Naturally, human beings can be provoked even by the slightest thing, and this makes it hard to fully please people unless you have understood a particular person well. But, there are people you can't understand completely no matter how hard you try. I've heard many accounts of this, and the latest was from a family I'm very close to in the town where I reside. The man is very sensitive about the way he interprets people's words directed at him, as well as their actions, and this has made me, on many occasions, decide not to call or share a situation that I ought to have shared because I don't want to appear insulting or offend him in any way.

Late last year, one of his friends came to my workplace and dropped off some documents for him. I don't know why he didn't call him before dropping off the documents. The man told me to give them to him whenever he came around. I thought about it and decided to call him to pass the message, and guess what? He queried me for calling him instead of just letting him come by whenever he happened to pass and collect the documents, just as the sender had requested. Although he tried as much as possible to remain polite with his words, his loss of temper wasn't completely hidden because I could clearly sense it.

"So, is it now a wrong thing to relay a message so I don't forget about it and get queried later?" I angrily thought to myself. I blamed myself, let it go, and vowed never to find myself doing that again. Mind you, this is someone who gets angry whenever someone drops off information for him and you fail to tell him on time. So, you see how difficult it is to please some people?

This lifestyle has indirectly become part of our society already, where if you speak, you're in trouble, and sometimes, if you keep quiet, you're still in trouble. To avoid getting into major trouble, the best option is often to keep quiet and let things be. But then, most of the time, the more we keep quiet in order not to provoke a system or a person, the more things deteriorate before our very eyes.

Is this lifestyle really new?

Nope, it has been in existence ever since humans were created and some people were placed in positions of authority over others.

This happens in many homes where children do not get the opportunity to air their opinions because the elders usually see them as offensive, and whenever this happens, the child gets punished.

It also happens a lot in organisations where superiors do not encourage juniors to share their opinions because they assume those opinions do not matter or that they sound offensive whenever they are expressed. This happened to me at the last place where I worked as a staff member. The manager of the organisation was the type who hardly took some people's opinions and suggestions seriously. According to how we perceived it, he saw such opinions as attacks on his competence, as though they suggested he wasn't capable, and he took offense very easily. So, most of the time, I would simply think about the situation and decide to keep my opinion to myself. The craziest thing was that whenever a problem eventually arose from something we had wanted to suggest earlier, he would start placing the blame on us.

Thanks for reading.

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