People are the worst. Right? If you are a fellow misanthrope like me, it's tough to give a fuck about other people*. It's nothing personal. We just don't care. You can look at is as a negative, but we don't.
*You can probably lump narcissists in here too. In spirit, there's not much difference.
Unfortunately, most people aren't like us. They have "feelings" and "build bonds" with other people. For you "well adjusted" people some psychologists came of with this simple little list for what happens when you lose a loved one. I'm sure you've heard it: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Bashful, Grumpy, and Doc (or something like that). It's handy to bring up when you want to seem educated or pretend your Psychology minor meant anything. At the end of the day, it's probably bullshit. Regardless, it's actuate way more often than it should be. People are predictable in that way, I guess.
With that in mind, I thought about what happens for someone like me; the stages of loss that someone who is indifferent to everyone goes through, since we are as equally predictable a crowd as most people, only different. So, I came up my own list detailing the Misanthrope's 5 Stages of Dealing with a Loss. It is as follows:
Stage 1: Recollection
Look, you don't have time to remember ever cousin, uncle, parent, or friend you have. There's a lot of them out there. Too many, quite frankly. Whenever you find out that someone close to you has died, it stands to reason that the first thing you do is ask "who is that again?". If you don't do that, you won't know if you should even begin to care.
Stage 2: Checking
Not every death is sudden nor is it always a surprise to people. Sometimes, you have been told this person is sick or "not doing well". I know, I know. They expect you to remember this? What if you were thinking about something else at the time they were telling you about the person's turn for the worse (such as "Why won't this person shut up?" or "Why won't he leave me alone?")? That is why this next stage is important. This is when you ask in your head or out loud "Did we know this was coming?". The answer can radically change the reaction you choose.
Stage 3: Gauging
When you don't care who is who, it can be tough to respond to death appropriately. Since you don't actually care what makes one person different from another, there's isn't an automatic response you have prepared for hearing news like this. For myself, I felt about the same when I heard that Mother Theresa died as I did when bin Laden was killed. That's why this stage is important. This is when you ask "So, we're all sad about this, right?".
Stage 4: Diminishing
People die every day. That's science. And, a lot of the reason that we are misanthropes has to do with the fact that we don't like most people. Odds are, hearing that someone has died is the equivalent to one more name to cross off the list of people that mostly annoy us. That's why this next stage kicks in. Lest we forget that it isn't our death that's being reported [so it really doesn't matter], we must remind ourselves why this isn't such a big deal. Naturally, this leads to a very important thought: "Well, he was kind of an asshole." Good thing I remembered that. Time to go back to not caring.
Stage 5: Forgetting
"What were we just talking about?" No, I honestly forgot. Shit, everyone else around me is really sad. I know we were just talking about something but I don't remember what. I think it wasn't about me, thus it must've been about someone else. Probably some asshole. I think someone is about to cry or something. Oh no, maybe I can say I need to go to the bathroom then wait in there until they're better. God damn, what the hell were we just talking about? I think I was listening to most of it...Oh well. Must've not been important.
There you go. That's what goes through the head of a misanthrope. So, the next time you find yourself in a conversation with some curmudgeon who hates everyone and they don't seem to care that grandma's dead, just remember, you have your grief cycle. He has his own. Even though it isn't exactly grief, it is a natural response and it's also designed to minimize the attention paid to realizing how little he cares. It's for the best.
I hope you found this informative*.
*Not really, but I could never write a good conclusion. If I haven't made it clear what this is about by the end, then I'm not doing it write.
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