The author seems about a decade younger than me and "raised" isn't the word I would use for myself, but I doubt I would have made it if not for the friends I made and the things I learned that way.
The thing about pulling yourself up out of a bad situation is that you learn to be usually very deliberate in how you talk about it and what you talk about. People who've never really known anything but stability in their lives tend to make a lot of assumptions they're not equipped to recognize, so it's usually just better not to create the opportunity.
If you feel you've noticed an odd ellipticality in accounts like these, the vague sense of something going unsaid, it's this. If that's all you've noticed, better not to pry.
It came up on HN recently, about how work is a place where it can be best to leave some things unsaid, because it invites assumptions about your character and capabilities that might not be true, or positive.
That isn't even unreasonable as a cultural norm, although it is that those who most firmly enforce it also cherish silly habits like saying "bring your whole self to work."
The expectation of not oversharing needs to be met by a commitment of not over-asking, but I suppose that's really too much to expect in an age so degraded that all the obligations across lines of social class are understood to run in only one direction.
> although it is that those who most firmly enforce it also cherish silly habits like saying "bring your whole self to work."
It is my understanding that about 50% of the cultural values companies prescribe to their teams are values they don't want to see adopted. Speaking up when something is wrong, open door policies, and work-life balance are the usual suspects. Continuous learning and development are also values that employees are often invited to practice, though not when there's work to do!
It's all aggrandizement with very little critical thinking about how these policies and values would actually change the workplace. And the companies often hate when they do.
> Continuous learning and development are also values that employees are often invited to practice, though not when there's work to do!
These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends.
Honestly, I'd love it if companies took the tack of giving employees projects based on the skills they want them to develop, instead of the skills they already have.
> These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends.
Along with "giving back" to "the community" in the form of unpaid labor. There is a class system at play where the owners and financiers--not the builders--benefit the most. And they make sure of it. They've effectively co-opted everything that made the early (mid-late 90s) Internet many of us grew up on good and turned it into a money printing machine. Acknowledging that you the worker are a skilled person worth investing resources in, rather than an interchangeable component in the money printer, would give you power they're not comfortable with you having.
> These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends.
Hmm, I wouldn't say so. In many countries it is illegal for an employer to prescribe what their employees should do on evenings and weekends, including up-skilling. Handing out promotions based on what an employee does outside work hours would quickly lead to labor disputes and penalties.
I don't deny that employers have this expectation, but it's often another case where if they actually enacted it, it would result in fines. And even in countries where this doesn't matter from a labor law perspective, a continuous improvement grindset culture (where employees work to improve for their work duties on a significant percentage of evenings and weekends) would often lead to morale loss, employee self-neglect and burn-out. Imagine how it would feel to have responsibilities after work (spouse, kids, parents, community commitments, chores, etc) when everyone is grinding to get ahead. You'd have no career prospects, too - a recipe for disengagement. Once again, a company would not actually want the consequences of enforcing this team value.
A better value would be that the company should provide improvement opportunities for their teams (conference tickets, time off work for professional certificates, etc), but same as before - they wouldn't want the real consequences (additional time off work) for having the team actually live such values.
I don't think anyone in most companies truly meaningfully lives those values, nor do they work with these values in mind. They may be slightly swayed towards doing something in line with the values ahead of their next performance review, but beyond that - not really. And that's best for everyone, including the company.
> I don't deny that employers have this expectation, but it's often another case where if they actually enacted it, it would result in fines.
Right - it's left "between the lines". In the US - salaried employees don't have any protections here AFAIK, so even if it became formalized, they wouldn't get fines.
>Honestly, I'd love it if companies took the tack of giving employees projects based on the skills they want them to develop, instead of the skills they already have.
Has your manager actively asked you what you want to work on or do?
Not sarcasm. Where I work, they talk a big game about "we don't want know-it-alls we want learn-it-alls", and "upskilling" and all that.
But we don't get any dedicated time to actually do that training during business hours. The implication of course is that managers expect it to happen on evenings and weekends.
> It is my understanding that about 50% of the cultural values companies prescribe to their teams are values they don't want to see adopted.
Sure, same here. What I don't understand is the idea that such pervasive mendacity and self-delusion should acceptably characterize a kind of culture that anyone is expected to regard as worthy of respect.
I realize it has a lot to do with the difference between organizational desiderata and organizational incentives, or put otherwise between asserted and revealed preference. Still, this is a problem in design susceptible to methods of analysis and adjustment recognizably derived as much from engineering as sociology, and it is not a novel field; I first learned of it from books published in the 1960s. The regression in ambient knowledge since then is remarkable, not to say shocking.
I think it's thematically consistent with the lack of rigor in this field. I've been told countless times to deliver provably broken, bug-ridden shit on the premise that "it's better to deliver quickly and iterate". Similarly, I've gotten the management stink-eye from discovering (and proving by fixing it) something that was running totally broken in production for years. When nothing matters, that is when companies can get away with producing garbage, the way they go about producing it also degrades.
So I'd say the amount of attention and rigor applied to values and management principles is roughly commensurate with the amount of attention and rigor applied to product and engineering concerns. That is to say, just barely enough to get by. Yet somehow we print money...
Because that's what it's come to be about. We aren't here to serve our users, our bosses or each other. We are here to serve money and personal ambition, with "meritocracy" inhering solely in whether one serves one's own ambition or another's.
Finance is a cancer in the body of the industry. This is why we say so; this is what it does.
I once heard, in a different century, that the "modal restaurant script" differed between the US and the UK in that in the former, the waitstaff asks the diners a bunch of (to a cultural outsider) overly prying questions, while in the latter, the diners ask them of the waitstaff. Still true? Never was?
UK: the diners aren't asking questions of the waitstaff unless things are very quiet, nor are the waitstaff asking you either. You might have a bit of "where have you come from today" in the more rural pub destinations. Tipping culture is basically "high end only" or a service charge sneaking onto the bill for larger groups.
Australian who has spent time living in the US: yes, the difference is still true today between how waiters at an Australian restaurant and servers at a US restaurant interact with customers.
Waiters wait. If you need anything you make eye contact and they come over.
Servers are overly friendly and will interrupt conversations to ask if the food is up to standard, etc.
I've always thought it was due to tipping. Servers need to be active and show they're being attentive in order to get tips.
> Servers are overly friendly and will interrupt conversations to ask if the food is up to standard, etc.
The median American in any restaurant with chairs not bolted to the floor can be assumed to operate on roughly the level of a marginally clever, but ill-parented and intemperate, four- or five-year-old child. Even nice places have to deal with this, because neither the child nor the American recognizes any such distinction.
The waitstaff need you to convince them they won't deal with this with you, which you can quickly and easily do by dressing appropriately - I know, but an American would need to be told - and comporting yourself in the correct fashion you described. A place worth eating at will recognize this and leave you pretty much in peace thereafter.
I'll take even the worst, unkempt dining experience at a deep south waffle house over the treatment that europoor Parisians give to those who don't speak perfect french at even high end restaurants in the heart of Paris. Also, foie gras, traditional veal, and many other European delicacies are disgusting (ethically).
Coincidental, even the ghettos of Baltimore/Detroit likely have a higher GDP per capita than most of continental Europe, and this is validated by the increasingly hilarious US-euro monetary exchange rate.
I'm comforted by seeing lots of snapbacks and "SUPREME" printed on clothes by the five-year-old minded Americans around me, because the alternative is hollier-than-thou European mentality of 1. requiring money to use public bathrooms, 2. not giving water by default at many restaurants (and being too poor for ice when asked for it), and 3. spitting in the food of/protesting the existence of the expats/tourists/immigrants who bankroll your entire nations existence in the first place.
Reap what you sow. Watching the UK get flung deeper and deeper into its recession as a result of one of the most hilariously stupid and preventable economic self-pwns ever (brexit) is especially delicious to watch. Reminds me why we threw off our tyrannical monarchists in the first place.
> higher GDP per capita than most of continental Europe
I once read that the cost of university alone in the US explains a large part of this difference. (I cannot evaluate that claim, as I am not a trained economist.) In many European countries (there are 50!), university is nearly free, when compared the the extortionary rates in the US.
Brexit was a product of democracy, as sad as that is. Your own country is just barely holding on to it's democratic status, in the eyes of other first world nations. I wouldn't be so quick to throw stones. The US GDP doesn't seem to be getting it's citizens much in return, it's a very poor measure for a country's success and prosperity.
The dumbest thing about this post is the usual grouping of "europeans" all together as if it's one country with one set of rules, cultural values and expectations.
It's also interesting to think about it when you say bothered.
I'm super american, born and raised and now living in the western Midwest. When the wait staff talk to me, I'm genuinely interested in hearing about them. I like meeting new people, even if those people are being paid to meet me. I legitimately enjoy learning about the lives of the people I meet, even briefly.
I don't think it's a bad thing, but it is most strongly a Midwestern and Southeastern thing, and I'm from the South. Boston might give a different answer.
I'm also Australian I experienced an overly attentive waiter recently when I was eating at a steakhouse with a few friends. It felt like every 5 minutes they would come up to the table interrupt the conversation to ask something like "How are you enjoying the meal? Can I get you anything?" It was a little bit jarring because of how frequently it occurred. I don't mind once or twice but the frequency in this case seemed excessive.
Possibly it was because it wasn't very crowded and the junior waiter was trying to look busy in front of their supervisor.
Historically, in the United States, the barbershop was a meeting place. It was a place you went to talk and relax. It's weird in the modern society of fast cuts and what not.
But barbers tend to go into that business because they like talking to people. And you're right, every barber I've ever had has pried into my life. But I've also been more willing to share life experiences with barbers, and listen to their experiences than any other profession. Not sure why.
I think for many men this may be the only professional they engage whose job involves touching the body and doesn't presumptively involve pain. (Not everything a doctor does will hurt, but one wisely assumes anything a doctor does might. This does make a difference, I think.)
"Intimacy" is a word and concept much misunderstood in this culture as relating only to sex, but at root it has to do with the passage of social and personal boundaries; its root intima refers to the inside of something, and so "intimacy" more usefully describes a spectrum of closeness or a point thereupon.
In that frame, the work of a barber is very slightly more intimate than that of many professionals. I don't know whether it's for having helped create that context - nobody makes you sit down in the chair - in which folks feel a little easier about speaking of things they never ordinarily would. But if I wanted to explain the "barbershop effect" I think it's something I would want to investigate.
After a tip from hispanophone colleagues in California, I started going to their hairdresser: it was Monday only, $5 or $10 instead of $30, and that was because the girls only took 5 or 10 minutes instead of 45. That was when I learned that the traditional barbershop package consisted of, say $10 worth of haircutting and $20 worth of rag chewing.
> barbers tend to go into that business because they like talking to people.
There's someone on staff at my local grocery who once told me she likes working the register because of the human contact, so whenever she's there and there isn't already a line I head for the register instead of the self-checks.
I hadn't understood the social power of smoke breaks until my welding instructor admitted he had been convinced for the first week or two of class that I was a tweaker because, given a bunch of rods to weld, I'd disappear into a booth and not come out again until I'd welded them all[0], no matter how many smoke breaks the other students had taken in the meantime.
It's a pity that when we realised the cancer sticks[1] aren't so healthy, we just got rid of them instead of trying to replace them with an activity that also allows colleagues to down tools and socialise for a well-determined short time.
(in the Old Country, anyway: over here, many businesses have a coffee break/round of snacks at ~9 and ~16)
[0] apparently one of the prereqs of becoming a welding instructor is knowing all the places in a booth lazier students will attempt to hide their unwelded rods
Some people are against that, even if only for purely pragmatic (as opposed to moral) reasons. This is another one of those "People who've never really known [otherwise] tend to make a lot of assumptions they're not equipped to recognize" things; being in a fortunate enough position to absorb the potential blowback of a lie is not unlike the privilege of being in a position to absorb the blowback to any other choice/decision that carries some risk that that seems minor to the average person but is potentially disastrous to someone who can't absorb it.
And then there's you have to keep track of the lies, and that most people prefer to think of themselves as not the kind of person who would ever, ever gossip - which isn't the same as saying they don't.
The moral consideration carries real weight, as you note; lying in a survival situation is one thing, but this kind of problem relatively rarely meets that standard. But even if the potential moral iniquity and certain hazard is entirely ignored, the policy as a practical matter simply cannot work for long.
They just define lying such that the shielding and misrepresentation they do don't count.
Nobody brings their "whole selves" to work, let alone their "selves." I had a lot of blue collar jobs as a teenager and still pick up the occasional shift at my uncle's shop for a call-out. They're guarded but somehow also make professional office life on the west coast rn look like a pearl clutching competition hosted at a flooded blanket factory.
I think the central takeaway of this essay is dead wrong, you should aim for the exact opposite. The fewer labels or identities you have yourself, the more strongly you hold on to them and the more fragile your personality. If the only thing you identify yourself by is your job and that gets taken away from you in a downturn, never to return, what's left? A lot of people who are in that situation and don't have other selves to identify with struggle strongly. On the other hand, people who identify with more facets of what makes them them have a lot of options to fall back on. You're not only your job, but you're also a parent, a child, an athlete, a hobbyist, etc. Even if you stop being one of those things, you keep being all the rest, and that gives fortitude and resilience.
If your self-image includes the structure of the world around you, or the behavior of people other than yourself, you'll run into problems.
I enjoy working with computers. I happen to work at a particular company doing computer things. Only one of those is an innate "what makes me, me" thing. Even if computers didn't exist, I'd still probably tend to gravitate towards things that are fun for the same sorts of reasons.
And if you hit a physical or health issue that takes that away, or dramatically reduces the amount of time you can spend on it?
This isn’t hypothetical; I have worked with people who’ve had to quit this form of work for the following reasons: Carpal tunnel that prevented using keyboard and mouse, brain injury, neck injury that made it impossible to sit at a computer (or desk), long Covid and “brain fog”. I imagine that vision impairment might lead to the same.
If any of these were to happen to me, would I still have my sense of self? Are we more than our love of technology?
You say that, but it happens all of the time. Its immensely painful of an experience. Painters who lose their sight, musicians who damage their fingers, car lovers who get too old to drive... That's just the fragility of life and people deal with it in different ways. Some people overcome it, some don't. I think it's important to recognize that reality and still choose to love those things knowing full well it could all end tomorrow. Identity is composed of so many things, some we have control over, some not. Of course it's going to be a messy endeavour
I’m not suggesting that we should “pull back” from the things we love for fear of the potential pain of losing them. What I am suggesting is that the worth of a person is not in what they can do. Their identity should be more than the things they enjoy or are good at.
My grandmother is 100 years old. She has led an incredible life filled with all kinds of achievements. Her passion for reading, learning, languages and art, have all shaped me. She’s blind now, and basically deaf. She can no longer read, which is very painful for her (I can read to her when I visit). How much value does she still have? To me, as much value as she ever did.
I've imagined this future, and I did think of one possible workaround that may or may not be feasible: morse code. One of my motives for learning it is, you can "copy" morse code by any of your senses except taste. I've imagined where I may be blind, or deaf, or even both. As long as I have the sense of touch somewhere about my body at the bare minimum, and can move a finger, I could communicate via morse code. I know it sounds kinda stupid, but it's comforting to know I have that "last resort option" in my back pocket.
You would need someone who understands Morse to notice and interpret. The same dexterity can also operate a pen, and this is the option I have more often seen used.
Neither is likely to be a much richer channel than the other, I think.
I think you probably need more dexterity (and grip strength) for minimal successful communication with a pen than with Morse code, especially if you wind up trying to do both without visual feedback.
The odds of those around you noticing is something you have some power over, if you're thinking about it ahead of time.
All true, but a pen still can be legibly used in at least some such situations. I've seen it done.
I'm not saying not to plan around Morse, just that it's a little early to assume there must be no other hope - and always too early to place much faith in being able to exert control over circumstances where, more or less definitionally, this is not a reasonable thing to expect.
That probably sounds scary. I can't help that. Dying is a scary topic, I imagine likely much more so for actually doing it, which I as yet have not. But I do know some things about how to handle fear, and one is that it helps a lot when that doesn't come by surprise - when you don't have to start totally from scratch to build what equanimity is available.
Less so than any one specific response, what I'd focus on trying to prepare for is that. You can't really know what tools you will have available in such a moment. You can't really know you will have any. Whatever there is, though, you'll have an easier time to recognize and use for being able to better see past that fear.
Probably my loved ones, or a subset thereof, would make the effort to learn. Otherwise there's software that can parse it (so people can read what I send) and software that can produce it (so people can type words and generate morse code I can receive via whatever means). :)
This is way off in a tangent but that's kinda why I think a UBI won't lead to mass unemployment. So many people self identify with their work that it's almost always the first question when you're getting to know someone.
By the time I was old enough to work, I had recorded dozens of my own songs and made countless websites for fun. I made computer graphics and learned tons about computers and could fix them for all my friends and family. These were all forms of "work", valuable to others (to varying degrees), and I received zero payment for any of that. People like to do things, particularly things that benefit those they care about. Not everyone is like that, but we don't actually really need everyone to be like that, IMO.
Aside from the strong selection bias, you've also been raised in a culture that both works and values work.
Now imagine you're a third generation UBI recipient. Your parents never worked, and you're surrounded by people who don't even "work" in the way which you describe it.
At that point, I have very little hope, even for people predisposed to it like you.
>Your parents never worked, and you're surrounded by people who don't even "work"
I'm not sure that's a guaranteed future. Even today we offer subsistence living with welfare and food stamps, and nobody ever brags about not working because they're on the dole. Even if UBI is better than the current welfare system, it's not likely to be enough to support a middle class lifestyle. People will still work because they want to get ahead in life.
Yeah, this is why I still wear a KN95 mask everywhere. Losing my sharpness or ability to code and work deeply with computers would not only trash my career but utterly shatter a huge piece of my life. I'm acutely aware that one day the depthful involvement in tech (among other things I enjoy) may end, so I absolutely try to make the most of it and mitigate threats to it.
>> The fewer labels or identities you have yourself, the more strongly you hold on to them and the more fragile your personality.
Conversely, being beholden and holding onto identities that have no bearing on your success or direction in life which you believe does in fact determine those things seems equally dangerous, no?
Respectfully, I disagree. Every label or identity is yet another pigeonhole to be stuffed into and a thought-terminating cliche that reduces the complexity of one's life into an overly simplistic symbol which fails to represent the totality of one's being. Better to dispense with such coarse-grained oversimplifications and reject the notion of labelling selves entirely.
> You're not only your job, but you're also a parent, a child, an athlete, a hobbyist, etc.
You're actually none of those things. In the words of Alan Watts, [0]
The principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with
reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth, and our names
about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, with ourselves.
You are neither a job, nor a parent, nor a child nor athlete nor any of these things. That which can be named and labelled is not reality; it enters into the sphere of representation and takes us a layer of abstraction away from the base reality of what you are, of which we cannot really speak and must treat in silence (see the Tao, or the Tetragrammaton).
We exchange these names of ourselves, ideas of ourselves, language describing ourselves, with others, hoping that the full reality of ourselves will be communicated, in whole and not in part, to others, who will actually see past the symbols and recognize the selves to which they point. In actuality they conflate the symbol and the self, the representation for the reality, falling victim to the deception of Baudrillard's simulacrum, of images that "mask and denature a profound reality."
Hence the injunction of the philosopher Kwaw to the daimios of Japan in Aleister Crowley's parable Konx Om Pax [1] to call themselves "the Synagogue of Satan, so as to keep themselves from the friendship of the fools who mistake names for things," while advocating not a "Satanist" way of life, but rather a Taoist one seeking the equilibration of opposites to achieve first inner personal harmony and then outer societal harmony.
A postmodernist would see the label "Satanist" and immediately conjure up images and notions of evil and "the adversary," confusing the name with the actual thing, the deeds and the philosophy of the synagogue, never bothering to inquire beyond the label and the name into the nature of the thing itself, letting their priors and biases make uninformed snap judgments for them. A modern instantiation of Kwaw's tactic can be found in The Satanic Temple, who advocates not for "evil" (whatever this word means) but for the advancement of rationality and reproductive rights. Yet this phenomenon extends far beyond The Satanic Temple and religion and extends to all of life more broadly, and this simplistic reduction of the world into one-word labels and mental filing cabinets is what lends to the exact same tribalism pg notes in his essay.
Ascribing labels to one's self limits your degrees of freedom by circumscribing your capabilities and characteristics within the bounds of the label. For if I am P, then I am not (not P) and immediately I have entered into a dualistic discourse of "me" and "not me" or of "self" and "other." Now you are beholden to a past, a history, and limited by that which you have identified with, rejecting what you are not yet but could at one point be. The very clinging to what scraps of "identity" one has accumulated around one's self is precisely what leads to this fragility of personality once those identities are forcibly taken away.
Ironically postmodern ideologies admit of "non-binary" sexualities that reject simplistic dichotomies and labels, but fail to extend this mode of thinking to other domains of life that would benefit from the same treatment; instead they insist on fractionating all of society into discretized identity groups and factions instead of recognizing the unique individuality of each human being, failing to acknowledge that continua instead of hard dichotomies exist and reality is not so cleanly divided. These ideologies purport to have moved beyond stereotypes and assuming everyone had the same lived experiences growing up, and yet continues to do exactly that with simplistic filing away of people into labelled cabinets of "identity."
All abstractions are leaky, including abstractions of self. Postmodern (Facebook onwards) social media has enabled a new era of idolatry; where once we erected statues and idols in a vain attempt to capture the ineffability of gods, now we publish online profiles and reels in a vain, narcissistic attempt to capture the ineffability of the self.
Crowley against Crowley? Good grief, this is why no one who knows anything has any use for that damned old self-promoter of a fraud. People read him as if he had anything to say other than on how to impress bored socialites, and here we end up with somebody who doesn't even seem to realize he has constructed an argument against postmodernism that requires a postmodern reading to work.
You'd be happier with the neo-Orthodox, I suspect, some of whom at least are not total charlatans. You should read Paul Kingsnorth in particular, who gives a much better account of the ideology you and he share; I would not normally make such a recommendation, but you'll believe what you believe in either case, and at least from him you'll see how a consistent account of it may be given.
Any quasi-public forum it's probably best to leave controversial and nuanced opinions on things unsaid especially under your real name. (But even under a supposedly anonymous handle, it's probably worth asking if you really need to post this.)
I'm not sure what could be going unsaid here. The schizophrenic dad, absent mother, limited and erratic money for food, no adults to do the shopping and cooking, and mentions of programming blogs and escaping poverty all paint a clear picture. It's an open account and I don't feel the need to pry or ask questions about the exact conditions of the household, which were presumably not good, but I don't see anything vague.
Your comment, on the other hand, raises my curiosity in exactly the way that you seem to be against. I have no idea what you're trying to warn me not to do.
Early in the history of the thread it looked like there would be a turn toward the sort of "Why didn't he just...?" questions that often tend to arise. They're not more useful in this context than any other, and it was that waste of effort on points uselessly missed that I sought to deter.
Ooh, now I finally understand what kind of thing one would want to avoid. The original comment could perhaps have been more concrete by saying something like (for stupid, privileged people like me)
> People who've never really known anything but stability in their lives tend to make a lot of assumptions they're not equipped to recognize, so it's usually just better not to create the opportunity [for them to ask "why don't you just ..."].
Skimmed a dozen sub-replies that were sorted above this but now I finally get it
Well, I've never pretended I don't also join these discussions to learn. Thanks for helping that happen!
Bad enough to have been made to learn a lot of things most people never get close to knowing. Explaining some of that knowledge so those people don't need to go through it to get the benefit isn't actually harder, but it can feel that way. It isn't really a case of not being fairly met in the middle, but it can feel that way easily too.
One other note: I've intentionally not used the language of privilege, and I did not call you stupid. If you're anything I'm not in this connection, it's fortunate, and that's not blameworthy nor something I would ever hope to see change.
Indeed the entire point of trying to talk about it at all lies in the hope of making it possible to understand some things about what going through hell can do to a person, without needing to find out firsthand.
Prose seems like an easier medium than the less overt and direct forms of art where such matters are more often openly discussed. I begin to imagine I haven't simplified the task as much as I thought, though, by this assumption.
On that basis I can also recommend Strange New Worlds s2e9 "Under the Cloak of War," which is the most nuanced and honest discussion of the experience of past trauma I think I've ever seen on TV. That it looks up front like a war story is a metaphor that pays off in the last act with a pane of frosted glass. Read it knowing that, and maybe I don't need to say anything else at all.
> People who've never really known anything but stability in their lives tend to make a lot of assumptions they're not equipped to recognize, so it's usually just better not to create the opportunity.
Having fell hook, line, and sinker to the conceited and holier-than-thou notion that (progressive) people have been enlightened beyond assuming things such as gender or shared lived experience or even race, I can corroborate the claim that silence is the winning move here. Unfortunately as others have noted downthread there are many who like to, and will insist upon, prying in this post-privacy era of the Internet.
People like to pat themselves on the back for having been educated beyond making such assumptions; in reality they still have the blinders on and are still constrained by the tunnel vision that their own upbringing has imposed, not even capable of comprehending that other ways of growing up and living can even exist, and presuppose that everyone visited the same waypoints in life at the same time and in the same order. The framing of one who has grown up in privilege is fundamentally different from one who struggled through adversity; si duo idem faciunt, non est idem.
This is why I don't mind making the recommendation. You seem angry in a way I think I recognize. It feels righteous because of the injustice in which it originated, but it also embodies and perpetuates that injustice. Act on it without grave reflection and it will always lead you to do harm.
I want you to read Kingsnorth because I hope that may lead you to see the error in abandoning all hope of the world. He is as clear in it as anyone I know. That is extremely attractive and I want you to think hard about where it leads.
People with different life experiences should just be quietly written off due to the faulty assumptions they might make out of ignorance.
> If you feel you've noticed an odd ellipticality in accounts like these, the vague sense of something going unsaid, it's this. If that's all you've noticed, better not to pry.
In what context? Work acquaintances chatting over coffee at the office? Parasocial public discussions on the internet? Intentionally public discussions? Friends talking all night over drinks?
You give the impression here of having taken something I said quite personally. I hope I may be forgiven for not yet really understanding what or why. Likewise, my responses may be somewhat less on point for the distraction.
The account under discussion is attributed public speech on the Internet. In other contexts, other conventions apply. There are about as many such contexts as there are kinds of relationships between humans. That's about as general as I can really make it.
If you're asking for a recommendation, it would be twofold. First, if a question seems like it might be taken as nosy, try to find a way to reframe it, or don't ask it at all. Second, when someone seems to persistently misunderstand something you're saying or asking in a more personal than professional context, consider that they may be intentionally deflecting a question or subject which they consider inappropriate to address in that setting.
I'm talking about behavior. What motivates that behavior isn't relevant.
A nosy question is nosy because it demands an answer to which the querent is not entitled. Whether that undue desire is motivated by curiosity, prurience, arrogance, pity, or simple fascination - and I have seen all of these, sometimes in combination - has no bearing on the effect of the question on the one so asked. The vice inheres in the asking, because that forces the choice between refusing to answer and arousing the ire of jilted entitlement, and giving you an answer you have already done much to suggest you are not prepared to understand.
Within acceptable error, everyone who ever tries to have this conversation from your side proceeds from here to umbrage at the idea their behavior within it is in any way either predictable or discreditable, owing to the purity of their intentions.
> A nosy question is nosy because it demands an answer to which the querent is not entitled.
Jesus, is this really what you meant? I can't imagine how barren my life would be if I restricted my interactions with others to only include things to which I was "entitled."
It's not an "all the time" thing, but an aspect of how human relationships work. Like everything else there, it's contextual. In the context of public conversations and professional relationships, it's reasonable to consider there exists a threshold of intimacy beyond which further inquiry is improper.
That shouldn't be a tremendously controversial statement, I hope. If there's a variation on it here, it is only that "improper", again as with anything in human relationships, is contextual and not always obvious, but that there can exist subtexts in a conversation which indicate when it verges thereupon.
I wasn't trying to straw-man you and I agree with this more verbose phrasing. There's a vibe in some related comments that suggests that the proper way to manage your work affairs is to interact through some narrow "proper" API, in which nothing is sought nor proffered, that we exist to each other as callable services only.
I try to generally be polite and treat people the way they seem to want, but I'm not going to live some meek life terrified that someone might take offense at my over-reach. If I'm going to screw up, my defaults are set for errors of commission.
> If I'm going to screw up, my defaults are set for errors of commission.
There have been times in my life where I said the same.
> I'm not going to live some meek life terrified that someone might take offense at my over-reach.
This isn't about that. This is about the wrong assumptions people make, much more easily than they realize, based on someone speaking knowledgeably of things very far beyond their own experience. Those assumptions easily motivate harmful behavior.
> There's a vibe in some related comments that suggests that the proper way to manage your work affairs is to interact through some narrow "proper" API, in which nothing is sought nor proffered, that we exist to each other as callable services only.
This is a cold and mechanistic view of the thing. I would rather say that some relationships more easily bear personal intimacy than others, and a basic aspect of human social competence lies in knowing which are which and avoiding the imposition of undue strain on those relationships that can't support it.
So what you are saying is that people have some hangup on saying ‘I don’t want to say’ and instead say all kinds of vague stuff that I might want to clarify, and that I should recognize that and just let it go?
I’m not quite sure how to distinguish that from people unintentionally being vague.
Not everyone takes "I don't want to talk about that" easily. A '...with you' is always available to be inferred, and a weak ego easily takes insult at that. If that weak ego belongs to someone who signs your paychecks, now you have a problem.
The thing about pulling yourself up out of a bad situation is that you learn to be usually very deliberate in how you talk about it and what you talk about. People who've never really known anything but stability in their lives tend to make a lot of assumptions they're not equipped to recognize, so it's usually just better not to create the opportunity.
If you feel you've noticed an odd ellipticality in accounts like these, the vague sense of something going unsaid, it's this. If that's all you've noticed, better not to pry.