Jordan Harbinger

Hopefully help him see things from your point of view.

Whatever you do, don't escalate it.

Don't attack.

Definitely don't hit him with the, hey, shithead, where's my wedding invite comment above, as tempting as that might be.

And if your brother ignores your attempts to talk, then you'll know that you really did everything you could for the time being, and you'll have to go with option two, but hopefully with a little bit less regret.

You can exact your revenge by getting him the $6 water goblets that aren't dishwasher safe.

No, the idea does seem to be in the zeitgeist right now.

Like we've normalized cutting people off too much.

And Gabriel, I don't know if you see this on social media, but people make fun of this all the time.

Like

Oh, you don't want to do totally reasonable thing.

Well, that's toxic and a boundary for me.

Yeah, totally un-nuanced.

And those same people are like, why is everybody, this loneliness epidemic?

And it's like, didn't you cut someone off because they got your order wrong at Starbucks when they went to go get coffee?

Didn't you label your ex toxic because they don't like noodles?

Come on.

For sure.

I think what you're getting at is, if the implication of his question is, my family might be cutting me off for no reason, like so many families do, so maybe I don't need to take much of an interest in their reasons, then he needs to revisit that assumption.

And if you do revisit that assumption, you'll also know that you handled this very differently from how your family tends to handle these things, which I think would be the real victory here.