“Dealing with bad people should always lead you to do one thing: Appreciating the good people in your life all that much more.” – Eric Barker

One of the most common pieces of advice in the modern era is to cut out “toxic people” from your life.

A few presumptions are baked into it. One is taking for granted that you’re not the toxic one that other people should cut out. Another is that you’re not interpreting any feedback you don’t like as “toxic”. And another is that you’re not so fragile and dogmatic that you outcast anyone from your life who even slightly dissents from your worldview.

It’s worth remembering this classic truth:

“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” – Raylan Givens (from the tv show Justified).

Who are these toxic people we should cut out of our lives? Is it people who aren’t bursting with relentless positivity? Or people who fail to sufficiently gush about how amazing we are? Or people who give us corrective feedback when we’re full of shit? (No, no, and no, obviously.)

It’s energy-draining “high-conflict people” we need to cut out, and there are plenty of them.

Now, the vast majority of people are sound (a very Irish word; translation: nice, decent). But certainly not everyone is, and it doesn’t take many of them in your life to really screw it up.

The birds-of-a-feather effect

“Psychology is more contagious than the flu” – Jeff Kirkham.

“Birds of a feather flock together” is a well-understood social phenomenon called “homophily”, the tendency for our friends to resemble us and shape our thoughts and behaviour.

The people we spend the most time with shape the mental scripts we unconsciously follow in life – from our accents to our typical diet, exercise habits, ambitions, and goals.

Five people theory

“Filtering the people we allow into our lives is probably the most important factor in determining whether we will live a happy life or not.” – James Altucher

The quote above has been stated time and time again, in different forms throughout history, because it’s simply true. The polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe reportedly said, “Tell me with whom you consort and I will tell you who you are.” The author Robert Greene advised, “Only create associations with positive affinities. Make this a rule of life and you will benefit more than from all the therapy in the world”. And the author Tim Ferriss wrote that if he had a billboard that he could put any message on, he’d put “You are the sum total of the 5 people you spend the most time with”.

Maybe some fine-print needs to go into that billboard for literalists and nit-pickers: The statement isn’t literally true obviously, and exceptions abound, but the spirit of it is true: be mindful of the company you keep.

Mean world syndrome

The same applies to who you listen to online. News media and social media zoom in on the behaviour of a tiny minority of the population – the noisiest and worst samples of humanity. The worst traits of humanity are in the digital spotlight continually because that’s what fascinates, enrages, and engages us. This means more clicks, more attention, and more ad revenue for advertisers and social media companies.

Over time, being exposed to this content can easily make you think that the majority of people are worse in almost every way than they really are, known as “mean world syndrome”. It’s worth remembering that the internet is mostly made up of, let’s say, psychologically unusual people.

99 problems

In any relationship, one of the people who will shape you most is, of course, your partner. (Some people practically become new versions of themselves every time they start seeing someone.) Few choices you could make in life affect your day-to-day happiness as much as the partner you choose.

In his TED talk “What Makes a Good Life: Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness,” Robert Waldinger identifies a key trait of happy couples: the feeling that they can count on each other when times get tough.

“Good relationships don’t just protect our bodies; they protect our brains. And those good relationships, they don’t have to be smooth all the time. Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker with each other day in and day out, but as long as they felt that they could really count on the other when the going got tough, those arguments didn’t take a toll on their memories.”

There are a million theories about how to make relationships work, but to distil some sane advice down to its essence: Don’t invest your time and energy in people who don’t invest it back. So much misery could be avoided if people didn’t treat others as malleable blank slates they could mould into whatever they want.

Angels and demons?

This all comes with some caveats that I hinted at at the beginning. All lives are extraordinarily complicated. Each person has personal histories made up of complex experiences in an untidy reality that simple “good” and “bad” categorisations can never do justice to, and blah blah blah.

Ok, with that out of the way, we can agree that some people are tough to love. And some people are genuinely toxic (despite this word being overused online, along with “narcissistic”). Filtering out people like that might be the single most important thing you can do for your happiness.

As a viral tweet put it: “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.”

(Caveat: See the Rayland Givens quote above about running into assholes all day.)

The 90% rule

By having a wide network of people in your life, you can see more clearly when someone is toxic. Again, most people are emotionally healthy, honest and trustworthy. And most of us are not angels. This is where the 90% rule comes in, a sanity check for a person’s patterns of behaviour.

When someone repeatedly behaves in ways that stress and bewilder you and drain your mental energy, ask yourself: would 90% of people behave this way? If not, you’re almost certainly dealing with a person who needs to be removed from your life. These are “high-conflict” people (estimated to be about 10% of the population), and they’re very unlikely to change. They thrive on conflict.

Some of them are covertly aggressive[1], some are overtly aggressive, but all of them lack accountability and social self-awareness. The Narcissist’s Prayer captures what most of them are like:

That didn’t happen.

And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.

And if it was, that’s not a big deal.

And if it is, that’s not my fault.

And if it was, I didn’t mean it.

And if I did, you deserved it.

If you have people in your life like this – high-conflict people who add pointless stress to your life – they will bring out your worst qualities (toxic traits beget further toxic traits), infect you with their attitude, drain your mental energy, and try to sabotage you in various ways. You have no duty to keep those people around. It doesn’t matter whether you have biological ties to these people or not.

If you feel guilty about cutting someone like this out of your life, think of it this way: if someone is dragging you down, they’re undermining your ability to support and do good by other people.

So if that matters to you, the responsible choice is to get rid of toxic people, not to stick it out with them out of a misplaced sense of duty. In the end, they would not do the same for you.

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We can take this a step further. The number one deathbed regret is directly connected to the birds-of-a-feather effect. We unconsciously adopt the expectations of those around us, and people regret being too afraid to step outside those expectations and live the life they truly wanted. But this is largely based on a trick of the mind. You can read about it here.

Notes

[1] Covert aggression and passive aggression overlap but are not the same. Both involve hidden hostility, but passive aggression is avoidant and defensive (e.g., procrastination, pouting, silent treatment, passive non-compliance), while covert aggression is manipulative and strategic, hidden under a guise of innocence or reasonableness.