries: making them, holding them, the people who don’t respect them, and what happens when you don’t deal with people stepping over those boundaries. It’s an important concept:
“An asshole filter happens when you publicly promulgate a straitened contact boundary and then don’t enforce it; or worse, reward the people who transgress it.”
Am I noting this here, today, because of events happening on the world stage right now? Because of things happening to people close to me? All of the above? Because of stuff happening at work? Maybe?
Am I good a making and enforcing boundaries for myself? No. I need to be periodically reminded of the consequences of transgressiveness, to help give me the courage to better enforce those boundaries. As Siderea also says in the essay:
“”Enforcement” is an idea with which plenty of agreeable people are uncomfortable because they have a certain vanity in their agreeableness: if they have to refuse somebody something, their self-concept as an agreeable person takes a ding. (The single best advice I have to give is never identify with your virtue because that way lies madness, or at least neurosis, but that’s a topic for another post.) If one can disentangle one’s ego from being agreeable even momentarily, one quickly sees there are many highly agreeable ways to refuse people things. This, indeed, is what diplomacy is for. And there’s less diplomatic responses, too, if one prefers.”
