Dead wrong on all counts for pretty much every reason.
You are making the world you live in every moment. By assuming the worst of people by default, you make the worst possible world for yourself, and almost certainly for others you come into contact with, too, as they will have to interact with you based on the filters you see through, the barriers you put up, and the responses you make in accord with them. Most of whom will have no clue what is going on in your head, but will be subject to it anyway.
This is usually the board where people say they are brave and encourage it in others, where women regularly encourage other women not to be fearful, and so does everyone else to everyone else.
There is a critical difference between what gets in our mind through paying attention to concrete events and what we cram in there on our own. I've seen it referred to as mental hygiene. It is certainly the case that you have to be careful what you put in there. That is taken far too lightly by some, who don't seem to realize that GIGO -- garbage in, garbage out --applies to what we put in our minds as well as our bodies.
And for that -- it is we who are responsible, not the rest of the world.
I see this almost every day in the neighborhood I live in, and with the people I work with, who are almost well into their senior years. The more they decline, the more paranoid they get. The more fights they pick with each other. The more sure they are that whatever their old friends are doing is now unacceptable and worth punishing somehow. The whole neighborhood used to be friends and now half of them are cussing out the other half over nothing, constantly exaggerating the drama and ramping up the thoughts that everybody else is evil.
Same thing with the seniors I've worked with as a guardian/conservator. A lot of them get more and more convinced the world is full of loonies and unacceptable people and behaviors ... and eventually they alienate all their friends and even their children and grandchildren until they are utterly alone.
It is not a symptom of enlightenment. Experience has nothing to do with it, and we can assume everyone involved has a lifetime of experience by this point anyway. It is a symptom of decline. I've begun to think it happens almost like clockwork ... but I do still know that not all succumb.
Still, it's nothing to feel proud of or superior about. I'd go so far as to say it's worth watching for in yourself. Even if you don't see it/realize it as part of your own decline, others probably will. One day, it may turn out that you've become the last to know that it's not the whole world that has gone nuts, but actually ...
