Tolerance is Overrated

I'm not talking about tolerance for people of different races, religions, sexual orientation, etc. I'm ALL for macro-tolerance of each other. Peace, love and Gap, and all that. I don't believe in some hippie notion of utopia where we all get along and love each other but I do believe we should all live and let live.

I'm talking about tolerance for people you simply just don't like. I kind of hate the new year because as hard as I try NOT to, I always end up self-assessing my character and realizing that goddamn, I kind of have a lot of character flaws. For about 11 months out of the year, I'm totally ok with it because well...I just happen to love myself, flaws and all. But every January I go through days, weeks of self-torture evaluating myself and making resolutions to change what have been lifelong personality traits and which seem to only get more severe as the years go by despite yearly resolutions to change them: I'm impatient. I despise incompetent people. I have zero tolerance for people who are socially awkward or lack basic consideration of others. I loathe people who feel entitled or perpetually wronged. I dislike negative people who bring the mood down for everyone else. And worst of all: I am completely incapable of hiding my feelings or acting counter to them. There are people I love, people I feel neutral about and people I strongly dislike. And pretty much everyone knows which camp they are in by reading my face and body language. I am totally incapable of hiding my feelings about something/someone. On the positive side, you always know where you stand with me - there will never be any question (of course, how I feel about someone can totally change, but even if it changes, that person will know immediately). On the negative side, that makes me kind of a...bitch. And come every January, I start feeling guilty about it.

So this year I made a resolution to increase my patience/tolerance for people. I was going to try to be nicer. More diplomatic. More tactful. Fake it till I make it.

But then I realized when I try to be nice to people I truly don't like, I feel like a big fat fake. I feel disgenuine. I don't like acting counter to how I am feeling. So I realized I can 1) try to be a nicer person which means pretending to like people I actually don't like or 2) just avoid the people I don't like so I don't ever have to fake it. I choose the latter because honestly..."niceness" and tolerance are so overrated. Why tolerate people you don't like when you can just avoid them?!