Redway |
10-08-2022 01:20 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by GoldHeart
(Post 11200283)
We all know that people who gossip like that, would hate it if the shoe was on the other foot. They themselves would not appreciate being talked about, typical really.
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Mhm-hm. I’ve encountered one-too-many people like that over the past two years alone. I don’t know if Covid tapped some people’s heads and made them more gossipy (maybe the hyper-outgoing folk didn’t get their tidbity supply during lockdown/s and over-compensated for that forced deprivation by becoming even more boundary-intrusive and gossipy than ever before) but it’s just not something that works for me. In practice the vast, vast majority of us are guilty of the more negative kind of gossip I’m specifically talking about (I am) but there’s a difference between tearing people you hate/find super-extra to shreds with your best mates on a Saturday night over a bottle of wine and a boxset (etc.) behind closed doors and publicly-shaming and embarrassing people you might not even know that well (if at all, really) in the first place. And the thing with that kind of gossip is that one story quickly becomes another (partly because people by default mould what they hear in accordance with their own experiences, which are often highly-subjective and not experienced or lived in exactly the same way by any other living person, which is what makes us all beautifully-unique). The result is that by person 3 the story becomes distorted beyond recognition and the ‘gossipee’ wouldn’t even recognise themselves in any of it. I just feel like talking about someone who essentially doesn’t exist is a waste of saliva but some people just can’t help themselves.
I’m not saying any of that to take the moral high-ground (I’m the last person to do that because that’s just not how I live my life, at all) but I do think that rumours and smear campaigns (which may or may not have even the slightest element of truth in them) do a lot more damage than people realise. Either say what you know for sure or say it behind closed doors. Tarnishing someone’s reputation isn’t worth it if they haven’t actually done the thing they’re being accused of or they had such good reasoning behind it that even the first person’s interpretation was ultimately-flawed.
And yeah (to respond directly to your post, really). People who gossip so much that it might as well be their 9-to-5 + shift-job are (like all narcissistic-lite folk) deeply-insecure 80% of the time. Often their gossip is a projection of their insecurities (with the unfortunate unassuming person roped into their nonsense just being a catalyst) and they often play on the fact that the people they’re talking to don’t know the gossipee very well, which means that their gossip can remain unchecked for ages (often until the gossipee - who often knows they’re being gossiped about - decides to fight back/call out people). Someone people will believe someone’s Bin Laden’s incarnate and a nonce on someone’s say-so. Having or not having a reasonable amount of familiarity with whoever the person in question is makes a lot of difference but even then some people will believe literally anything if it was sold in a charming enough way.
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