I'm high, and it just occurred to me that situations that are perceived as negative and unpleasant are just that - they are negative and unpleasant because you are perceiving them this way, not because they actually are.
Therefore if you want to feel less negative and shitty about a situation that is ultimately out of your hands, you can regain a little more control and feel more positive if you shift your perception of it.
To explain properly I'll give you an example: Picture that your internet is playing up or your boiler sounds like it is going to explode. You feel shit. "Fuck the world" right!? and "fuck the company that sold it to me." This negativity masks itself as empowerment by making you feel that through sheer bolshy aggressiveness you can get what you want i.e. a solution. In reality you are already internally defeated because you feel bad inside. Negativity wins.
Here's how you could make positivity win in that situation. Fix that boiler, speed up that internet and maybe even keep a stoned little smile on your face! Let’s stick with the customer service analogy, it seems to work for me!
When you deal with a company that is providing a customer service to you, it is important to realise that you are all but a link in a long chain of involved people. When told to wait in a queue we are socially programmed to assume that there are only two given perspectives within this frustrating scenario – and, rather arrogantly, we assume that ours matters most. This creates discomfort in our subconscious because when weighing up our odds we see the interaction as a two-way competition with only two possible outcomes - in other words, a 50% chance of failure.
This morbid fear of failure manifests itself as various different types of negativity such as impatience, discomfort, anger and worst of all, hatred. The brain employs the two party perspective for dealing with the issue by dividing it into ‘them’ as the provider and ‘us’ as the consumer. This is wrong! Once you realise this you won’t be able to get as angry in queues going forward, helping you live in a more compassionate and peaceful world.
Consider instead that there are actually three parties at play here. The first is the provider, the second is you, the consumer. The all-important third is the other consumers, who aren’t you. Your brain simply fails to see it this way initially and the nonsensical perception that ensues creates damaging negativity within you. The reason why your brain cannot make sense of the situation when utilising its 2 party model is because of one simple and universally-known but almost always looked over fact - you aren’t those people!
Their involvement affects your experience of customer service directly, and therefore must be considered when assessing a customer service interaction and deciding internally whether to get pissed off about it and live within a negative space for a while.