People. There are a lot of them, roughly seven billion. We interact with them everyday. Some are nice, some are funny and some are, unfortunately, rude. There's no escaping rude people. They're everywhere.

So, how do we deal with rude people?

I was recently getting lost on YouTube and stumbled upon a video by the channel "The School of Life" and their video on "How to Remain Calm With People." They compare rude people and the things that they do to the way that young children act. It is not uncommon that a child will act terribly for seemingly no reason and regardless of what they do (spill their food or scream at the top of their lungs), we never get mad at them the way we get mad at adults. We tend to align a sense of innocence with children and we always provide excuses for their behavior whether it be that they are hungry, tired, etc. This is the exact opposite of what we do around adults.

Whenever someone cuts in front of us in line, is driving too slow on the highway or is taking too long to order their food at the drive-thru, we tend to come to the conclusion that the other person is malicious and intentionally being "rude" to spite us. In order to deal with these people and have a better relationship with those around us, we must employ the baby tactics we use. Instead of getting angry, we should consider that the line cutter is in a rush or may have an injured knee and that the slow driver may be a teenager practicing for his license or someone unfamiliar with the area that may be lost.

The video brings up the perspectives of French philosopher Emile-Auguste Chartier. He told his pupils to "never say that people are evil" and that "you just need to look for the pin." This means that we should "look for the source of agony that drives a person to behave in appalling ways." It is helpful to "imagine that they're suffering off stage in some area we can't see. To be mature is to learn to imagine this zone of pain in spite of the lack of much available evidence."

As Elle Woods said in "Legally Blonde," "Happy people just don't shoot their husbands." People who are content with their lives do not do appalling things. There has to be some underlying stress that makes them act out whether it be a breakup, a death of a loved-one, a bad test grade or something someone said to them. Everyone goes through hard times and it is natural for people to try and relieve their stress on other people. We shouldn't get upset at them, we should see them for what they are: human.

This past school year, I had a creative writing course where we explored the human condition. One of the first lessons my teacher gave us was on empathy. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's perspective to understand how they feel, what they do and why they do it. Apart from not being able to write well, we cannot be human without a sense of empathy. We may not know from experience what someone is going through, but we all know what it is like to hurt, to have loss, failure, embarrassment, anger, sadness and countless other human emotions.

In times when we least want to do it, we need to aim compassion in an unexpected place, towards the people that annoy us the most. "We must move from anger to pity."