We are told that it is toxic, immature and even self-destructive to sweat the small stuff, but can pettiness ever be justified? After all, deprived of more substantial avenues of seeking redress, clinging on to minor grievances and attempting to settle the most trivial scores might be your only way of defying authority or delivering a much-needed lesson. Planting Japanese knotweed in the garden of a landlord who wrongfully overcharged you; writing a poison-pen diatribe on Glassdoor about a former employer with a penchant for making sexist jokes; leaving your fortune to a charity that provides luxury grooming services to cats instead of to your ungrateful children.¹ Might these actions, however petty, be a way of dispensing justice in an unjust world? 

The prevailing idea in popular psychology holds that forgiveness is something you should do for yourself: The greater the offence, and the less deserving the recipient, the more therapeutic it will be to let it go with a saintlike grace. So if your neighbor runs over your cat, or your husband leaves you for your sister, it may indeed serve the healing process to exorcise all bitterness and arrive at a point where you can finally declare—with only a modest amount of self-deception—that there are no hard feelings.

 But then, such serious matters are unlikely to lead to pettiness, which is, by definition, a preoccupation with the trivial and inconsequential. Of course, we shouldn’t spend our lives consumed by fantasies of revenge just because someone made an offhand comment at a party years ago. But there’s usually no harm in nurturing half-hearted grudges and vague dislikes. Imagine you discover that a selfish ex is going through a messy divorce, or a duplicitous former friend’s new book has been met with poor sales and tepid reviews—you would be forgiven for feeling just a little gleeful as you insist that you sympathize with them and wish them all the best. It’s not harming anyone, it doesn’t change anything and it would be absurd to think we can police ourselves out of having any unpalatable emotions.

If we are going to be petty, it is far better to admit it than to dress it up as something more high-minded. When pettiness is something to which we can readily confess, as neither an appealing trait nor an especially damning one, it becomes not synonymous with real cruelty but a barrier against it.