A Petty Act A Day Keeps The People-Pleasing At Bay

Screw the high road. For Prescilla, a 40-year-old in Chicago, pettiness is a virtue — an unfairly maligned means of exacting justice. “My neighbor shared a wall with the nursery and heard my son, who was going through a sleep regression, cry in the middle of the night,” she says. “He knocked on our door the next day and told us to ‘pick up our baby’ like we weren’t f*cking doing that. My husband, who was nonconfrontational, was too stunned to speak.” So she took matters into her own hands, telling him off for his presumptions about their parenting — and then adding a bit of spice. “Finally, I told him, ‘I’m glad that you realize how thin these walls are because I’ve heard too many arguments that I didn’t care to hear. Like how your ex-girlfriend wasn’t attracted to you [and] that’s why she didn’t want to have sex with you anymore!’” She said all this in front of his new partner, too. “The part that was satisfying to me was letting him know about the stuff I heard and how embarrassed he was.”

Anyone who says being petty isn’t satisfying is lying. Case in point? The wide grin on Kendrick Lamar’s face during his record-breaking halftime show at the 2025 Super Bowl, when he performed “Not Like Us,” his earworm of a Drake diss track, to a cheering audience of more than 65,000 — and brought not one, but two of the Degrassi alum’s ex-girlfriends, Serena Williams and SZA, along for the victory lap. The moment spawned memes of social media users hailing Lamar as “the level of petty [they] aspire to be.”

At some point, we seemed to have transitioned from “forgive and forget” or the TikTok-approved #letthemtheory, instead idolizing those who stick it to others. As “mean girl influencers” are pointing out, being good isn’t getting us anywhere. Even Michelle Obama, who previously evangelized the “When they go low, we go high” philosophy, is over it. “Petty envy is real,” says Caroline Fenkel, DSW, LCSW, chief clinical officer and co-founder at Charlie Health. “When we see someone being effortlessly confident, cutting, and unbothered, it taps into a fantasy of ‘What if I didn’t care so much about being nice?’”

“One of the driving fears in our collective lives is the fear of loss of approval,” adds Elise Loehnen, author of On Our Best Behavior and podcast host. Anyone who seems liberated from these fears, she says, is inherently compelling. “Most of us spend an inordinate amount of energy managing our reputation, ensuring we’re likable and palatable, and proving our goodness,” she says. What might it be like to forget about all that?

“We’re seeing a shift where people, especially women, are rejecting the idea that they always have to be the ‘bigger person’ at their own expense,” Fenkel says. “The rise of petty icons is part of this bigger movement toward self-respect, where people are saying ‘I’m not going to be a doormat anymore.’” She notes that pettiness has an added benefit: It taps into our brain’s reward system. “When we feel slighted, our body releases stress hormones like cortisol,” she says. “A petty act can give us a dopamine boost because it creates a sense of resolution or control. It’s like a tiny, self-created moment of fairness.”

Nikki, a 26-year-old New Yorker, was at a concert at Fort Worth Convention Center Arena when the dopamine hit. “During a BTS concert, these girls were shoving the girl next to me and ended up giving her a panic attack,” she says. So, she reached for some chewing gum. “I stuck it deep in the main mean girl’s hair to make sure she’d have to cut it,” she says. Nikki left the concert pleased.

Often, people let things slide if it inconveniences them, but if someone crosses a line with others, all bets are off. It’s pettiness as vigilantism. “At its core, pettiness is about reclaiming power,” Fenkel says. “It’s often linked to justice, a sense that ‘if no one else is going to hold them accountable, I will.’”

At its core, pettiness is about reclaiming power. It’s often linked to justice, a sense that “if no one else is going to hold them accountable, I will.”

Nicole, a 34-year-old creative marketing consultant and writer, lets her petty flag fly in the workplace — a risky move, yes, but she can’t help it. “What triggers my pettiness is when somebody drops the ball during a project, doesn’t take accountability, and then throws other people under the bus to try to pin their error on someone else,” she says. Her former boss was guilty of such an act, so she collated receipts. “I made a whole-*ss deck to properly document the who, what, when, where, and how this person dropped the ball, consolidating email and Viber screenshots, complete with a timeline slide,” she recalls. “As a professional, I ended it with a recap slide and a ‘recommendations for a way forward’ slide.” Nicole later presented it on a call with the boss’s bosses and the guilty party present. There was “a lot of silence” at first before the bosses jumped in with possible solutions. She’s not sure if her nemesis was ever held accountable, but at a minimum, her pettiness went unpunished.

Admittedly, PowerPoint pettiness isn’t for everyone. In the gray zone between pettiness and cruelty, each individual has to decide where they’re comfortable. For the less confrontational, sometimes just thinking petty thoughts is enough. It certainly works for Robin, a 38-year-old from New York. “My friends and I practice petty cursing for people who have wronged us, like may their beverage always be the wrong temperature or may they miss every single one of their commuting connections.” Instead of ranting to her group chats, her friends collect these slights and save them for book club.

Involving her friends, Robin says, is a “nice way to vent frustration and commiserate about the terribleness that is life sometimes.” She adds, “Oftentimes there’s literally nothing else you can do, and it helps you feel better by putting it out into the world as opposed to it festering inside.”