23 New Rules For Being A Good Person
1. While on a date with a person who does not yet know that you are cripplingly self-involved, do not take out your phone at the dinner table more than three times in the whole evening. (The caveat, of course, being when they go to the bathroom and you can frantically scroll through your notifications with impunity.)
2. When ordering from a poor, innocent barista who had no involvement in the invention of the terms “venti” or “grande,” don’t make snarky comments about how stupid the company terminology is that they are then forced to laugh at.
3. You are only allowed to argue the merits and importance of tipping culture if you have worked in the service industry to support yourself in the past 10 years.
4. If you hear someone listening to a song or an artist that you don’t like, take at least a moment to consider before vomiting out your disdainful disapproval of whatever they enjoy. The time that someone I care about told me, offhandedly, that Major Lazer was “boring EDM for frat boys,” I went home and cried in the fetal position.
5. Never stalk someone’s Tumblr unless you are 100 percent sure that they do not have visitor logs.
6. If someone asks you to watch over their things while they use the bathroom at a coffee shop, always do it with grace and honor, as one day it will be you who needs to pee but is too encumbered with laptops and tote bags to do so comfortably.
7. If you are the kind of person who listens to your music at a volume that is clearly bad for your eardrums, invest in earbuds that don’t leak sound. No one needs to hear the tinny aftertaste of the new Drake album.
8. Always keep a mental division between the information that a romantic interest has provided you themselves, and the information that you have painstakingly harvested from their social media. Never shall the two meet in conversation.
9. Even in the heat of anger, take a few seconds to think of an insult or criticism that isn’t based on someone’s physical appearance or sexual history.
10. If you know that you have unfinished business or resentment towards an ex, bite that electronic bullet and remove them from your Facebook, at least for a while. It will prevent many future embarrassments or intense sessions of self-flagellation.
11. Keep the really good message exchanges you have with good friends, family, or your SO. You never know when you’ll want to look back on it again to remind yourself of all that’s great about them.
12. Delete the sexts and dick pics, though, because you never know how it will find itself as a banner ad on the side of TheBigTittyTeenEmporium.com.
13. If you are in the bathroom at a bar and are a 6 on the “1-10 How Badly Do I Have To Pee Scale” and see someone come in who is jumping up and down and grimacing and clearly a 9.5, let them go before you.
14. Put down your phone and/or take out your earbuds when you get up to the cash register to make your order. Even if you’re having some ~incredibly important phone call~ that absolutely can’t wait until your burrito is safely ordered.
15. Say hello to said cashiers, almost as if they were real human beings.
16. When shopping for a cardigan or t-shirt that is near the bottom of the stack, try to extract it without obliterating every item on top of it.
17. When using a dressing room, remember that “leaving the clothes on the floor and scattering the hangers on top of it to add insult to injury” is not as compassionate a strategy as “returning your unwanted items, on a hanger, to the salesperson.”
18. If you are bringing your child to a public place, such as a restaurant or movie theater, where other people are paying to enjoy themselves and relax, and your child begins throwing a temper tantrum, take them outside and give them a Klonopin or something.
19. When there are people waiting to sit down with their fresh coffees and muffins at the coffee shop, do not continue into hour three of your Imgur cruising next to your empty plate and cup.
20. If you tell your waiter that you are, in fact, “ready to order,” try not to spend the next 30 seconds silently looking at the menu while he stands next to you thinking about all of the other tables he could have attended to while you deliberated.
21. On public transportation, be as discreet and considerate as possible with your coughing/sneezing/germ-radiating. Almost nothing is worse than being stuck next to someone who is liberally coughing on a heavily crowded morning commute.
22. Don’t leave voicemails unless it is absolutely necessary. They are stressful.
23. When you do get a voicemail, do your best to respond to them within, say, the first two months or so. Even if the anxiety brought on by hearing the voicemail robot tell you that you have “Eight… new… messages” is enough to make you want to give up having a phone. Bear with it, it’s the right thing to do.