Accidental Saving

The strange happenings…

By Snarky LisaPublished 2 months ago • 3 min read

There are times when an action meant to harm someone instead ends up saving the person it was meant to hurt. Events when sin turns into good for its target. Hatred which almost shows up as a strange sort of love and/or care, in a weird way.

Alternatively, an act of malice could end up serving goals of goodwill that aren’t directly related to the intended recipient — erm, victim. Whether the actual target gets some sort of consequence or not is often irrelevant in these cases.

For the record, I’m not talking about a receiver finding “light in the darkness” or finding hope in an otherwise bleak situation. I’m talking about results being achieved either right away or as a direct continuation of a series of events leading up to them.

With the first category, an insult could fall flat and (no pun intended), flatter the person it was meant to target — as a basic example, of course. Not giving someone a prestigious role they’ve worked hard for may save them from its troubles.

Heck, a refusal to treat someone decently enough while trying to get them to join a cult might cause that someone to run before they can even join their lower echelons. This also goes for more mundane relations in this world.

These kinds of instances are perhaps easier to obscure than the second type. Because they result in the target being “saved” in some way, the sufficient damage required to raise red flags among many people’s eyes might not even show up. As such, they arguably tend to have more of a net positive.

By contrast, the second category is more complicated — at least, in my opinion. These are frequently things with more subtle, indirect, good consequences along with bad ones on top of them. Because of this, their net lean decency-wise can vary.

Let’s take a talented and important employee leaving a job from both serious burnout and an ongoing feud with their manager as a case.

This hurts the employee financially and at first, could hurt the company affected by the job cut as well. It’s neither good nor pleasant at the beginning, and the person who used the chopping block on their own employment status could come to regret their decision at some point.

However, over time, the business might end up finding even better workers to replace the employee they got deprived of. Sure, they’ll likely never get that employee back — if said employee wants to work with them again, that is — and the employee could still be struggling out there. That being said, the fact of the matter here is that the company still gained a spark.

With the above stated: is the power the business gained in the long run really that much of a logical result from initially losing one of their workers? Or did they have to put far more effort than they would have needed to if they could have just kept the initial worker that disappeared?

I mean, there are a lot of factors in between which contributed to the newer employees getting hired: timing, the identities of the hiring managers, and so forth. It’s not as simple as just the first employee’s departure immediately creating a net gain.

The point here is that deeds and plans meant to cause harm to other people can still backfire into doing good instead of bad. Whether these effects are desired or not by those involved is another story — and indeed, there are plenty of times when they aren’t.

Any other thoughts on this? Let me know in the comments!