The badness you can actually fix

Spend a shift cataloguing other people's flaws and you'll never run out of material. The manager who plays favorites. The coworker who coasts. The customer who treats you like furniture. You can stew on all of it, draft the speeches in your head, and arrive home wrung out — having changed exactly none of it.

Marcus caught the absurdity of where we point our effort. "It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men's badness, which is impossible" (Meditations 7.71, Long). Read it slowly. The one set of faults you have real power over — your own snapping, your own corner-cutting, your own grudge-keeping — you mostly leave alone. The faults you have no power over at all, other people's, you chase around all day.

This is the week's move turned back on yourself. Reading people without mind-reading frees up enormous energy, because you stop prosecuting cases you can never win. The warehouse picker, the ward nurse, the parent refereeing siblings: each has one person's conduct actually in hand.

Let the manager be the manager's problem. Spend the saved effort on the only badness you can outrun.