Should I keep giving tourists wrong directions when they ask with that insufferable confidence, or does that make me the problem?

The word 'insufferable' is pulling a lot of freight. It converts a specific person — standing on a specific corner, asking a specific question — into a type, and types can be punished without guilt because they are not quite human. This is the move Sartre recognized as bad faith: using abstraction to launder a choice that was, in fact, made freely, with full sight. You did not react. You decided. The category 'confident tourist' did not give false directions. You did, eyes open, in a moment that was entirely yours. The cruelty required a villain to feel like justice, and so you built one. That construction project is the problem — not the asking, not the confidence, not the stranger who is already three blocks away and nearly fine.

“Existence precedes essence — we are what we do, not what we mean to be.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism

The tourist turned wrong and will correct. The correction takes minutes. What you are carrying has no such built-in expiration. This is the teaching the Dhammapada opens with: mind is the forerunner of all actions, and the mind that chose misdirection does not reset when the tourist disappears. It rehearses. It justifies. It watches for the next insufferable face. What you sent them toward was a temporary wrong street. What you kept was a practiced reflex toward harm, dressed as wit, maintained by repetition. The Buddhist concern is never primarily the stone thrown — it is the arm that throws it, the habit deepening in the muscle. Three seconds of satisfaction. That is the whole yield. Count what it cost the three seconds after.

“Mind is the forerunner of all actions. All deeds are led by mind, created by mind.”

— Dhammapada, Verse 1

The Cynics had no patience for performed virtue, but they had equal contempt for cowardice dressed as protest. Diogenes insulted Alexander the Great to his face, in the sun, asking him to move out of the light. He did not wait for Alexander to turn and then mutter the insult into the air. What you did was different: you felt the sting of their confidence, said nothing honest, smiled or said nothing at all, and then used the gap between their turned back and your private satisfaction to be cruel without risk. That is not philosophy. That is not even rebellion. It is the action of someone who wants the relief of transgression without the exposure of honesty. If their confidence offended you, say so. You had a mouth. You chose a lie instead.

“It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.”

— Diogenes of Sinope, as recorded in Diogenes Laërtius

Rumi's reed flute does not perform longing — it cannot help but reveal it. The reed has been cut from the reed bed and cries the truth of that separation in every note. You also are cut from something — some expectation of being asked gently, of being seen, of the encounter going differently than it did. Their confidence landed on a bruise you have been carrying quietly. But the answer to an unacknowledged wound is not misdirection; it is recognition. The Beloved, in Sufi understanding, sends every difficult person as a mirror. This stranger arrived with the specific quality most likely to find the tender place and press it. What is actually aching? That question is more urgent than any street name, and answering it honestly costs nothing but the pride of the wound.

“The guest is God. Receive them.”

— Rumi, The Masnavi, Book I

Camus did not argue that the boulder was light, or that Sisyphus deserved rest, or that the hill had a top. He argued for full clarity about the weight and the repetition — and then for going back down to push again, without illusion. Your boulder: the confidence will not stop existing. Tourists will not begin to ask with deference. The smug face will arrive at the corner again tomorrow, and the day after, and you will stand there in the same two-second window with the same choice. The question is not whether the universe endorses your misdirection or the tourist's arrogance — it endorses neither, because it endorses nothing. The question is whether you can see the whole shape of what you did — the choosing, the satisfaction, the cost — and then decide, with open eyes, what you want Tuesday at 2pm to permanently be.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus