Revenge Is Someone Else’s Game
There’s a question I keep circling: how do you stop caring about your enemy?
Because caring is corrosive in a specific way. When you keep remembering someone who wronged you, you’ve handed them your values — your mood now depends on their trajectory. When they succeed, you turn bitter, asking how someone so toxic could possibly be doing so well. That question is a trap. It assumes their scoreboard is yours.
My first answer was discipline: get a mission. If you have a mission and you’re genuinely focused on it, you simply don’t have attention to spare for them. You ignore them not through effort but through overflow. A full life crowds out a grudge.
But honesty requires admitting there’s a whisper underneath, and the whisper says something darker. It doesn’t just want to outperform them — it wants them to fail. And I know that impulse. When someone breaks something in you, part of you wants to break it back. I don’t think wanting that makes you uniquely evil; I think it makes you someone who was hurt and never got a clean ending. But knowing where it comes from doesn’t make it useful.
Here’s what I’ve concluded: revenge is a distraction, and worse, it’s a game you didn’t choose. Its rules were set by the person who hurt you. Its win condition is defined in their terms. Even winning it means spending years optimizing for someone else’s defeat — which means they’re still setting your goals, just from a distance.
The real move is not “how do I get back at them” but “which game is actually mine?” Not revenge or its opposite, but the search for a game intended for you — one that only you can win, where the scoreboard is one you designed yourself. Engaging in anything revenge-shaped steals exactly the attention that search requires.
Which leaves the harder question, and I don’t have the answer yet: what is the game I want to play — the one where I’m actually capable of winning? It’s a hard question. But it’s the only one worth answering.
Drafted with AI assistance from my personal journal (2025-07-12), then edited by me. See On AI Assistance.