Did your bullies end up better off than you did?

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Allowing kids to bully trains them to be bullies and sociopaths when they grow up.

A Ph.D. doesn't say anything about success, quality of life, social, or financial standing. It doesn't even really necessarily say anything about intelligence. SO it shows a lot of ignorant hubris to feel so superior simply because you are getting one.

Heck, I knew one person that got his PhD, and he was considering a job as a college professor. He seemed elated at the prospect that he might make half of what I am currently making. Emotionally, Socially, and Financially, he wasn't doing well.

I knew another person with a PhD in English, and he didn't speak well AT ALL! And he ADMITTED and APOLOGIZED for it!

Oh well, considering some of your threads, I guess your opinions here fit.

I read a book on sociopaths, and it said that any success the more "functional sociopath" types get is only transient. While they seem to get ahead in the short run (because they are ruthless, don't care about hurting others to get ahead, etc), they usually end up only "ahead" in very materialistic ways to begin with, and usually even lose those things by the end of their life (usually by taking too many risks).

I don't think all bullies are sociopaths, but I think two of my childhood bullies actually were (others were messed up in various ways but not lacking conscience), and that's one reason I don't see their apparent success at the moment as all that great. The book I was reading on the subject actually took up this subject. It said that a lot of people envy sociopaths because they do often get ahead in the short run. The author said that her approach to this sentiment was to tell people to imagine the alternative: Imagine not having a conscience, hurting people for fun, not knowing what love (in any sense of the word at all) is like, not feeling any particular purpose in life except selfishness, feeling a void because of that and always having to fill it with things like thrill-seeking because you can't fill a void with what other people would fill it with, etc. Does that still sound better? Etc. Doesn't to me.

I think psychopathic and/or contemptible traits are often mistaken for positive traits in work interviews because, many times, such as in large companies, the initial phases of interviewing are done by persons that are little more than secretaires and have little idea of what they are doing. (At least where I live.)
Not hiring the right people to keep psychopaths out is stupid basically because no one wants Enron happening again.

Personally, AS or whatever, I was never written off on the psychological interview; I was either written off at the first chance or at the very last.

Funny, my grandmother used to try to console me by saying that the girls who bullied me would all end up broke, uneducated, pregnant often, and with "bad men" just in a few years.

For the most part, I think she was probably right, based on the trajectory they were on when high school ended. But I left town not long after, and haven't seen any of them since.

One girl got pregnant while we were still in high school. I know one eventually married a guy we both knew in school, and they had four kids, and for all I know she may be quite happy.

The only bullies I can recall are doing general labor or lower end jobs. Much lower on the food chain then they once thought they were.

Oh, THIS. You NEVER know about people. They may look/seem "fine" from the outside, but you never know what happens behind closed doors.

NEVER.

Yeah, They figure such traits mean you will be FIRM, and thus a good manager, or a team player and thus a good employee. NEITHER is that likely to be true. 8-(

I don't know where you are, but most firms in the U.S. have a department of #$%^& called H.R.!(Human Resources) They tend to know little about anything, and CERTAINLY little about the non administrative jobs. Yet THEY are generally the first hurdle you have to get over. If you are just trying to get a good job, there is perhaps a 95% chance they will throw your resume away, or just NEVER look at it. You often have to tailor your resume to THEIR request! You also BETTER generally have at least 5 years experience in what they are looking for EVEN if nobody can have that much! I lost out on one job because I didn't have 5 years experience on a product out for 2 years.

Finally, I often have the SAME problem you do! Either written off at first glance, maybe 3 times because the resume didn't cover it, I looked TOO good, or sometimes I was too nervous and just slipped up. I was also written off at last glance perhaps twice because they chose another for some reason.

I distanced myself from all of them. I am happy with where I am in life, for the most part.

I did run into one later on. He had sustained a head injury and was even more pathetic than I always envisioned him to be. I was working in the County eye clinic at the time and had to administer a visual field test to him. He was overweight, in a home, and living for life off of disability. I felt very sad for him.

Karma has a much longer attention span than you do, Ben.

Financially? Probably, but most people in the first world are.

I don't give a damn for money, status and power; never have, never will.

Most times, the only time karma ever works is at death (and what will eventually come after.) It's all over the Bible that good things happen to bad people and vice versa. It's unfair but that's just the way things are on this planet.

But the best thing to have been said in this thread is that we have NO WAY of knowing just how good or bad someone's life may be unless you practically live with them!

Mine have all had kids before 20 and a string of messy relationships. Poor people.

As a young kid, your parents probably drilled into you that if you work hard you would go far, make money and be successful in the world. Unfortunatley, in the corporate world, that is farthest from the truth. You must have "bully skills" to make it in the corporate world. Hard work will keep you from getting fired, but it won't get you the job, and it certainly won't get you promoted. To do those, you need to scheme, like, cheat, kiss ass to the ones above you, and stab the ones in the back around you.

...this is one of the reasons why I started my own business where I can directly see the results of hard work, but even then, simply keeping a business above water still requires you to go against your personal morals and eithics

I see some of the bullys and other people that made my life miserable when I visit offices and businesses to do work for them. While some of these people are working low-end jobs, others have been quite successful in big corporations. They are still back-stabbing, lying, cheating, and making others' lives miserable as they force their way to the top. I'm not sure what their home lives are like, but when you look at the actual work skills they posses, they are nil, and they certainly didn't get to where they are by working hard!

I don't know because I don't keep up with them. I should call them up, find them and say, so how are things? Is life going okay for you?

I cancelled out most bullies by lashing out and fighting them. No bully left behind.

I haven't seen any of my bullies in about 6-7 years. They'd be about 18-19 now.

I don't really know what any of them are doing, exept for one, who got herself pregnant not long after I left that school/town when I was 12. She moved out of her parents house soon after having her son, leaving him with her parents, wanting nothing to do with him. She didn't learn much from her experience as she got a new boyfriend not long after the birth and moved in with him, leaving her son behind.

I have a firm idea that the rest of them haven't become very successful, either. 4-5 of them were theives as young as 7, most of the girls were rolling up their skirts to knicker height before they were even in their teen years. Most of them were smoking and drinking before highschool (age 11) and soon after entering high school, started discovering drugs.

I remember one girl and her brothers were in the local papers once when she was about 9-10 for trying to break in to a sweet shop.

So, yeah, I doubt any of them turned out to be very successful based on how I knew them from school. I doubt many of them have changed their ways, either.

Last edited by Anniemaniac on 19 Dec 2007, 10:02 am, edited 1 time in total.