I'm easily irritated. For example, I can't stand people posting pictures that have already been posted before on a group chat. Anytime I see that, I just feel like calling the person out for it.
I also really dislike broadcast messages that threaten you to send with statements like "if you don't send to xx number of people, you'll die or not get admission into university; it happened to Jane and Paul" or the ones that try to test your faith "if you love Jesus, you'll send or a conversation between God and satan 😑". I really hate those kind of broadcasts so when people send them to me, I almost go ballistic.
I also really don't like small talk. You know, all those conversations that are just 'hey, how are you, how was your night/day, have you eaten.... ok', the end. I feel those conversations are largely useless. I feel like if you have something to say to me, just come straight up and tell me, don't rigmarole, I get that the only reason you want to talk to me is because you need something and I'm ok with it. You don't have to pretend otherwise.
I really hate all of those things I've mentioned above but I find that most times, when these things happen in group chats or in personal conversations, I get upset and the first thing I want to do is go on my status and complain about it. In that moment, I'm upset at one person but I'd rather rant on my status than talk to that person.
After a while, I found that those status rants only helped take away the anger I felt at that moment. It never made the person change because the person couldn't tell that I was upset by those things. So in the long run, I find that these people repeat these things because they feel ok with it, plus not alot of people actually read the long status rants anyways.
When I came to this realisation, I started talking to people about issues I had with them... when I can 😅 (of course I couldn't tell African elders to stop sending me broadcasts, it's their way of life 😂😂). I found that actually talking directly to the people about it prevented future occurrence of the same thing. It helped me in the long run. Although telling someone they did something I didn't like was hard at first, I found that it was so much better for my sanity in the long run 😀.
I once read somewhere that these days, people are more comfortable talking about personal issues they have with one person on their social media statuses. So while they just want one person to hear something, they'd rather post it for everyone to see and then hope that the person it's meant for gets the message. I think it's totally true.
I challenge you today. Talk to that person about that thing you don't like. Don't just hide behind status rants. Actually have a sit down conversation and say 'hey, let's talk about this'.
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