~by Haley Lynn Gray~
I work with a great many personality types, and one I find genuinely interesting is the person who wants to make someone else pay.
Revenge, righting a wrong, teaching someone a lesson — the reasons vary, the impulse doesn’t. And yes, I can think of people who’d benefit enormously from tacks on their chair or superglue on the toilet seat.
Here’s why it isn’t worth it anyway.
1. You almost never get the outcome you wanted
What you want is for them to understand — to feel what you felt, and to realise they were wrong.
That is almost never what happens. What happens is they feel attacked, conclude that you’re unreasonable, and go looking for support from everyone who’ll listen. The lesson you intended to teach is not the lesson received.
2. It makes you the problem
Whatever they did may have been genuinely bad. But the moment you retaliate, the story stops being about their behaviour and becomes about the fight.
Onlookers rarely have the full history. What they see is two people behaving badly, and they’ll divide their sympathy accordingly — which is a poor return on having been the wronged party.
3. It costs you the credibility you’ll need later
Credibility is a budget. Spending it on getting even leaves less for the moments that actually matter.
And people watch how you treat someone you’re in conflict with. Clients, employees, colleagues — all quietly noting what you’re like when you’re angry, and what that might mean for them one day.
4. It keeps you attached to them
This is the real cost. Revenge requires thinking about someone constantly — planning, anticipating, reading meaning into everything they do.
You’ve handed a person you dislike a permanent tenancy in your head, rent-free, and you’ll be paying attention to them long after they’ve stopped thinking about you at all.
5. The alternatives work better
Not passivity — there’s an unhelpful idea that the choice is revenge or lying down. There are better options in between:
Address it directly. Say what happened and what you expect instead. Unsatisfying, often effective.
Use the actual mechanism. A contract, a manager, a formal complaint, a lawyer. Dull, and it works.
Remove yourself. End the relationship, decline the work, stop the access. The most powerful response to consistently bad treatment is usually withdrawal, not retaliation.
Or simply do well. Nothing irritates someone who wronged you quite like your continued, visible success — and it costs you nothing to pursue, since you were doing it anyway.
The one exception
None of this means tolerating harm. If someone is stealing, harassing, or damaging your business, act — firmly, formally and quickly.
That’s not revenge; it’s protection, and the difference is whether you’re trying to stop something or trying to make someone suffer.
Let it go, and get on with building the thing you were building.
