Certainly in your life there are people put you down; as if they were sucking up all your energy.
If you meet these people for lunch or coffee, usually after that meeting you start to reconsider all your life decisions, including something trivial like – did I really need to see the latest Spiderman; what if it really is a trash and if it’s not worth watching?
You run into these banal dilemmas because whatever you said in the past two hours, your friend did not miss the opportunity to point out your mistakes and your nonsense.
These are the people you share something good with and they tell you something better that happened to them or someone they know; also, if you share something bad with them, they will tell you that you have no reason to worry because something worse has happened to them or someone they know.
These people are the smartest people in the world, they watch the best movies, they listen to the best music, they read the best books, they cheer for the best football clubs, and only their decisions are right, just like their opinions.
These people will truly respect you only when the whole world respects you; which means never.
These individuals will have several idols who have achieved some remarkable success; be it a Nobel Prize, an Oscar, exceptional financial success, a number of YouTube subscribers, or anything “world class”, and if your opinion does not match that of Steve Jobs or Casey Neistat, you will never get the approval of your vacuum cleaner.
My advice is to end any contact with these people. If this is someone close to you, then you need to find some form of defense.
Most often, these people are unaware of their bad influence; in that case it is enough to tell them how you feel and they may reconsider their behavior and pay more attention to what they say, but you must know that over time they will return to autopilot and continue their old behavior, so you will have to warn them again.
If their behavior, and their attitudes towards you, do not change, then you need to be careful about what you share with such individuals and stop taking them seriously; you have to distance yourself.
You need to know that the only way these people can be happy is by putting down others.
It’s probably not their fault. This kind of behaviour is often caused by lack of support; they had the strict and overly ambitious parents whom they could never satisfy and these parents often made them aware of how worthless they were. Therefore, in order to be raised in their own eyes, they must belittle others.
A true friend is someone who can celebrate your successes with you.
People who have nothing good to say about you and what you do should not be your friends.
Lastly, think twice before criticising others; maybe you’re a vacuum cleaner without knowing it.