How becoming genuinely content is the most savage thing you can do to those who wronged you
Let’s address something that sounds like motivational poster drivel but is actually backed by decades of psychological research and the bitter tears of people who thought they’d broken you: happiness really is the best revenge. Not in that insufferable wellness-industry way where you pretend you’ve ascended to some higher plane where you pretend forgiveness whilst secretly checking their Instagram at 2am. Absolutely fucking not. I’m talking about the kind of happiness that makes people who hurt you incandescent with impotent rage because you’re thriving without them, and there’s not a single damn thing they can do about it except watch.
It’s the George Herbert principle from 1640: “Living well is the best revenge.” Except Herbert was being poetic because he was a 17th-century priest who had to mind his language. I’m going to explain exactly why this works neurologically and psychologically, why it’s more devastating than any direct retaliation, and why the people who wronged you will find your contentment more insufferable than anything you could possibly say or do to them. They’ll be losing sleep whilst you’re thriving. Delightful, isn’t it?
The Psychology: Why This Works (And Why Plotting Revenge is for Amateurs)
Here’s what makes happiness brutally effective: it removes you from the revenge cycle whilst denying your antagonist what they wanted – power over your emotional state. They’re expecting a fight and you’ve just… left to do something infinitely more interesting.
The people who waste energy on elaborate revenge schemes genuinely baffle me. You could be using that time to build something magnificent. Learn a new skill. Gain a new qualification. Deadlift double your bodyweight. Climb a mountain to conquer your fear of heights. Write a book. All things I genuinely did while someone was mad at me for something he did, someone I barely thought about during it all, but who – because he was as healed as a gangrenous leg and as stable as pogo stick on the Titanic – got his mum to send me nasty messages; what a wonderful example of an absolute fucking toaster.
Sitting there plotting like a budget villain, keeping yourself tethered to someone who isn’t giving you a second thought, let alone any attention, is simply embarrassing, really. So don’t, do something useful instead.
When someone wrongs you, what they’re after is proof they matter; it’s insecurity dialled up to eleven. They need evidence they’ve affected you – through anger, pain, obvious struggling. Your happiness denies them all of that. It’s showing up to a fight they desperately wanted and just… not being there because you were too busy winning at life.
Research shows revenge-seekers become more tied to their antagonist. Each vengeful thought keeps the wound festering. You’ve made them your unpaid life coach in chronic misery. Meanwhile, those who move on? The wrongdoer fades like a bad dream after morning coffee. They become irrelevant – not through effort, but through your life filling with better things.
But here’s the beautiful part: whilst you’re genuinely happy and they’re fading from your consciousness, they’re often still thinking about you. Research on social rejection shows that excluded individuals ruminate significantly more about those who rejected them than the other way around. Your indifference becomes their torment, delivered without you lifting a finger.
The Neuroscience: Your Brain Knows Better
Revenge gives you a dopamine hit. The ventral striatum thinks you’ve restored balance. Sweet vindication! Except that satisfaction evaporates faster than January gym resolve. Studies show revenge satisfaction lasts minutes to hours, not the lasting relief people expect. You’re left with the same anger, amplified by cognitive dissonance from acting like a twat. They’re now living rent-free in your head. Brilliant business model.
Happiness engages different pathways. Sustained wellbeing activates your prefrontal cortex, stimulates neuroplasticity (literally rewiring past giving a shit), and changes baseline neural activity. This is broaden-and-build theory in action – positive emotions don’t just feel good momentarily, they build lasting psychological resources including resilience, creativity, social connections, and problem-solving abilities. Your brain literally becomes better at being happy, creating an upward spiral.
Research shows happier people achieve better outcomes across the board: financial success, supportive relationships, better mental and physical health, stronger immune function, even longer lifespans. A comprehensive review of 225 studies found that happiness doesn’t just result from success – it precedes it. Being happy makes you successful, not the other way around. People experiencing frequent positive emotions build ego-resilience, which then predicts increased life satisfaction over time.
This is why living well works so devastatingly. You’re not pretending whilst stalking their social media – you’re actually building better, creating a positive feedback loop taking you further away whilst simultaneously making you more capable, more connected, more successful.
Here’s what that looks like: when I made the adult, emotionally grounded decision to remove myself from an horrific situation and spend a year living wild in the Scottish Highlands, I wasn’t plotting revenge. I was surviving. Healing. That year – which became the basis for a book and my entire business – healed me better than any therapy I’d tried before. The person who hurt me? I genuinely forgot about them. The “revenge” happened accidentally, as a side effect of building something extraordinary. I hit the jackpot of life whilst they remained stuck in the same misery that made them awful in the first place. Everything about it was wonderful, unless you were them.
Betterment Revenge: The Only Kind Worth Your Time
There’s a term for this: betterment revenge. Channelling pain into self-improvement. It’s revenge for adults who’ve evolved past keying cars and spending three hours crafting the perfect passive-aggressive email.
This differs from standard revenge because it’s not about bringing someone down – it’s about raising yourself so high they can’t see you from their pit of mediocrity. The revenge is incidental, which makes it more infuriating. You’re not doing it to make them feel bad. You’ve decided your life will be excellent regardless. They’ve become irrelevant. That irrelevance? Devastating.
University research on revenge strategies shows people actually prefer covert approaches – cutting contact, removing themselves from situations – because these methods feel psychologically safer and more dignified than direct confrontation. They allow people to reclaim power and agency without risking further conflict or appearing unhinged. Betterment revenge takes this several steps further by removing not just your physical presence but your emotional investment entirely.
The genius? No contact, no confrontation, no dramatic posts you’ll cringe at later. You’re just building something infinitely better. If they notice and it bothers them? File under “not my circus, not my monkeys” and carry on being magnificent.
Why Your Happiness Infuriates Them (And Why That’s Delicious)
People wrong others because of their own inadequacies. The cheater’s emptiness (not your problem). The threatened colleague’s mediocrity (not your problem). The critical family member’s self-loathing (still not your problem).
Direct revenge gives their fragile egos exactly what they need – proof they matter, that they’re significant enough to warrant attention. Even negative energy validates their importance. Well done, you’ve fed the beast.
Your happiness? That tells them they didn’t matter enough to derail you. That you’ve moved on whilst they’re stuck being… themselves. Which must be exhausting. Imagine waking up every day as that.
This devastates narcissists particularly. Research on narcissistic personality patterns shows they have an excessive need for admiration and validation from others to maintain their inflated self-image. They need your reaction like oxygen. Your pain validates their power. Your happiness? Suggests they were forgettable. Replaceable. That you’ve found better whilst they’ve become nothing. Their worst nightmare – irrelevance.
And they can’t do anything about your happiness without looking unhinged. What are they going to do, demand you be miserable to prove they hurt you? Phone and say “excuse me, you’re supposed to be suffering”? Your wellbeing becomes untouchable, utterly maddening to someone who needed to see you broken. They’re stuck watching you win whilst unable to articulate why it bothers them. Exquisite poetry.
The Long Game: Patience as Your Weapon
George Herbert knew in 1640 that thriving despite someone’s attempts to diminish you is more crushing than direct retaliation. He was 400 years ahead of the neuroscience.
Revenge – the getting-even kind – keeps you locked in relationship with your antagonist. They remain central to your narrative. You’ve made them the protagonist of your life, which is embarrassing. You’re better than this.
Happiness removes them entirely. Not through forced forgiveness or wellness-industry nonsense, but through building something so good they become irrelevant. Your life fills with relationships that nourish you, work that fulfils you, experiences that expand you. They fade to background noise.
That’s revenge that actually lands. Not because you’ve diminished them (though you might have, by contrast). But because you’ve elevated yourself to where they don’t register. They’re irrelevant. Forgotten. And if there’s one thing small people cannot stand, it’s irrelevance. Your indifference is acid dissolving their ego.
Research backs this: happiness comes from intentionally building a life aligned with your values, maintaining ties with non-arseholes, engaging in meaningful work, pursuing growth, finding purpose beyond yourself. It’s considerably more interesting than obsessing over someone undeserving of mental real estate.
So when wronged, feel the anger. All of it. Process it. Scream into pillows. But then decide: stay in that story tied to them like a tedious anchor, or write a better one where they’re not even a footnote?
Because nothing you could say or do will bother them half as much as watching you flourish. Your happiness becomes revenge they can neither escape nor retaliate against. They’ll watch you thriving whilst stuck in the same patterns, the same limitations, the same crushing smallness that made them lash out.
That’s fucking poetry.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a life to continue building that’s so magnificent it requires no effort to be revenge. Turns out when you’re not carrying dead weight, you can actually fly. When you’re not dragging an anchor, you move. When you’re not tethered to someone else’s mediocrity, you soar.
Who knew? George Herbert knew. And now you know too.
Mistress Mind 
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