I second this! The mental state of being offended is not useful.
However, I want to point out that I believe there’s some typical mind fallacy popping up this post? I think it’s geared at the particular group of people whose knee-jerk impulse is to perform offendedness once they are in the offended mental state because the post doesn’t clearly precisely distinguish between the two. But that’s not the knee-jerk reaction of everyone. For example, I am very conflict-avoidant (to the point of doormat-ness), so I actually had to teach myself to perform offendedness for the social benefit of enforcing boundaries, which is pretty important but is only briefly touched upon in the post. My natural impulse was to tolerate (sometimes deliberately) offensive behavior and do nothing, so because I didn’t get defensive or angry, I would just get hurt and sad and … take it. Until I eventually realized this was a bad strategy. Therefore! I think it would be useful to clean up that distinction and make sure that it’s the offendedness mental state that is a bad habit.
-- Noah Brand
I’d prefer if this quote ended with ” … and then I got done weeping and started working on my shoe budget,” but oh wells.