Anyone who regularly uses Link to get around town will certainly have noticed the recent surge in the number of riders (the good thing) and bags occupying whole seats (the bad thing). Most of these bags are owned by people either going to or coming from the airport. Often the bags do not give up their seat when the train is packed with humans. The bag just sits there like it’s not a non-living thing.
Now, one can tell the owner of a bag to free the seat, but that’s being aggressive, and open aggression costs a lot of nerve and psychic energy. This is Link, this is a new way of doing things for many people, and so one who knows the rules, who is accustomed to crowds, and who is also aggressive, has to constantly break from their urban solitude to tell clueless people to do this, to do that, to get out of the way on the escalator, and so on, and so on. It just never ends. The great advantage to being passive aggressive is it uses much less energy than standard aggression. And this virtue is often unappreciated or poorly understood. Aggression not only demands more of your energy but it also exposes you to the risk of an even more demanding entanglement. The costs of a passive aggressive response are impressively low. That is the Seattle way. Be proud of it.
Also, it makes more sense that the person who is doing something stupid or wrong in a public situation should bear the whole cost of sorting it out themselves. In Zimbabwe, for example, we never say “no.” If you ask for something, you will always get a “yes.” Ask for money, you will be told: “Yes, of course, when do you need it by?” And it is up to you to figure out if the yes is a yes or if the yes is a no. A negative response to any appeal is always so unpleasant and has more psychic costs than a positive one. So, why should the burden of the negativity fall squarely on the person being asked for money, or a place to stay, or to attend some event or party. The person who is doing the asking should work it out on their own: yes/yes or yes/no?
The same is true for the passive aggressive mode. It places the psychic burden of correcting a wrong on the offender. And it does not matter if the offender has no idea that this burden has been placed on him/her. What matters is its not on you.
