Arrogance has a price to pay

So I happened to meet someone who I have not met for quite a while, and I could sense the disdain and discontentment towards me. I can be something I said, posted on facebook, or written on this blog. Basically I know it due to my arrogance. Coincidentally, in a recent presentation, I found that my partner is better loved by the audience than I am. In short, he’s an over-achiever who is very humble.

Seeing how good a people-person my partner is and how hurtful it was when the indifference of the acquaintance had towards me was, I started to think about the ever growing arrogance in me again, and came to a conclusion. Ultimately, humility boils down to two factors: whether you love yourself more, or you love the people around you more.

I’ve been taught a big lesson on arrogance before: some things are better left unsaid; saying it doesn't change anything or anyone, it just brings hatred towards me. But no, saying those things brought me a sense of superiority, it made me feel better than others, it fulfills my ego. That is the main cause of my arrogance. Unfortunately, I like the attention from people too. The problem with being arrogant is, it agitates people around you. It doesn’t matter if you’re right, people hates it when you’re right, and they’ll all be like “god damn it, I hate it when he’s right”. The problem is, I like to celebrate and make sure everyone knows that I’m right.

So the tradeoff is really between the love of people and being humble and nice to others, or the love of yourself and going around poking others.

I choose the latter.

I realize that I have always been a selfish person who loves me more than others, and I live by the principle that “you can’t please everybody, but you can please yourself.” However and fortunately, I find that guilty conscience still lives somewhere in me, every now and then, incidents as above happens and the morals and ethics kick in to check if I’m doing okay. So for now, I hang in the balance of my arrogance and my guilty conscience, I think I’d still be okay for quite a while.

P.S. And of course, there’s the political-hypocritical humility: you need the people around you. That’s the reason why arrogance is good for me. In order to put up the arrogant front, I have to make sure that I have as little dependency on others as possible. This pushes me to strive forwards to be ever better than others, so that incidents where I need to beg others for help can be as little as possible.