In a commercial for the Danish TV talk show Søndag Live that went viral on YouTube this past spring, host Ane Cortzen demonstrates what life might be like if we could dismiss people with a simple left-swipe as we do on the popular dating app Tinder.
One after another, Cortzen encounters people on her walk through the city who try to catch her eye, including co-host Michael Jeppesen and comic Anders Lund Madsen (who, with his heavy beard and disheveled hair, looks like Denmark’s answer to Zach Galifianakis). Each time, she callously flicks away the potential suitor with a quick finger swipe, sending each hurtling violently out of her path.
Danish TV host Ane Cortzen took her viewers on a tour of what life would be like if she could easily swipe away people she considers annoying.
Finally she comes upon handsome Danish physician Peter Qvortrup Geisling, whom she grants an approving right-swipe—only to be left-swiped herself by Geisling, smiling and humming along with Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” on his iPod as he quietly mouths the words, “To the left, to the left.”
It’s a funny visualization of the kind of snap judgments Millennials have become accustomed to making with the new dating app (and how badly those left-swipes might actually damage our spines, along with our self-esteem, if the action had real-life consequences). But, with more than 160,000 views worldwide, the wordless ad has also captured the imagination of people who, through their online comments, truly wish certain people could be as easily excluded in real life as they can be left-swiped—or blocked, or unfriended or unfollowed—on social media.
A survey on Facebook asks, “If there was a block button in real life, would you use it?” More than 700 out of the 1,000 polled answer “Yes.” (The brainy types on Quora answered a similarly worded question differently: “See: Restraining order,” with a Wikipedia link, was the most up-voted response.)
Beyond seeking a court order to block undesirables from stalking your driveway, however, there seems to be a growing number of people who would like to see real life become as customizable as their virtual lives.
And why not? On the ever-expanding arsenal of mobile devices we carry in our pockets, we can filter out all of the news, music, viewpoints and, yes, family and friends that we’d rather not be surrounded by, selectively choosing who and what winds up on our daily timelines.
In real life, however, there’s no such control. Annoying people pop up at school, in the workplace, in grocery store check-out lines and, especially, in traffic as regularly as that preening insurance salesman that slaps Bill Murray on the back each morning in Groundhog Day (“Am I right or am I right?”).
Wishing we could rid ourselves of “social allergens,” as Wall Street Journal columnist Elizabeth Bernstein described the behaviors of annoying prototypes—from noisy gum-chewers to public belchers to incessant knuckle crackers—as nothing new. Only Will Rogers was able to find every personality type likable.
What’s new is the entitlement we feel to being able to filter out people we find annoying. A recent study by the University of Colorado Denver Business School found that unfriending people on Facebook can have real life effects as well: Researchers found that 40 percent of those surveyed said they would avoid someone in real life who unfriended them on Facebook, with women being more likely than men to avoid someone in real life (IRL) who unfriended them.
That’s considered a plus by many social media users. “That’s what I like most about culling jerks on Facebook—the fact that it gets them off my back in person too,” wrote Seattle-based essayist Lindy West, a culture writer for GQ. After all, West noted, what’s so bad about being avoided in real life by a guy who annoyed you so much that you “can’t even stand the thought of him looking at your crabcake benedict on Instagram and had to take evasive action? Sounds like a win-win to me.”
But filtering out who we come in contact with in real life can have its downsides.
“Nowadays we can choose who we want to be friends with and what media we want to watch,” says Nicole Roberts, an assistant professor at ASU’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
“And in college dorms now, you can even choose who your roommates will be in advance, based on some computer matching algorithms. Before, you were just kind of stuck with whoever, and you learned to tolerate their differences and possibly even expand your own horizons in the process.
“It was the one time in your life where you were stuck with someone random,” Roberts says, almost wistfully. “And I don’t know if that’s such a good thing to get away from.”
Habits of Highly Annoying People
Christine Cashen is a Dallas-based public speaker and “humorista” on a personal nationwide campaign to “Stop Global Whining.” Her website includes a blog post on the “Seven Habits of Highly Annoying People (H.A.P.),” a takeoff on the seminal self-help book by Stephen R. Covey, where, in addition to whiners who insist on loudly taking their frustrations out on airport gate agents over baggage checking rules the ticket-takers have no authority to change, she lists a variety of societal “rule breakers” who drive her up the wall. Loud cellphone talkers. Parents who let their kids run wild in the post office. Multi-taskers who insist on whipping out their smartphones to check their email while you’re trying to have a face-to-face conversation with them.
“Humorista” Christine Cashen is the brains behind the “Stop Global Whining” campaign.
“I’ve got my share of pet peeves,” she admits. “I was on an airplane a couple of weeks ago, and I heard a nail clipper. And I look over, and there’s a guy in the aisle across from me clipping his toenails! I seriously almost asked for a barf bag, because it made me ill. And he was just happily clipping away, like, ‘I’ve got some free time, let me take care of some personal grooming.’”
Finally, Cashen reached across the aisle and said, “I’ve got a nail file if you want to borrow it to finish the job.” She was amused to find out the guy had no clue he was grossing out his fellow passengers with his activities.
“Most people aren’t out to deliberately annoy you,” she says. “They don’t know, or they don’t care. And all we can really do is find some humor in it.”
Cashen’s way of coping with annoying people is to invent funny stories that might explain their behavior, a technique she’s passed on to her kids. Before she confronted the nail clipper, Cashen says, she thought to herself, “Maybe he was raised by wolves. Maybe his nails are so long he’s afraid one will poke a hole through his shoe and he’ll be subdued by passengers as a potential shoe-bomber. You know? By making up stories, it’s fun, it’s creative and, who knows, you might be right!”
She learned that last point herself when she was stuck depending on the services of a “slow walker” working in a hotel she was speaking at. “He couldn’t have walked slower, and I needed to get a table for an event that was about to start.” Cashen found her temper boiling over until she was approached by another hotel employee who told her that slow Joe had been recovering from a bad motorcycle accident and this was his first day back on the job.
“I felt so stupid!” she says. “I couldn’t believe that I didn’t follow my own formula and invent a story for this guy. Because you really don’t know what’s up with other people, what makes them behave the way they do. You’ve got to give them the benefit of the doubt.”
If a real-life block button existed, would Cashen use it on all the slow walkers, airplane toenail clippers and loud cellphone talkers she encounters on a daily basis?
“No!” she insists. “My first instinct is to get mad at them, but then I think, ‘What can I do to make this funny or interesting?’ There’s always another way to look at it. I force myself to twist the dial, change the channel on how I’m seeing someone. We all need more compassion than judgment.”
Bonding Through Loathing
Working with young people every day as an ASU psychology professor, Nicole Roberts is used to dealing with a generation that’s grown up tailoring their personal universes through a series of “likes” and “dislikes.” But she doesn’t necessarily see her students wishing they could swipe away annoying people as easily as they can thumbs-down annoying songs on Pandora.
“I can see it going both ways,” she says. “To some extent, people who use social media can be more accepting, because they develop relationships with all kinds of people online that they wouldn’t normally meet, and that can break down some of the barriers if they’re used to dealing only with the same network of friends. The problem is that their social skills are not so good, so if they encounter people who annoy them, that can be tough if they have grown up only indicating their responses on the Internet. They may not know how to respond face-to-face.”
Roberts recommends developing empathy, first and foremost. “In psychology, there’s something we call fundamental attribution error, where we tend to blame the person instead of the situation,” she says. “So one way of coping with people you find annoying is to understand where they may be coming from.” This may include learning more about cultural differences or the events that may have shaped their personality.
Nicole Roberts, a psychology professor at ASU, sees both benefits and downsides to our growing interactions on social media.
“Another is to reinforce the positive behavior they might be exhibiting, so you can subtly shape the behavior of people around you,” adds Roberts, who admits she uses that technique on her own preschooler. “Like, if someone is always interrupting you, when they finally let you talk you can say, ‘Thanks for letting me finish my thought. I’ve been wanting to get all that out!’”
If that doesn’t work, breathe deep. “Nowadays in psychology, there’s a big focus on acceptance and mindfulness and just being in the moment and paying attention to your own feelings,” Roberts says. “So if someone is annoying you, just focus on your breathing—apply some Eastern philosophies—and also apply some of the traditional things to boost your own mood: make sure you’re getting enough sleep, and exercising. Whatever can improve your mood can offset some of the irritability and annoyance you may feel around other people.”
Finally, if all else fails, leave. While you may not be able to swipe the offending person away, sometimes we can swipe ourselves away—at least to another side of the break room.
“There’s often a sense of obligation that we have to be in contact with these people. But it is OK to remove yourself from that situation as much as possible. You may have more control than you think in your interactions with even your closest coworkers.”
If you just can’t stop hatin’ on the people who rub you the wrong way, Roberts says, embrace it.
“It can be fun to be annoyed by other people and talk about it!” she allows, playing the devil’s advocate. “Sometimes we have anger and aggression, and we can actually get closer to people by bad-mouthing somebody else. There are always those annoying people in the office that everyone talks about, and it can actually bond together the people who feel the same way.
“There’s something to be gained by collective meanness—the dark side of responding to annoying people,” Roberts says, laughing. “I mean, it would be nice if we could all be accepting and happy with everyone. But there’s a lot of social reward in finding people annoying and all chiming in on that.”