Bad Things About Supposedly Good People

Coming to terms with this reality can be scary. But I also believe it is a necessary evil in our adult lives.

___

In the course of our lives, we have undoubtedly met many people who seem like good and decent human beings. And more than that, we probably wanted to believe they were good and decent human beings. Because for one reason or another, we needed at least some of these people to be good and decent human beings.

But contrary to what we might want or need to believe, there is nothing that happens to people when they reach a certain age that makes them behave in a mature or responsible way. That makes them consider other people’s feelings. That makes them act in a manner that is congruent with the definition of what ‘being an adult’ means.

In other words, it is not a preordained conclusion that people who have reached adulthood are good or responsible or caring. And it’s certainly not the case that progress and growth are an inevitable component of the aging process.

Because sometimes, no matter what we believe or what we think we know, we discover bad things about supposedly good people. And these bad things are ugly and damaging and calculated and painful and selfish and cruel. These bad things are a complete and total contradiction to what we thought and expected and wanted to believe about these people we know.

As heartbreaking as these bad things about supposedly good people can be, I’ve come to understand that they are essential to the process of growing up. They are essential to realizing that the world is not the flawless place we thought it was when we were young.

Coming to terms with this reality can be scary. But I also believe that it is a necessary evil in our adult lives.

Of course, we would like to believe that these supposedly good people have never done bad things. If only because the alternative is frightening. If only because the idea that seemingly decent adults are capable of irresponsible and harmful actions is not something we want to consider.

But as we’ve grown up, we’ve no doubt discovered that these bad things about supposedly good people are real and they do not necessarily exist in some far-off land that you only hear about on the evening news or read about on the internet. The reality is, these bad things about supposedly good people might apply to our mother or our older brother or our spouse or our best friend. These bad things about supposedly good people might even apply to us.

Because of this, we will invariably discover that someone we once held in high regard or someone we simply thought had their life together, actually turned out to be completely out of control and uninterested in being a good and decent human being.

And it is this upsetting realization that starts to peel back the layers of adulthood. This process of peeling back the layers of adulthood does not indicate that the things we thought about adulthood were wrong. It is simply a newfound understanding that there were far more layers to being an adult than we could have imagined when we were younger.

When we hear these bad things about supposedly good people, it can be crushing. It can turn our world upside down. We can find ourselves completely blindsided by these bad things we find out about supposedly good people.

But the most dangerous aspect that stems from these bad things about supposedly good people is not that they hurt us or that they impact us in any number of negative ways.

These bad things about supposedly good people are so dangerous because we can suddenly feel the desire to stoop to this same level. To become, ourselves, a supposedly good person who does bad things. It’s almost as if these revelations about other people give us a license to be careless and selfish and cruel.

These bad things about supposedly good people can crush the spirit of others. They can make good and decent human beings lose hope. They can send good and decent human beings into a downward spiral of feeling betrayed by humanity.

In the face of these revelations about supposedly good people, we have a choice. We can give into our fears and our pain, or we can break the cycle. We can make the choice to continue to be ourselves even though we now realize that the world we thought we knew couldn’t have been any further from the world that actually exists. And above all, we can work.

We can work to hurt others less. We can work to empathize more. We can work to be less reckless. We can work to consider other people’s feelings more. We can work to be less selfish. We can work to give more. We can work to put ourselves in good situations to stay away from people and places and behaviors that put us at risk to harm ourselves or others.

That might sound like a long list of clichés from an inspirational Instagram feed, but a world of Instagram clichés is an infinitely better place than a world of supposedly good people who do bad things.

____

Photo credit: Getty Images