I don’t know if your experience is similar to mine, but it might be: When people say things that are stupid, it feels a bit like a personal attack on me and my existence. This made me pretty mad and defensive (truthfully it sometimes still does, but less so). But I realized that the problem is neither their lacking intelligence / our shared values nor my elitism, but contempt as a defense mechanism. “Their words can’t hurt me if I fundamentally dont respect them.” Catching myself in these moments of me getting mad and reexamining to (re)realize that im not actually actively threatend helped a lot to handle such situations with grace and conspicuosly improved me respecting them as human beings as well.
I don’t know if your experience is similar to mine, but it might be:
When people say things that are stupid, it feels a bit like a personal attack on me and my existence. This made me pretty mad and defensive (truthfully it sometimes still does, but less so). But I realized that the problem is neither their lacking intelligence / our shared values nor my elitism, but contempt as a defense mechanism. “Their words can’t hurt me if I fundamentally dont respect them.”
Catching myself in these moments of me getting mad and reexamining to (re)realize that im not actually actively threatend helped a lot to handle such situations with grace and conspicuosly improved me respecting them as human beings as well.