Resentment, like many other entities in our world, operate under the compounding force.

Just like health, wealth, relationships, your skills and pretty much everything else – over time these entities evolve, and devolve, in a compounding fashion.

If you build a relationship with a friend or colleague, the value of that relation at the 10th year, or 30th year of knowing them, is significantly more valuable than it was the first few months of knowing them.

If you eat consistently healthy, the change noticed in the first few months would seem like nothing compared to the change of eating in a routine for 10 years. Your body reaps the benefits of compounding dividends, when you eat healthy over a long enough period of time.

Tapping into this compounding behaviour of life, and playing long-term games is my current outlook on life.

Now, the center of this reflection is an instance where this compounding force poses a negative. While most things compounding is good, a feeling like resentment towards something or someone can also compound – negatively.

Let’s say something happened, and now you’ve suddenly created a perception of someone, filled with hate and distaste.

It starts off small, but as the days and years go on, this feeling compounds. It gets bigger and bigger, and by the 10th year, your hate has grown into this acceptance of hatred. You have internalized this hatred, and you might have even forgotten what incited it.

That’s a dangerous feeling.

It’s also not one I want to carry around with me.

I haven’t lived very long, so I don’t possess any of this long-term pent up hatred. Of course I’ve possessed my fair share of relational trauma, and part of this reflection is noticing how to correctly respond to these situations.

I have observed this phenomena in those much older than me. I’ve probed these people, and often they can’t explain where the hatred comes from. From the outside looking in, it seems like irrational feeling. They’ve accepted this hatred and it has become a part of them.

I don’t think anyone wants to live in a state where their hatred towards another person is normalized. It sounds absurd, and yet, so many people are carriers of this difficulty.

That’s why it’s particularly important to make mends early. Don’t let these feelings compound. The longer you wait, the more you acquire the misfortune of compounded resentment, and soon it’ll be so large you would’ve had to accept it.

Of course, you can do some self-internalization, meditation, and eventually you can come face-to-face with your problems, at a future time. This doesn’t seem very productive, though, when you can solve the problem early on.