forgive but maybe forget?
September 14, 2026
Every once in a while, the universe hands me grief. Grief comes in different ways - breakups, deaths, rejection etc. I've learnt to be resilient, but sometimes there's an extraordinary case which exposes a chink in the armour. Its good though, when that happens, because I get to strengthen the armour.
Most recently, I had an incident where an old friend decided they didn't want to continue our friendship. The details aren't important, but I messed up, and this was the consequence. They mentioned, in the heated outburst, that more than this incident, he disagreed on our fundamental values and didn't want to be friends anymore. He stood by that post outburst.
From my perspective, my mess up didn't warrant this conclusion. I also wasn't privy to what he meant by he disagreed with my fundamental values. Nonetheless you can't force how people feel about you, so I didn't try to change his mind or reason my way out of it. And I've learnt that generally its better to not try and do that anyways, because it comes at the expense of your happiness & identity.
If your goal is to get someone to like you, you've projected your pleasure onto things that you do not have control over. We are responsible for our own happiness. If you tether your happiness to how someone feels about you, the logical way forward is to mould yourself into a form factor that this person will accept.
That can be fine sometimes. People do this with their parents, bosses, God etc. It can work well if what you tether yourself to is platonic, because if you agree on a set of base axioms (don't steal, don't cheat, etc.), then it works to mould you into a better version of yourself. But people aren't platonic, so the tether is inherently flawed. If you start changing yourself to be viewed in a higher regard by someone, your optimizing for their perception of you. And because they are flawed, so will be the perception.
A much more optimal way to deal with your identity is to first-principles your way into a better version of yourself. Then you can catch yourself at every junction instead of waiting for someone else's judgement on whether you've become better or not. Its still good to take people's feelings and opinions about you into consideration. But the goal shouldn't be 'I want person X to like me more', but rather 'I want to be a better human being, and person X has pointed out a few flaws that make logical sense to me'.
Back to the story - when our friendship abruptly ended, I felt many emotions. It wasn't fun - I felt uneasy and anxious. I wanted to understand the causal chain from their perspective. I wanted all the answers. I found myself distracted and in a spiral. I wanted to reason my way out of discomfort, and fix the issue.
After deliberating, I came to the conclusion that what I did was wrong, but what my friend did was actually much worse. He should have told me how he felt about these fundamental value differences long before he decided to abruptly end our friendship, and I felt he owed it to me to be transparent. His outburst and the way he ended a long friendship to me, in my opinion, was an extreme interaction - sort of like nuking a country because they killed one of your citizens.
I felt anger towards him, and started demonizing him in my head for all the micro-things he had done in the past to affirm my belief. I was able to recognize that this was irrational, so I stopped doing that.
If you look carefully, you'll see that I've actually described, in the chain of events, the stages of grief. And If you read my other essays, you'll know I've been working on how to accept reality for what it is. 'You can't cry over spilled milk' is really just a reduction of the 5 stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And I've found that those first 4 stages are really just a massive inconvenience, because regardless, the end state is acceptance. I've learned to identify where I am in that pipeline, then accelerate to the finish line. If you can't control an outcome, accept it, learn, and move the hell on.
In this case, even after accelerating to the finish line, I wasn't sure what the next move was. Should I reach out and try to make things right? Should I accept a hypothetical apology? This has the caveat of him apologizing for his actions & me apologizing for mine - not 'hey I can change for the better and then you'll like me more'. I can accept what happened, but what then?
Its clear to me that forgiveness is mandatory. Forgiveness here means to not harbour animosity or hatred towards an individual. The reason its mandatory is because harbouring negativity is toxic for the mind. Whenever those neurons fire, they spike negative emotions which cloud your thinking and judgement, raise your blood pressure, and leave you in a state of anger, which is generally a bad thing. You have to forgive.
I have a trick for forgiving quickly. Forgiving is actually very easy if you can rationalize what they've done by taking into account their perspective. If someone steals money from you, the chain of thought can be - what they have done is wrong, but humans are imperfect and this one has made a mistake. He's in dire circumstances etc. Shit happens, its fine. Forgiving is different from forgetting though. I can forgive you from stealing, but I won't forget you stole from me & that you're capable of stealing. I'll use that as an important data point when I interact with you next.
Forgetting is a much more complex endeavour. You don't want to unconditionally forget, because that can have devastating consequences. If you know someone steals, they apologize, you forgive and forget, you've opened yourself up to being stolen from again. On the other hand, if a friend says something rude that rubbed you the wrong way, remembering it over & over might cause you to overweight something inconsequential. Our brains also put a large temporal factor on forgetting. As the years roll by, your memory fades. That's a limitation of our biology, but its not optimal from a performance standpoint. You have to train yourself to know when to forget, when to remember, and how much to remember. You want to put an adequate weight on an event - just right to give you the best outcomes.
Once you decide if you will forget or not, your next move becomes clear. If you decide you cannot forget that someone stole from you, it becomes very clear if you should be friends with them or not. If I come to the conclusion that someone is inherently untrustworthy for what they've done, and I cannot forget that, my next logical move is very clear.
This formalization helps, because it helped me explain my uneasieness. I didn't know whether I should forget what happened with my friend or not. I'll call this the forgetting classifier. How do you decide if something is worth forgetting or not.
I came to the conclusion that when someone wrongs you, there are a three variables here that go into the classifier on whether you should forget it. Longevity, plausibility, previous steps, next steps.
Longevity
The closer you are to someone, the deeper the relationship, the more grace you should give them. The more time they spend with you, the more they do for you. You keep them around because you think they're good for you, which means you fundamentally believe they are good. If you didn't, you obviously shouldn't keep them around. So when they mess up, you have more information to factor in. Relationships are investments of time, and compounding relationships are powerful. I anticipate there are several profound implications of sharing life with someone. For one, its a scarce resource. You only have so much life, so you can only have so many compounding relationships. Detaching from one of these really is a shame, because you lose rich shared experiences distributed over several versions of yourself.
Plausibility
Is what they did plausible? Can you rationalize it while still maintaining they are good for you? Is the lapse of judgement fundamental, or a function of an extraordinary circumstance? Is it repeated behavior? If someone is in a bad circumstance, and they say horrible terrible things to you, maybe spill a secret of yours, etc. Are you able to give them the benefit of the doubt by maintaining their past behaviors and chalking it off? If you can't do this, you have no choice to get to the conclusion that they are fundamentally flawed in some way. It really boils down to lapse in judgement versus fundamental flaw. And if you come to the conclusion that it is in fact a fundamental flaw, you'll have to decide if you can be friends with them given their fundamental flaw.
Previous steps and next steps
Lastly, how do they react to what happened. Are they apologetic, or do they stand by what they did? Can you agree to disagree and move on? Can you reach a common ground. Ego tends to come in the way here too. Cognitive defusion, again, can really help here.
These variables aren't independent of each other. The equation strongly correlates them. If you're close enough to someone and they apologize for a one-off incident, plausibility tends to get weighted extremely low. If you're not close to someone, plausibility gets weighted tremendously high. In general, I find that the apology is a high resistance gate. If the other person is not willing to apologize, and you feel wronged, that puts tremendous strain on the relationship.
Having a strong forgetting classifier seems vital to me now. Its an unfortunate skill to have to exercise, but nonetheless seems like one of those things that is essential to any strong individual.