This is a useful analysis of what "being an adult" means. I've noticed that the moment when I feel like avoiding social discomfort or potential conflict as the precise moment when I have a choice: either be an adult and understand what I want and communicate it, or avoid it and dislike myself and project those feelings onto others.
Invariably when I choose to behave like an adult I feel empowered and ultimately at peace with myself and others in the end. If I choose avoidance, resentment builds, and further avoidance follows.
The idea that avoidance behaviors can be selfish or agreeable cuts through much self-deception. This can be helpful when I tell myself "I'm just being nice" because it adds the proviso: "yeah, but I'm not being an adult." Which I could see being a really helpful inner monologue in those situations.
This is also intimately connected to the concept of "taking responsibility", which begins with not avoiding something which "someone else" might deal with so you don't have to.
Everything you said is true, but just to add a little nuance, I think it's possible that avoidance can still be the correct choice when confrontation is unhelpful. Confrontation for the sake of confrontation is another form of indulging yourself to avoid certain emotions, like feeling weak or disempowered. Managing that in the height of emotion takes some real meta-cognition.
Keep in mind that "avoidance" in this context refers to not confronting one's own feelings and intuition. After grappling with that feeling explicitly, avoiding overt conflict can certainly be an adult decision to make.
Our feelings are vast and bottomless. It is impossible to confront all of them, and for the same reason its undesirable. Avoiding your feelings can be useful too.
Maybe it’s just personal experience, but I vehemently and totally disagree with this.
There has never been a time in my life where I was better off because I ignored my feelings. Literally never.
There are times that we should avoid acting on some of our feelings. But to do that well, and without further self-harm, requires that you know what they are, and what those feelings are influencing you to do.
It is absolutely not impossible to confront all of your feelings. Difficult, yes. Exhausting, yes. Impossible? Absolutely not. And I really think it’s doing yourself a disservice to ever believe that you have depths that you yourself are incapable of facing.
I can think of a time when I was better off because I ignored my feelings.
I've struggled with anxiety a lot throughout my life, especially in the lead up to something like a public speaking engagement. For a time, I always tried to reason through it. Why was I feeling anxious? Was it feelings of inadequacy? Perfectionism? Not wanting to disappoint my peers? Any attempt to interrogate those feelings and confront them usually had the opposite effect: I'd feel even more anxious.
On one particular occasion I was scheduled to present to a client at a new job, and the feelings of anxiety started bubbling again. But, this time, I’d had enough. None of my past strategies had ever worked, so I decided I wasn't going to do them. I thought, if my brain is going to flood my body with stress hormones, then it can go right ahead. If I was anxious, then I'd deliver the presentation anxious. I sat in the lobby and allowed the feelings to envelope me. To my surprise, the anxiety began to lift.
What I eventually realized is that my anxiety in those situations was caused by a fight or flight response. My body was trying to spur me to action, and by pausing to think about those anxious feelings — where they were coming from, how I might address them, etc. — I wasn’t doing anything to address the response itself. When I instead choose to ignore the feeling and do the action regardless, it sends a signal to my brain: I’ve chosen to fight. The stress response is no longer necessary, and the feeling goes away.
I don't think the parent meant ignore in the same sense you're taking it.
You still engaged with what you felt. You named what you were feeling, and decided to act on it. In the past, you acted in accord with it; in the instance you cite, you acted in defiance of it, and then on further after-the-fact examination identified what was going on inside of you and determined that acting in defiance of it served you better.
I believe the parent was not using 'ignore' in the sense of "don't act in defiance to how your emotions would incline you to behave", but in the sense of, literally, to pay no attention to it. If you were not paying attention to how you felt, you would still have avoided; your emotions ensured that was the 'easy' and 'natural' choice. It was only by recognizing the feeling, and how your past responses to it didn't serve you, that you were able to decide to act differently.
> When I instead choose to ignore the feeling and do the action regardless, it sends a signal to my brain: I’ve chosen to fight.
I think many psychologists would say you did the opposite of ignoring the feeling of anxiety.
> I thought, if my brain is going to flood my body with stress hormones, then it can go right ahead. If I was anxious, then I'd deliver the presentation anxious.
This is exactly what processing and acknowledging a feeling is like.
Avoiding it can take the form of distracting yourself—literally trying not to think about—but it can just as often take the form of arguing with it or "confronting". It's less about avoiding the existence of the feeling and more about avoiding experiencing the feeling. Not avoiding it means acknowledging it, letting it flow through you, and then letting it pass.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
I think maybe the point of disagreement may be due to "ignoring" vs. "succumbing" to one's feelings.
I think it's almost always useful to acknowledge emotions, but it doesn't mean you have to reactively give in to them. It's sometimes better to view them as a car on a railroad track that will soon be out of sight than to hop on that car and see where it takes you.
I don't think the person you're responding to is suggesting a deep meditation on the unlimited ramifications of one's feelings at every moment. They are talking about avoidance coping, which is pretty well-documented (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_coping). The admonition is to avoid that, more often than not. It's not the same as excessive navel gazing.
Confronting does not mean naming and categorizing everything. It is to introspect, and sometimes the only takeaway is "here be dragons", and flagging that particular terra incognita for exploration later.
In the short-term avoiding overwhelming feelings can sometimes be necessary to deal with something else that is more urgent, or to simply not go insane. In the long run you can't avoid them without some bad consequences.
And while our feelings may be vast and bottomless, they are usually finite in type. Almost any unpleasant feeling can be traced back to our fear for survival.
There's a difference between being "assertive" and "aggressive". I've had this discussion in the past on HN and it seems people want to treat both as the same, not saying that you are. Aggression is rarely, if ever, useful, both directed at someone or coming from someone.
Taken too far, the "what do I hope to gain" thing can be kind of life-shrinking (because it's not always clear what you'll gain from interactions up front, and that lack of clarity tracks with the quality of what you'll gain too, in some situations) BUT it's definitely a higher-order consideration that way too few people employ.
Yeah. IMO reducing everything to cost-benefit analysis feels like one of those "Silicon Valley" endeavours the feature article talks about - sounds attractive, but ultimately we ought to grow out of the good/bad one-dimensional thinking
Just an observation, n=1; when I moved to Los Angeles to go to school, I was shocked to find that people cancelled plans on me all the time. At first I took it personally, because that didn't happen in the more rural town I'm from. But then I realized: its part of the culture, and maybe its just an attribute of very dynamic urban social networks, where an exciting new opportunity might pop up any moment. So I learned to not get my hopes up, and learned to cancel on others too without worrying about it over much.
When I moved back to rural California, people thought I'd become a jerk. Took me a while to shift back.
As a New Yorker, I find the social culture out in LA to be super flaky and pretty annoying. People are non-committal, or cancel, or complain that you're staying in an inconvenient neighborhood for them to see you in. I blame it partially on the physical landscape of the place, just a bunch of suburbs smashed together trying to pretend to be a single city.
In NYC people might show up late, but generally I find New Yorkers to be good at keeping plans and the city lends itself to spontaneity. In LA if the restaurant in the strip mall you tried to go to is full, it means driving to another strip mall and interrupting the flow of the night. In the city you can just walk down the block and change your plans on the fly. In LA I've had friends cancel plans to later find out they got an invite to some famous person's house. In New York, you'll likely end up getting invited along because who cares if you were in a movie.
As a relatively new New Yorker (I've been here for five years) I agree with your assessment. New Yorkers commit to engagements and follow through, in my experience. I've had new acquaintances here follow through at a higher rate than old friends back in California. It is one of the things I like most about the city.
> People are non-committal, or cancel, or complain that you're staying in an inconvenient neighborhood for them to see you in. I blame it partially on the physical landscape of the place, just a bunch of suburbs smashed together trying to pretend to be a single city.
1) No, it's just LA flakiness. It's all about being seen dontcha know.
My weird story about this. I was at a Little Barrie concert. Of course, there is a band before and a band after. We're there up front listening to the first band--Auditorium (Spencer Berger, his brother, and someone else) who were really good. There's the two of us at a bar table like 4 feet from the band, and something like 4 other people. 6 people total. We talk to the band (awesome dudes) afterward.
And, then, suddenly, it's like a hipster sea flows in. Skinny corduroy jeans everywhere. Snaps and flashes everywhere. I had words with the corduroy boys who thought they were going to be annoying as fuck in front of us. Uh, no, we understand that you're going to get a little riled up but you're NOT going to have your phone flash in my face the entire concert (I love the fact that Johnny Marr (separate concert) will call these douchebags out in the middle of a concert and chuck them out if they don't stop.). That can fuck right off--fortunately, I'm huge and make a very nice wall so they can get a nice picture of my back or they can move.
Little Barrie takes the stage about 5 minutes later--awesome super high energy show. And, then, suddenly, the hipster sea flows out.
And there's 6 people in the bar again for the band afterward. We felt so sorry for them. It's one thing to be the opening band and not have people but its another thing to be the closing band and watch everybody leave before you even hit the stage.
That's LA.
2) However, part of it is LA traffic. Your median appearance time is -20 minutes. Your variance is +15 to -Infinity.
If there is an accident between me and you that's going to make me 2 hours late, I'm not coming. I'll text you and tell you why, but I'm not coming unless you are a very close friend.
For sure, each suburb has it's own sort of "downtown" area in LA. But just because you can sort of walk around some parts of LA doesn't make it a place where spontaneity can thrive. As soon as you throw necessitating a car into the mix you lose that.
Yeah. Even if you do go out in a strip mall neighborhood, unless you're in the SGV or something there will be enough of them you can easily hop from one to another on foot (and people do).
And honestly some of the best food in this country is found in these strip malls. This humble strip mall of a half dozen restaurants contains some of the best Thai food in the world (1). If you've ever heard of the chef Jet Tila, this very strip mall is his formative ground.
It feels to me like your initial intuition was right - they are being jerks/babies and they aren't respecting the decisions their past selves have made.
I went through a phase of tongue-in-cheek "quantum planning", wherin I would give my friends a percentage on any plan I was invited to. So if I was asked to dinner I might just say "60%". Needless to say this didn't go down very well with people.
There is a value to your word, and yes, it is more prevalent in closer-knit communities than in bigger cities, but I think that's because the cost of ditching a "friend" in a big city is much lower - after all there a plenty more potential friends to be had. But in my opinion someone who habitually breaks plans is giving a clear indication that they don't value their word and don't value the person they break plans with.
Might be something to do with LA (and possibly other large urban/metro areas) but possibly something more to do with 'school'. Even at a university level, people are still kids or young adults, don't have many connections, don't really understand the impact of their actions, reputation, etc.
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I saw this sort of "yeah/maybe/cancel" behaviour amongst some portion of peers back in my university days, but even then, it wasn't everyone, or even most people in my circles. It was known poor behaviour then. We tolerated things a bit more because... no mobile phones, no email, etc. If you weren't there, you weren't there, but often didn't have a good way to let someone know you had to cancel ahead of time (but you'd check your answering machine timestamp to verify!).
This was true of my life in SF as well post college. I suspect it’s universal of life for young single people in cities.
Looking back, if I had to diagnose it, I’d say it had to do with a compulsion to stay busy coupled with overcommitting to the point of social burnout. Kinda like how children get cranky when they don’t get their nap but don’t believe they’re tired until they fall over.
> I went through a phase of tongue-in-cheek "quantum planning", wherin I would give my friends a percentage on any plan I was invited to. So if I was asked to dinner I might just say "60%". Needless to say this didn't go down very well with people.
This is hilarious. I do think it's generally a good idea to communicate hesitation or any degree of unwillingness, I'm just laughing at how you convey it with this approach.
BTW I kinda love your quantum planning approach. It's honest and accurate! If you're 50/50 on going to something, be transparent and tell others that. If they don't like it, that's on them, not you.
But that's not how planning works. I want to know how many people to expect. I want to know if you're coming or not so I can plan accordingly. If someone just said 50/50 without any kind of reasoning or explanation, I'd say OK forget about it then.
"I've got a pretty busy day that day and am not sure I can make it" - transparent
"I don't know if I'll be up to going to that that day" - transparent.
"Hey, maybe; if I find nothing better to do" - transparent.
"50/50 chance I'll be there" - all the charm of the last of those, without the transparency.
Haha thanks, but I agree with the sibling posts, I just did it to be weird and provocative (and not but for more than a week or two) and people _hated_ it and for good reason, I think.
Just like the linked post, learn to better predict how you'll feel so you can go from 50/50 to 100% in either direction as soon as you can. Then you can all move on instead of having another spinning plate in your life.
IMO cancelling plans on people because 'something better came up' is rude and selfish. I just stop being friends with people like that.
e.g. I had someone cancel plans made weeks ahead to meet up with me and my family at the last minute because they got invited to go skiing (this is in an area near many ski resorts, it was not a once in a lifetime opportunity). I just lost interest in meeting up with that person again.
I similarly dislike dealing with people who "keep their options open" by refusing to commit to plans until the last minute (e.g. RSVP-ing to a birthday party invite the night before).
I generally agree with your sentiment but do also think there is value in some degree of flexibility and recognizing some plans have more significance than other.
E.g. if the friend bailed on a coffee break instead of a weeks-in-advance-vacation-plan it would be much less of a big deal (maybe not even worth nuking the friendship over?). Either way, situations like that do call for evaluating how important that person is in your life and (down)ranking them accordingly. Everyone has some fair-weather friends.
There's flexibility and then there are repeat offenders. In a more detailed look, last minute cancel is the worst.
I have moved the fair weather friends to group invites, and they either come or don't. They torpedo so many plans, it's not worth making the changes anymore.
> Los Angeles [...] people cancelled plans on me all the time
Traffic. It's because of traffic and sprawl.
LA is massive[1]. If you lived in Manhattan and made plans with people living in Queens or Brooklyn or East Rutherford, you would expect them to flake just as much as people living in LA. If I only make plans with people in Santa Monica and I live in Santa Monica, they will probably show up.
The reality is that in LA you do not have subways that go everywhere. You also do not walk. So you interact with people that mostly got to that location via freeway and probably live at least 30 minutes away. Plans sound nice and people like to be agreeable, so they will say "sure, I might make it." And usually you do not get a strong yes. It's always a maybe. Because when the event rolls around, you're stuck deciding whether you feel like getting into the car and driving a good hour in heavy traffic or not. It's not because people are dicks, like everyone is claiming. It's because the city wears on you. Distance is measured in time, not miles in LA.
Also, parking. If you live in WeHo, KTown, DTLA, or Santa Monica and you're asking people to find parking, be prepared for lots of canceled plans. No one likes circling the streets for 20 minutes to find parking.
> LA is massive[1]. If you lived in Manhattan and made plans with people living in Queens or Brooklyn or East Rutherford, you would expect them to flake just as much as people living in LA. If I only make plans with people in Santa Monica and I live in Santa Monica, they will probably show up.
Why does logistics make your attendance unreliable? I live in Cambridge (UK) and regularly have social things in London. The transport usually goes: cycle to station (20 minutes), train to London (1 hour), Underground to destination (10-40 minutes). I know that's the transport when I agree to do something - if I don't want to do it, don't accept the invitation. If I change my mind in the intervening period then that's me being shitty for not thinking it through in the first place or for not bothering to put in the effort.
If anything the longer the transport the less likely I would be to flake due to the larger mental commitment I've made.
Barry Sobel made hay of this aspect of LA culture back in 1992:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLf3EaDEf68
I'm amazed this has been bouncing around in my head for 30 years, and equally amazed I could instantly pull this up with a Google search.
Grew up in LA. Never had people flake. My guess is via random variation, some people get unlucky, have a few people flake, and assume it's the cultural norm. You can insert "people from ____ are flaky" and find complaints about pretty much anywhere.
Common experience for me, rural stores closing 15 to 30mins early (so from my pov as a customer, flaky, by not being where they said they'd be)
I'll affirm and agree with the sibling comments here: I know lots of people who live in / spent time in LA and they report the same thing -- that lots of people there are just flakey on plans.
I don't think the fact that lots of people do it makes it OK in any way whatsoever. If the culture is to be rude and flakey, you don't have to conform to that, and you don't have to accept that from others. I'm friends with some people in LA and we all know that flaking on plans is a no-no regardless of what city we're in / from.
This must be a cultural thing because it's the rudest thing I could imagine! Agreeing to a plan is a commitment. The other people involved (who have also committed) rely on you doing your best to honour your commitment - who knows how their plans would have been different had you not committed in advance.
Its only a wrong if it is not understood how contingent the affirmative is. If its common knowledge that fulfillment of an agreement to meet at a certain place and time for a social occasion is highly contingent on the circumstances on the time, no violation of trust occurs. Let's not be too rigid in our thinking about human social relationships.
Also n=1, but a buddy of mine from the east coast lived in LA for 7 years, told me the people there were the most selfish and fake bunch he had ever met. He said he never made a real friend in the entire time he was there, and that was a major reason he moved back east. I think you just ran into a bunch of assholes.
A bit of insight, the people you we’re hanging with weren’t from LA either. There is a difference between the people who grew up here vs the people that are here to act out some fantasy.
I like this article, but I wish it was phrased "are you being a baby" instead of "are you a baby". Labeling oneself as wholly a particular attribute is one of the mechanisms by which anxiety takes root: you _are_ or _aren't_ something, full stop. Labeling actions or states shifts your mindset so that you can clearly see this is something you're free to change. It's the sort of thing that makes no difference at a factual level (they're logically equivalent! right!?) but emotionally the tone shift makes a huge difference.
It seems blindingly clear what the author means, and if one isn't going to connect with the article because they're hung up on "is acting like" versus "is", they weren't going to get it anyways.
Yeah, my point is exactly that although it is clear at a language level, the terminology shift can be quite important for whether you end up with a thought process that's healthy vs entangled with anxiety. If you don't believe that -- perhaps you haven't dealt with a lot of anxiety in your life?
I've dealt with plenty of anxiety. Talk therapy is great.
If somebody's anxiety prevents them from connecting to the article because the author refers to themselves as "a baby" instead of "like a baby", that person may benefit from talk therapy.
As an outsider, I think the conversation went off the rails here when you assumed the OP wasn't "going to connect with the article" based on their comment. This is now the 2nd time w/o reason you're implying that, whereas the OP is talking about general implications of the word choice (on the author and on people in general, not on people's emotional state while reading it).
Why do you think it's "blindingly clear"? If you're going to use such strong language, it should be easy to present your argument in a more convincing way. Others disagree with you - I think calling them wrong without so much as a single line to suggest why is very much "being a baby". You think others should just agree with you because it's what YOU think - my five year old niece seems to think this way as well.
* someone reacting strongly to this slight difference is "acting like a baby", at least colloquially, but I'm not sure if it meets the author's definition of "active".
* the author using the term "acting like a baby" might get through to people who are sensitive to the difference
Excellent point. I try to do that on HN: differentiate between describing how you interpreted what they typed ("said something greedy and childish") rather than a value statement about that person ("you are greedy and childish"). Easy to forget sometimes, but super important to separate the words/actions from the person. We all say/do dumb shit sometimes that is out of our normative character for all sorts of reasons.
A person is perhaps defined by _all_ their actions, but they're not very definable by a single action, out of context. That's the kind of reasoning that writes someone off if they make a mistake, which is totally intolerant.
That's fair. I would say a person is defined by what they do next.
I think what you're saying is that you should be careful telling someone that they 'are a baby' or 'are dumb', because they might believe you.
I would also be careful of telling someone they are 'acting like a baby' or 'acting dumb', because most people won't appreciate the semantic difference.
In the context of this article, though, I'm not too bothered since the article is about how one can change their baby-like habits. But it is always a good reminder.
I'm not really so concerned with what you tell someone else, but what you end up telling yourself can be pretty important and stick with you for a long time. an article like this is mostly targeted at one's perception of themselves, and if you read it and start to adopt the model that that "you are a baby" when you act that way, you might have adopted a slightly less healthy model than you could have.
This makes me think of an interesting story from an article [0] about MIchael Bublé's latest album, and his work on it with Sir Paul McCartney.
> “It was a long day, we were playing live, and he was really calm and patient with me. He helped me to make sure that I told the story the right way. Less was more for him. I’m dramatic, so I have the urge to go over the top.
> “I was taking liberties, and he didn’t like that. He had to make a long walk from the control room to come down and put me right a few times.” When Bublé sang the line “I’m waiting on a sign”, McCartney called a halt and arrived in the booth.
> “Can you explain to me what you’re waiting on?” he asked. “Yes. I’m waiting on a sign,” trilled Bublé enthusiastically. “So are you actually on the sign, waiting?” asked McCartney, “or are you waiting for a sign?”
> Recounting the tale, Bublé hangs his head like a defeated schoolboy. “I’m waiting for a sign, Sir Paul.” He laughs. Bublé’s revived love for his craft is endearing.
I don’t think they're logically equivalent at all.
“Are you being a baby?” - Are you temporarily being a bit of a baby, like, at the moment? Could you maybe be a teeny bit braver to get through this current bit of anxiety you're feeling, and then we'll worry about the next bit tomorrow eh?
“Are you a baby?” - Is it possible you have always been a baby? Is it time to grow up, ie, make a real, permanent change to how you think? To start taking responsibility for managing your own emotional responses to the all the inevitable sources of potential anxiety that life will continue to throw at you forever? To break the cycle of weak/passive/burdensome social behaviour once and for all?
The author obliquely touches on this, but my sense is that people need to cut themselves a lot more slack. A large part of becoming an adult is learning to navigate ambiguous social signals, and to make decisions without the comfort of having another adult's prior approval.
My advice to 20-somethings is to be gentle with themselves. The "boot-strapping, we-can-do-hard-things motivational speaker" talk isn't so much wrong as it is ascetic. As it turns out, you can be a responsible, virtuous and respectable adult without being so damn hard on yourself. In fact, I think I became an adult the moment I recognized that the child in me needed some care, and that I alone could provide it.
EDIT: on second thought, my wife provides a fair bit of that too, and I for her.
That’s a fair point. But also, it may not be the right advice for 20-somethings who are already being too gentle with themselves, which is the audience I think the author is trying to reach.
Advice falls on a spectrum, and whether to follow it or not rests much on your present circumstances versus the advice giver’s.
I see your point, and even agree that "coddled 20-somethings" are a real and worrying phenomenon. Where I respectfully disagree is with the idea that the ascetic, protestant-work-ethic, hard-truth-telling, pull-yourself-together rhetoric is helpful to them. Even Jordan Peterson, who is arguably the epitome of that category, explicitly recognizes that the way forward is through incremental baby-steps. To wit: he (along with essentially every clinical psychologist) recommends aiming for small victories (make your bed, get your car's oil changed, etc.) and rewarding oneself, say, with a cup of coffee on the way home.
It's in this sense that I think hardlining oneself is counter-productive. Worse, I think it's even more counterproductive for coddled youth. The way to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps is gently, or at least, compassionately.
I find it a bit strange that the author leads with the example of wanting to "blind cancel", and then suggests that maturity and communication is the real answer to that scenario.
People sometimes seem to imply that if we could just select the most appropriate types of language, and only express our true, heartfelt feelings, then our language will never cause pain.
But that's just not true. Sometimes your friend may also secretly want to cancel, but other times your friend will be hurt by knowing you want to cancel the plans you made together that they have, for whatever reason, been really looking forward to. And sometimes there doesn't exist a way to communicate your true feelings without potentially causing pain. Being mature and communicating truthfully cannot solve this problem. Often times the solution is to suck it up and stick to the plans -- but that has nothing to do with communication.
>And sometimes there doesn't exist a way to communicate your true feelings without potentially causing pain. Being mature and communicating truthfully cannot solve this problem.
That's because it's not a problem.
The point of the article is that it's babyish to be so fragile that a friend cancelling plans causes you great pain, or so guilt-ridden that you can't bring yourself to cancel. In both cases the solution is not to avoid the feelings, but to become stronger.
>The point of the article is that it's babyish to be so fragile that a friend cancelling plans causes you great pain, or so guilt-ridden that you can't bring yourself to cancel.
My reading of the scenario is not that the person is too "guilt-ridden" to bring themselves to cancel - it's that they only mildly want to cancel, for frivolous reasons. They want to find out if the other person also mildly wants to cancel. The point is, in many relationships it is simply not possible to find this information out, because asking "how much do you want to keep our plans" in and of itself reveals that you want to cancel.
You can't measure how much the other person truly wants to cancel, because attempting to take the measurement will alter the outcome.
I don't think that's quite right. It's not that they mildly want to cancel some plan, but rather that they don't really want to do it and are only going along with it because they think the other person wants to do it. Thus the hypothetical app would solve the situation where both people are doing something only because each thinks the other person wants to do it, but in fact neither wants to do it and neither wants to disappoint the other one by telling them they don't want to do it.
But in general, aren't there some cases where we want to moderate our communication based on how it will be received? Honesty is the right default, but not universally correct.
The classic example is that it might be preferable to tell someone that a dress they just bought looks good on them.
I think as children we tend to be too honest, and then overshoot as teens or young adults by worrying too much about social acceptance. And we have to find a middle ground.
I agree. I've had lots of these kinds of interactions— it's definitely possible to "put out feelers" on whether someone is really excited about a thing or just going along with it.
Yes there is a slight risk that that action will put a damper on the other person's interest, but it's not a huge deal to recover from— either by amping yourself up to assure them that you really are excited for the thing they're excited about, or taking the initiative the next time to make a thing happen that you know you can be excited about and follow through on.
I've definitely also triggered the damper reaction accidentally in the past when just trying to make an innocent inquiry about a start time or something, so even if you rarely do it for real, it's good to understand these dynamics and how to navigate them.
I think for me a lot of it is just the knowledge that often I end up really enjoying and feeling good about activities that I may not have been all that excited for at the outset— fitness stuff like swimming or going for a bike ride are obvious examples.
So it's not just a matter of me being deceptive, it's also the internal conflict between my lizard brain ("stay home and do nothing, so great") and my thoughtful brain ("you enjoyed this the last time, give it a chance, ya dummy"). The not-being-a-baby for me is having the executive function to go do a thing that I know I'm probably going to end up being glad I did, while not wanting to be a wet blanket for everyone else by letting them all know upfront that I'm not there yet.
I completely agree and think that is normal for a lot of people. I was just saying that is perfectly reasonable and healthy to explain this to someone else if you choose to reach out to them.
EG:
Person 1: Do you still want to do X?
Person 2: Yes, why?
Person 1: I just wanted to check in. I usually get (anxious, lazy, scared) before this kinda thing. I know I'm going to end up being glad I did.
This is a normal conversation and builds healthy relationships, but for some reason people are often hesitant to say how they feel and want to put on a facade. It is a lot easier to be candid than internalizing it and lying.
The other branch of this post’s children, from thrwy_ywrht is a perfect example of the sort of neurotic overanalysis that the article’s talking about. It’s extra cute that the poster is using a throwaway account.
Some of the decisions you make in life will run counter to other people’s expectations. The strength you get, and demonstrate to them as well, from communicating your intentions is in acknowledging you can’t “protect their feelings” and aren’t trying, and that you have the respect for them as well to manage and regulate their own feelings.
Good people will understand and forgive minor infractions. This isn’t license to freely commit any infraction. It’s just an acknowledgment of everyone’s fallibility.
> It’s just an acknowledgment of everyone’s fallibility.
You are not describing failure there. You are describing the "I made plans I feel like cancelling and don't care about other person".
Them reacting negatively is healthy self presentation instinct. Because if this is your strategy, you will cancel regularly and they are better off finding more reliable friends.
I agreed with your first sentence but not the rest. It's not a problem because pain is not inherently a problem.
Yes it's going to hurt to find out someone doesn't want to go through with plans. It's going to hurt even more to find out they really don't enjoy your company as much as you thought they did, or as much as you do theirs. But how is keeping your head buried in the sand going to be more beneficial in the long run?
>It's going to hurt even more to find out they really don't enjoy your company as much as you thought they did
This is the crux of the issue. There are many people who often feel like cancelling on plans, but it is absolutely not because they don't enjoy their friends' company. It might be because they have a mood disorder, or chronic fatigue, or social anxiety, etc etc. The whole reason someone might want an app that lets you cancel on plans, but only if the other person also wants to cancel, is because it's almost impossible to express this feeling to someone without that person drawing the conclusion, to some degree, that you enjoy their company less than they thought.
If you genuinely don't enjoy spending time with someone, that's a much easier problem to solve.
>is because it's almost impossible to express this feeling to someone without that person drawing the conclusion, to some degree, that you enjoy their company less than they thought.
Not only is it not "almost impossible" -- it's easy. Especially if you have a reputation for being honest.
"Listen, I am feeling like shit right now, and won't have fun if we go out. It's got nothing to do with you. Can we reschedule?"
By the author's metric, I think this statement would be "Active" if it were an honest statement, i.e. you're actually sick, but it would be "Avoidant" if it is deceptive
So? It's not your responsibility for someone else's insecurity - and in fact, if you stop to assume that they think this way, you'll find that they 9/10 times do not.
>The whole reason someone might want an app that lets you cancel on plans
I know this is HN where we are probably all biased towards creating software solutions, but do you really think software is the right lever to this problem?
The root cause is that people don't feel psychologically safe enough to voice their wish to cancel. I don't know that an app really helps that, it just provides an escape hatch. I'd much rather a person say to me, "Look, it's nothing about you, but I struggle with social anxiety and it's getting the best of me right now and need to cancel." Not only would that give me greater compassion for what they're going through, it would also help tailor future outings to alleviate that. Just having a "cancel matching" app won't do anything to foster that kind of growth.
To me this feels like one of those distinctions between "can" and "should" in tech.
> I know this is HN where we are probably all biased towards creating software solutions, but do you really think software is the right lever to this problem?
I'm not sure how you got that impression from that sentence, especially because the word "want" was emphasized.
I'm sorry, I'm not following. I'm assuming someone would want something because they feel like it's a solution to their problem. In this case, I'm saying I think software is the wrong "solution" because it just treats the symptom (get me out of this obligation) and not the underlying cause (provide psychological trust). Did you interpret the sentence differently?
They want the supposed benefit. That doesn't mean they think the mechanism is correct, or even that any mechanism could actually do it in a non-abstract way.
That's kinda the point of the last sentence in the my original comment. People may desire an app that optimizes their ability to connect with drug dealers. It's certainly possible from a technical standpoint. It doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Likewise an app that allows you easily bail on social engagements guilt-free through minimized interactions is probably not a good idea because those interactions are exactly how you build the trust that's the root cause of the guilt in the first place.
Maybe we're miscommunicating. I'm not implying the software solution exists, just that that desire for such an app may be misplaced.
> Likewise an app that allows you easily bail on social engagements guilt-free through minimized interactions is probably not a good idea because those interactions are exactly how you build the trust that's the root cause of the guilt in the first place.
The interactions of possibly cancelling things? I don't know about that. And expecially the interactions of cancelling things both people want to cancel? That doesn't seem notably trust-buildy to me.
> Maybe we're miscommunicating. I'm not implying the software solution exists, just that that desire for such an app may be misplaced.
And I'm saying the desire isn't specifically for an app, and shouldn't have given you that impression that the poster thought software was "the right lever" in the first place.
Yes. Precisely because it causes one to actively communicate why. That’s what builds trust. As other commenters have noted, just agreeing to cancel still leaves one wondering why. Is it because they have social anxiety and I invited them to a black tie dinner? Or is it because they think I’m pompous because I enjoy formal gatherings? Did I agree because I think they are socially inept or because I think the party would be lame? You’ll never know and that uncertainty breeds distrust. Trust and certainty are intertwined when it comes to human social interactions.
>the desire isn’t specifically for an app
I mean, the OP literally said there was a want for an app. Now maybe they really meant there is a “want for reduced friction in canceling social interactions” but I’m saying psychological trust is a better way of reducing that friction, not off-loading it to faceless technology. To my original point, there are some things tech is great for. I’m not sure managing social interactions that have evolved over eons and are one of a few species-defining traits is one of them.
Imagine a different scenario like communicating what projects you want to lead at work. One organization just matches your requests with your bosses through an intermediary. When you don’t get the projects you want, you’re left wondering…is it because the boss thinks you’re not competent? Is it because someone else has a unique skill set to lead instead? Is it nepotism? Bribery? The other org institutes an open dialogue where your boss explains the exact rationale behind each assignment. Which do you think is managing their relationships more effectively?
if you cancel without telling me why then i am even more likely to draw the (wrong) conclusion. and if you, and if i wanted to cancel too, then i am still going to wonder why you wanted to cancel. the only way to avoid misinterpretation is to state the reason outright.
I'm depressive and have social anxiety and I still found that forcing myself to attend these social situations instead of bailing and staying home for "self-care" almost always improved my mood and made me feel happy that I went at the end. If you have a more serious medical condition that makes you physically unable to go anywhere that's another matter, but I'm guessing lots of people (just as I did) use less serious mood disorders as excuses to, as the OP put it, be a baby.
> It might be because they have a mood disorder, or chronic fatigue, or social anxiety, etc etc.
This is a babies excuse. If you're an adult, you should be actively dealing with this. However, it has become fashionable to wear a psychological condition on your sleeve. People who use this as an excuse have likely never been diagnosed and probably aren't even trying to deal with it. Either way, those are their battles, and if it means they are flaky, we just won't be friends. I've done the hard work to get myself out of a social anxiety disorder and can easily tell who actually has similar issues and those who are just lazy flakes.
I always found the "Boundaries" (Henry Cloud) distinction here very useful.
It's OK to "hurt" someone - that is, if you are communicating the truth, your boundaries, your needs, you may hurt someone.
It's not OK to "harm" someone - that is, you do intentional/lasting damage to them through your actions. (My wording is not nearly as on point as the original author, but I hope you get the gist.)
I think it's appropriate to get upset when someone cancels. I think it is more adult to only commit to something you intend to follow through on.
Life happens. Sometimes some people cancel. But if you're one of those people always canceling plans, be prepared to find your invites become less frequent, and people not planning things around what you say.
I've come to the point where if I don't know whether I want to do something I say "I'm not sure yet I'll let you know" and then always actually fess up and let them know one way or another, or say "yes" or "no" and follow through no matter how I feel. And I expect the same of people, people who get to know me who are used to peer pressure find themselves initially worried about saying no, but then I find, pleasantly refreshed when I just say "OK." People that flake a lot though get annoyed with me, because I hold them to what they say and give them a hard time if they don't follow through.
This just sounds like insulting people for having feelings and hoping that since you called it "babyish", they will be insecure enough to not argue with you.
I think you're missing part of the author's point.
Yes, as adults, we are bound to "cause some pain" as you put it in some mundane situations, such as cancelling a plan that someone else has been looking forward to.
But her point is that what matters is expressing and discussing with your friends in that scenario:
- Tell them you don't feel like going out after all, maybe you're drained by work and need some time to cool off
- They could answer that it's fine, they don't mind going out alone
- Or maybe they'll propose to just stay in at your place for a quick dinner, just to catch up for a bit and let you rest
- Or they could let you know that they really need to go out with you, as they are going through a rough patch
- At that point you have a better idea of what different options you both have, and you can make an informed decision either way, deciding between your needs and your friend's needs.
- etc...
Obviously if that friend is important to you and you've already cancelled 3 times then maybe suck it up a bit. It's all a matter of context.
The point is that you should start by not avoiding that interaction with your friend for silly reasons, and relying on tech/tricks is not going to help for long.
> People sometimes seem to imply that if we could just select the most appropriate types of language, and only express our true, heartfelt feelings, then our language will never cause pain.
Accepting the inevitability and utility of pain is part of being an adult. Childhood should teach us how to handle pain and mitigate the pain we cause, but not to avoid it unnecessarily.
>> I find it a bit strange that the author leads with the example of wanting to "blind cancel", and then suggests that maturity and communication is the real answer to that scenario.
I don't think that's the _only_ solution the author is suggesting. She also goes on to mention "...self-knowledge: Will you be in the mood next week?". In other words, don't make plans if you're not confident you won't break them. Similar to the idea of "hell yes or no" as a response to social requests. If you don't have a strong sense for stuff you like/don't like doing and how you'll feel about social situations in the future that's going to be tough.
no matter how much i look forward to an activity with a friend, if they don't want to go, then i want to know, i'd rather cancel or reschedule than have someone be secretly miserable. the relationship itself is more important than my feelings about it. for a close friend, avoidance is damaging to the relationship, talking about it, strengthens the relationship.
sucking it up quietly is the wrong answer.
sometimes there may be a situation where canceling causes problems for the other person, but you only find out by talking about it and if you end up going anyways after you tell them, they will appreciate it even more that your friendship is worth so much that you are willing to be uncomfortable for their sake.
It really depends on the situation IMO. "Sucking it up quietly" doesn't necessarily mean that the entire event will be unpleasant. Sometimes it is more like the activation energy necessary to stick to an exercise routine - if I had a draining work week I'll have low motivation to go out, but if I do "suck it up" I'm usually happy at the end of the night that I did.
The social pressure to "suck it up" can actually be an awesome motivator for healthy behaviors, e.g. committing to a rec sports team. So there is definitely variation here. You need to know not just how important the event is to your friend, but also yourself.
right, it depends, if the thing that agreed to has some other benefits.
an alternative example would be after that draining work week cancelling an activity because i know i'll be tired the next morning and i really need more rest to be fit the next day.
You're missing the point. The desire to bail out of a social commitment is the problem, not the way you're doing it. Blind cancelling or coming right out and saying it are both baby behaviour.
The key bit here is communication: An adult communicates their rationale for a given situation while also acknowledging that the rationale may not be shared by others. In the old days we called it sticking to your principles.
For the dinner party, it’s perfectly okay to be late if the lateness is communicated ahead of time to the host and the reason is a valid one. “Afraid to meet you on my own” is not a valid reason.
Canceling or ghosting is not a valid reason period.
While an apt distinction, I think it's important to acknowledge that one's body and subconscious often cannot distinguish between "anxiety" and "fear" even though our higher level faculties may.
I agree, but it often takes a lot of training and experience to truly know the difference when both both fear and anxiety feel the same physiologically.
Because it is relevant and you seem to not have made the connection? More importantly, it's not a comment just to you, but for anyone who may struggle managing their anxiety. I thought it would be helpful to explain further. I’ll try one more time.
If a person has the same physiological reaction, they often can’t tell one from the other. You can’t “just ignore it” if it provides the same subjective experience without having the skill set to acknowledge the distinction. A person public speaking and a person standing on the ledge of a cliff may have the same physiological response, despite one being anxiety and the other being fear. The problem is our decisions may be rooted in our lower brain faculties which can't tell the difference. It doesn’t justify reacting to anxiety (which seems to be what you're hung up on), but helps explain why it happens and why it’s so hard to change.
Not GP, but I think the point being made is that regardless of your ability to distinguish between the two, you still need to act according to one of the two, with less weight given to which it ends up being. Showing up late means you avoided making a decision, to the detriment of both others as well as yourself. So pick one now, and maybe next time figure out if that was what you were feeling or not.
I wasn't trying to justify the decision. I was just trying to add context. The poster kept using the word "reason". I.e., it isn't a rational choice to be late. I agree with that.
All I was trying to do is add nuance that reason is a higher-order faculty of the mind. Many of these decisions take root at lower levels, where rationality isn't present. Because your body and subconscious struggle to differentiate between the two, it may take a lot introspection and training to arrive at the right conclusion. None of that is in disagreement with the comment I was replying to, it just adds context as to why it's easier said than done and how it may take some specific skills to implement.
> Because your body and subconscious struggle to differentiate between the two, it may take a lot introspection and training to arrive at the right conclusion.
You still don't seem to understand my point. When you say things like "You can’t “just ignore it” if it provides the same subjective experience without having the skill set to acknowledge the distinction." that has nothing to do with my argument.
What I'm saying is that it doesn't matter which one it is. You don't need to reason about fear vs. anxiety at all. If you reach the right conclusion, you don't show up late. If you reach the wrong conclusion, you also don't show up late!
I never said it was easy to distinguish between the two. The key is that making an assumption works just fine too. If you assume it's one or the other, then you won't show up late.
Fear doesn't shut your brain off. If you can't tell whether a snake is venomous or not, you decide whether you're going to give it a wide berth based on a combination of emotion and/or logic. What you don't do is decide "it'll probably stop being venomous after a few minutes".
> The problem is our decisions may be rooted in our lower brain faculties which can't tell the difference. It doesn’t justify reacting to anxiety (which seems to be what you're hung up on), but helps explain why it happens and why it’s so hard to change.
That's not what I'm hung up on at all. What I'm hung up on is the idea that it would make you late. If the anxiety feels like real danger, and you're treating it as real danger, then don't show up at all. It's not a "dinner party" if you're scared for your safety.
I understand what you're saying but get the feeling you're painting in a light that just doesn't align with the way people make decisions.
Have you ever known someone who procrastinates on an important task even though they know it's important? They rationally know it's in their best interest and needs to get done. They know it's not fear, because there's no real threat of bodily harm. Yet they can't get the initiative to begin the task. Maybe they eventually get around to doing it because they can rationalize themselves into action, but why was there a delay at all?
I'm saying it's because the parts of our brain that help initiate decisions are affected by fight-or-flight stress. In the case above, the stress may be caused by the anxiety of an overwhelming task. Delayed action is a form of coping. It's not "fear", but there is still a delayed decision because anxiety initiates a similar response. Is it rational? Not at all. It still governed by the same mechanisms, but can be overridden even when it takes some time. Just like in a real fear scenario when people can't think straight enough to act. If you can understand that "being late" is, at times, a coping mechanism for that stress, then you can understand the relevance of my point.
>If you know it's anxiety then you know it's a bad reason
To underscore the point ad nauseum, "they" do not know, other than "they" feel the pangs of anxiety that lead to to the inability to act. There is a disconnect between their rationality and their mechanisms to make a decision. It's possible "their" rational faculties understand while "their" lower systems do not. There's no mental gymnastics necessary to see how the two can coexist. As I said, it takes a whole lot of introspection for some people to override that. The mind is not a single all-seeing rational "decider", unfortunately, and that's why things like cognitive dissonance are difficult to overcome.
All I can conclude from this discourse is we have very different ideas about the way the mind works. Yours does not seem consistent with the cognitive psychology of the last 30 or so years, particularly since fMRI studies became popular.
My conclusion is that you keep mixing up scenarios.
There is a scenario where they know it's anxiety, and a scenario where they don't.
I have completely different arguments for each scenario. But you keep mixing up which of my arguments goes to which scenario, and then refuting it in a way that doesn't make sense.
I mean, look at this part specifically:
you: They know it's not fear
me: If they know it's just anxiety
you: To underscore the point ad nauseum, "they" do not know
What the hell, how am I supposed to reply to this?
And when I say "know" I mean at a rational level. I'm not demanding emotions be rational, and I'm not demanding they not be paralyzed by emotions. I'm saying that IF they make a choice, that choice should not be "show up late". And IF they don't make a choice, because emotions are overriding decision-making entirely, then that's understandable but it's not a good reason. But those are two different scenarios. If If If.
>What the hell, how am I supposed to reply to this?
Ok, I'll try one last time to explain.
Neuroscientists generally divide the brain into 3 crude regions based on function and evolutionary development.
Region 1: the primitive "reptilian". This handles things like breathing and fight-or-flight response.
Region 2: the limbic system, "old mammalian", or "unconscious" system. This concerns things like social emotions and how you can intuit someone's intentions based on things like body language, tone of voice, etc.
Region 3: the neocortex or "new mammalian" system. This handles the rational processing of things like mathematics and logic.
Usually when people are talking about the "brain" they mean region 3, but they all work in concert with each other. My point of "they" is that there isn't a single monolith; there are times when the systems are incongruent.
So the rational brain may say "it's just a dinner party". To the rational brain there's no good reason to not go. But there's all kinds of reasons why Regions 1/2 may be screaming "don't go! It's dangerous!" It may not be rational, but those systems don't operate rationally. For example, one theory about the very common fear of public speaking is that it causes our limbic system to freak out because, from an evolutionary point of view, if you were speaking alone, in front of your tribe, it may be because you were at risk of being cast out. To a paleolithic human, that is a life-or-death risk. Unfortunately, that same functionality carries over to our current Region 2, and it doesn't know that it's just a powerpoint presentation without the same consequence.
So what does all that have to do with your point? When the different systems don't align, it causes wonky, irrational behavior, like indecisiveness. Like showing up late. You seem to be saying "Region 3, the rational brain, has made a conscious decision to be late. That's a bad choice." I agree, except it may not be the result of a conscious choice. It's possible their neocortex knows it's not fear while their limbic system does not. Research shows many of the choices we think are rational are actually rooted in our limbic system, which makes the reasonable choice more difficult for many people than you seem to assume.
We aren't in disagreement and it's interesting to me how you keep framing it as if we are. I agree being late isn't a good reason, as I've said previously. All I'm saying is that your advice to "just ignore it" requires a decent amount of introspection because of the way we're wired. Maybe you keep thinking we're in disagreement because it's on a forum and not face-to-face where your limbic system would be able to take in all the extra non-verbal/non-text information :-)
> We aren't in disagreement and it's interesting to me how you keep framing it as if we are.
Because you keep saying things like: [You seem to be saying "Region 3, the rational brain, has made a conscious decision to be late. That's a bad choice." I agree, except it may not be the result of a conscious choice.] and [your advice to "just ignore it"]
Because no, I'm not saying either of those things.
It might not be strictly "disagreement" but you're not understanding my argument at all.
Let me try one last time too.
There are two scenarios:
A) If region 1/2 is making the decision then it's understandable but irrational to show up late. We seem to agree on this.
B) Region 3 is making the decision. This is where we're having difficulty communicating.
Early on you said "it often takes a lot of training and experience to truly know the difference when both both fear and anxiety feel the same physiologically."
That's region 3 decision-making, right? Region 3 is trying to interpret region 1/2 and decide if there is real danger. Then region 3 plots a course of action.
So my direct reply, saying you "should" either "not go at all" or "ignore it" was specifically talking about scenario B, where region 3 is making decisions. Because region 3 is the part that's trying to interpret a gut feeling.
But then you saw the words "ignore it" and thought I was criticizing scenario A. I wasn't.
If region 1/2 causes someone to be late, I'm not calling them a bad decision maker.
If region 3 causes someone to be late, then I am calling them a bad decision maker. And I think I'm justified in this.
Since then it's been a huge mess of talking past each other. I can only hope that by wording it this way we can finally reach understanding.
At no point am I telling the theoretical chooser that they're expected to just suck it up and ignore regions 1/2. I'm very sympathetic if they fall victim to regions 1/2. I do say it's a bad reason to be late, but I don't blame them.
But if region 3 is in charge, I expect a semi-rational decision. And while I totally agree that it can be hard to distinguish between fear and anxiety, that quandry is not an excuse for showing up late. Because that quandry only has two answers, and neither answer is "show up late". Even if you don't know which answer is correct, you should know the answer is not "show up late". Again, this paragraph is only if region 3 is in charge.
Thanks for explaining. It seems our talking past each other stems from statements like:
>where region 3 is making decisions
>If region 3 causes someone to be late
>if region 3 is in charge
As you state, "this paragraph is only if region 3 is in charge." Central to my point is that Region 3 is not in charge like we generally think. Your perspective that the rational brain is in charge is common, but it's an error in understanding the way we make decisions. There's interesting research on this, but unfortunately not a lot of it because (for ethical reasons) it was previously required to find someone for damage to a specific portion of their brain. (Now they have other techniques). There are instances of people who have damage to their limbic system and literally take hours to make a decision with something as simple as where to get lunch. That should be a fairly easy decision if the rational Region 3 was in charge, right? But it's not; most of our decisions get initiated in Region 2 and then our Region 3 rationalizes an explanation. So someone will be late because Region 1/2 is scared and Region 3 comes up with a reason to justify their behavior like "I was afraid to meet you on my own."
Is it a good reason? No, but I was just laying context as to why it happens. To your point, we can learn to override it but often that is what results in a delayed decision because it takes time to reduce the cognitive dissonance. Hence being late.
Let me phrase it a different way then. Some decisions are made with region 3 as a critical part of the loop, and some aren't.
You're not navigating a map or writing a comment with regions 1 and 2 doing everything.
If it goes scared -> hide, then I don't blame region 3 for screwing up.
If it goes scared -> make plans -> pick a plan, then I will blame region 3 if it makes bad plans. Is it wrong for me to say region 3 is "in charge" here? Okay, maybe that's too simple of a way of looking at it. But region 3 has a lot of power and responsibility when it comes to planning. So if it's the logical planning step that fails, not because it was disrupted by fear but because it went "oh I can't tell if the fear is real, better get stuck on that and not explore the two whole possibilities", then that's a non-emotional screwup and I expect better.
>If it goes scared -> make plans -> pick a plan, then I will blame region 3 if it makes bad plans.
The error in your mental model here is that you equate Region 3 with being the "plan maker". As I said previously, an awful lot of the time Region 2 is actually the decider and Region 3 just rationalizes it. You can see this with the priming research. The way it often goes is
Region 1/2 gets a response -> Region 2 makes a decision on a course of action -> Region 3 rationalizes that course of action.
A researcher may bring in a subject and ask them to describe their idea of a good vacation. Maybe around the room there are influences like pictures of a beach and oranges and the subject talks about planning a vacation to Florida. Meanwhile, with other subjects they use pictures of mountains and there is a higher likelihood the person describes a vacation in Colorado. It's not that their Region 3 was influenced by Region 2; it's literally that Region 2 made the decision without Region 3 even being cognizant of it. You can even see this on an fMRI where the limbic system makes decisions even before the person is consciously aware a decision was made. And then Region 3 comes up with all kinds of elaborate reasons why like "I've always wanted to go to Disney World" or "I grew up skiing and want to try it again."
There's other classic examples of people thinking they are being rational but really just being subject to Region 2's decisions. The 1960 presidential election is a famous example. Different groups were selected (years after the election so the weren't politically biased); one watched the televised debate and the other listened to the radio broadcast. Time and again, each came up with different winners of the debate. The TV group thought Kennedy won, while the radio group thought Nixon did. Why? Because each group's Region 2 got different information. The TV group saw a young, vibrant, tan Kennedy with great hair and saw a pale, sick, Nixon without any makeup. The radio group heard a Nixon with an authoritative deep gravely voice and a Kennedy with a harsh, nasally Boston accent. Yet when pressed, each group was great at rationalizing their choice that had nothing to do with any of that; both based it on the same debate words. If a rational Region 3 made the plans to vote, it would only be based on the content of their words. The fact that it's not, just like the fact that the man with the damaged limbic system couldn't make simple plans like what to have for lunch, points to the fact that many of our decisions are actually rooted in Region 2.
The common perception is that Region 3 gets influenced by the other parts of the brain but ultimately makes it's own decisions as if it's some ultimate judge who weighs all the evidence. We like to think we're rational and consciously in charge. That's understandable but not congruent with much of the research.
What you're essentially doing is blaming Region 3 for Region 2's irrationality.
Why do you keep removing the word if and telling me I'm assuming things?
Sometimes people rationalize things, and they're wrong about why they did something.
But there are logical planning things that only region 3 is capable of.
> The error in your mental model here is that you equate Region 3 with being the "plan maker". As I said previously, an awful lot of the time Region 2 is actually the decider and Region 3 just rationalizes it.
I don't understand this criticism, unless you're treating plan maker and plan decider as the same thing? I was already leaving it open for region 2 to be the decider.
If region 2 is completely on its own then it's not making much of a plan, is it?
Imo, real adulthood is to recognize that adults communicate in variety of ways. Real world adults are not and never were perfectly communicating non-emotional beings.
I mean, realistically, many of them don't. For many different reasons, like being socialized to not make them. Or, having own mental health or emotional issues that make it hard. Or because, they know the consequences for it in the social group they are in.
I thought "sticking to your principles" meant that you persisted in your course of action or thought convinced that it was the best one, despite other people's objections.
This is outside the context of the example though. Here the author has accepted an invitation to a dinner party where she's meeting the hosts for the very first time. I think part of becoming an adult is mastering, or at least masking, social anxiety of participating in new interactions. That's because there's no way to know whether you will like or dislike the other person until you actually talk to them. Only kids throw tantrums and back out because they're too shy or too immature. Adults don't have that luxury. That's the thrust of the author's position.
right, but the thing is that the situation has changed. if i am invited to a party where i don't know anyone except the one person that invited me and then that very person has to cancel at the last minute, i might consider not to go. it has been said elsewhere in this thread it depends on whether this is an opportunity for me to grow or not and whether that benefit outweighs the cost.
This isn’t about growth but rather about social etiquette. In this case, although your friend is the reason you attend, it is the host who has officially invited you to the party. Now, the invite and acceptance are between you and the host directly and social etiquette requires a clear communication in case of a cancellation.
From the host’s perspective, you are still attending until you cancel. Of course people do the social calculus all the time and can choose to bail without notice. It’s been done for centuries, but is considered poor form in most circumstances except emergencies. In almost all cases a “sorry, I am unable to make it tonight,” is usually sufficient.
Of course if the host never officially invited you in the first place and you were simply tagging along, there is no social obligation and you are free to do as you please.
I enjoyed this post. Choosing what actions to take when there isn't a clear right or wrong is really what makes being an adult interesting.
I've found that it helps to ask if the thing that I'm avoiding is something that is reasonable for me to accomplish and something that will help me grow, such that perhaps if I encounter it again I can handle it better. If so, I should take action instead of avoiding it.
In the case of the mosh pit example, staying in the pit even if you didn't want to didn't really give you any growth opportunities, unless you were really eager to "learn" how to mosh.
Going to the party when you didn't want to, although possibly awkward, was such a growth opportunity. It afforded a chance to flex social skills, and the downside was likely overstated. In the future, should such a scenario arise, the author can now deal with it much more easily.
I think we have deep feeling of "I didn't do what I should've" (and a sense of personal failure) when we choose to avoid action and we recognize that we've denied ourselves a growth opportunity. Our analytical brain may not pick up on it to form the thought, but I think we still know it.
Not even sure what 'this' is any more. Someone taking micro daily decisions for her own personal pleasure/displeasure and it somehow being an example for everyone else.
When you presume a feeling for someone else, you're robbing them of their own agency.
You may not even be wrong, but people have a right to choose how they feel about something, how something affects them, and the only way to know is to talk to them about it.
Attributing to someone a feeling or thought they themselves did not actually have is among the worst things you can reasonably do to someone on a daily basis without interacting with them at all.
I worry people don't quite realize how harmful this behavior is, or how often people do it.
The solution, as always, is to communicate. Just speak, using words, to the person you're inventing thoughts and feelings for. Often you've successfully detected something (we are social creatures, after all), but rarely are you right on the specifics.
I agree, with the caveat that it doesn't work with people acting in bad faith (e.g. liars, manipulators, narcissists). In those cases, communication often makes situations worse. Of course bad faith should never be assumed, but once it has been demonstrated, it's hard to forget—if someone was willing to lie once to get what he wanted, how do I know he'd be unwilling to lie again?
For the vast majority of people, though, communication is better.
> I worry people don't quite realize how harmful this behavior is
trying to predict how people feel without talking to them is baked into thousands of years of evolution, not just for humans, and a large amount of human communication is implied or non-verbal as well. It's hard to think it's that harmful given we've coevolved with it.
BTW, would you only take this approach with close friends/partners, or bosses/coworkers too?
it's harmful because it when it is wrong, then it can cause a lot of damage to the relationship. what we think others are feeling is always based on our own feelings. the reason it works, because most of the time, their feelings don't actually matter.
when bumping into a stranger, assume best intentions, apologize or say something else appropriate and move on. who cares what they actually think or feel.
the closer the person is, the more communication is warranted.
There are plenty of things we evolved to do/believe/think/perceive that are now harmful, because the world has changed and we haven't yet genetically evolved to fully adapt to it yet (and, because of medical technology, we may never do so). There are hundreds of cognitive biases that exist because they were an evolutionary benefit, but no longer are, or are no longer enough.
Predicting how people feel is empathy, and that's great! But stopping there and assuming your predictions are correct without actually verifying them with the person first? That's harmful. You're not too busy anymore running from lions and hunting deer to stop and talk to a person before forming your ideas about them.
We're not on the savanna hunting antelope anymore, so knowing that you're feeling, "scared of being eaten by the lion behind me" is no longer granular enough to be useful.
Human ancestors evolved social skills way before they descended to the savanna. Chimps kill each other all the time, maybe evolving a way to predict feelings would be useful there?
What does it look like to presume a feeling for someone else? The reason I ask is because I have a hard time connecting how thinking something can rob someone.
Also, when it comes to talking about things that happen in the mind, wouldn't hyperbolic assertions like "When you do X, you're actually robbing X" actually rob people of their own agency if the listener trusts the speaker as a legitimate authority?
"Oh, they're not interested in going to this event, they probably think it's stupid."
"He's always talked about working more with his hands, I probably shouldn't forward him this desk job that'd otherwise be perfect for his career progression."
I agree that robbing someone of their agency sounds very important; however, if I make assumptions about how someone feels, that could rob them of a potential opportunity, or it could also give them a new opportunity depending on the nature of my assumption.
Either way, their capacity to act (agency) remains intact.
The very important phrasing, in my estimation, can lead people to neurotically question their feelings less they "rob" someone of the capacity to act. In reality, a more lax quip such as "assuming makes an ass out of u-&-me" gives people more breathing room for their lapses in judgement.
I think we've gotten too hung up on a specific word, but if you really want to bring the dictionary into this, are you saying you owe it to other people to give them as many possibilities to decide for themselves? I would have to disagree with that assertion.
Think about it in reverse. Suppose your boss is thinking of increasing your responsibilities along with a significant pay bump, but they think about it and make the assumption that you like your current role and wouldn't like any new responsibilities. Wouldn't you rather make that decision yourself?
Or suppose you're single and there's an attractive acquaintance who is thinking of asking you on a date, but they overhear you talking to a friend about a date you had, and so they assume you wouldn't be interested. You don't want to make that decision yourself?
Yes, I would like to make those decisions. No, I don't think I'm owed the right to make them. To say otherwise would be silly; if we all honored such a right we'd be forever trapped navigating an interminable labyrinth of negotiation and consensus-reaching.
reaching consensus and building unity is a good way to strengthen a community, organization or team, so no i don't think we'd be trapped. on the contrary, everyone would feel empowered.
most of our problems today are coming from the fact that people are disempowered and lack the agency to improve the situation.
you need to seek consensus, in order to reach it, so i disagree. of course, if you can't find consensus after sufficient negotiation then that is a problem, but it depends on the nature of the relationship and the nature of the point in question, how much of a problem it is.
failure to reach consensus could threaten your relationship.
if my boss keeps making decisions for me then i'll eventually quit my job, because i am not willing to work like that. and if my partner does it then it will lead to a breakup and if it is something else, a judge might force a consensus on us.
"You look unhappy. You must be expecting me to do something, and now [ I'm frustrated because I don't know what you want from me | I'm anxious about meeting the possible expectations I imagine you might have ]."
If someone looks unhappy, it might not be because of you. Even if they do have a need that you could meet, they might not expect you to meet it. Instead of guessing, you could simply gently ask.
I've encountered this before when preemptively using they/them for someone, that it was robbing them of their choice. I do my best to use a name or point until a pronoun is defined to avoid uncomfortable moments.
This isn't the same thing: A person using they/them - when they do not know the other person's pronoun - is someone trying to be nice and not misgender someone. In other words, using neutral language unless confirmation of gender. Pointing isn't polite in all company and repeatedly using a name isn't natural speech.
It isn't taking someone's choice. All someone has to do is speak up.
Additionally: I use they/them when I'm speaking about friends that are not mutual friends. Usually, gender doesn't enhance the story. Same when talking about my spouse in situations where I'm talking about myself being bisexual. People do not need to know what sort of genitals my spouse has, especially when it is because they want to see "how queer I am".
It's tricky. Not everybody _wants_ be called they/them. Not everybody wants to be called he or she either.
The way I try to work around this is to use "they" only when it would not sound grammatically unusual or confusing to do so, and otherwise rearrange the sentence to omit the pronoun.
As an example of the first, "That's their phone on the table" sounds natural because singular "their" is a lot more common than singular "they", and it's unambiguous because a phone is typically owned by an individual.
As an example of the second, "I met Bill yesterday and they went to the store with me" is odd because it sounds like "they" either doesn't agree with singular "Bill" or refers to some earlier plural antecedent, so I'd rephrase it "I met Bill yesterday and we went to the store together" or something like that.
> When you presume a feeling for someone else, you're robbing them of their own agency.
There are unfortunately heck of a lot of people out there who (going by their actions) don't see denying people agency as a bad thing except when it is brought up as a standalone topic.
I hate to say it, but this post shows how absolutely smashed mentally some city-based Americans are. Full of anxiety, fear, and general angst about what should be normal operating behaviour as a common city resident. I'm finishing a week up with my buds in Barcelona, and everything in this post is the exact OPPOSITE of the mentality we've seen here. Friendly people, happy to chat, guys and girls alike, no concern or fear and no overwhelming motive of anything. Talking for talkings sake.
My buddies are still working and living in US but I've been living in europe for the past 6 years... and I gotta say, the US has become so weird to me, especially super "liberal" culture, if you can even call it that. People simply don't know how to talk to one another anymore. It's fucked.
Returning back from 7 years in Europe, a year in Australia....post COVID. The US is very different. People are on edge and there are a lot of very on-edge people out there. The level of not just anxiety, but palpable distrust, fear, and rage, is frankly uncanny.
I'm very much hoping it's a phase and not a permanant thing... I'm still very much patriotic because of stuff the U.S. has acheived in terms of science, engineering, and of course culturally, but recently I'm not so sure what the future trend of US is going to be.
I've lived all my life in Europe and the article still hits home, including the growing up part. Maybe the manifestations are different and more extreme in the US, but the core is the same -- feeling uneasy because of how other people will react to me and the things I actually want to do.
Makes me wonder though about how we inevitably generalise people's personal stories into rules of thumb. I'm acutely aware how one person's journey for an antidote to their personality dysfunctions isn't always medicine for another person.
If Hayley has dominantly anxious-avoidant attachment style it'd explain her ambivalence. The antidote is engage executive regulation (to supress the anxiety and flight response), and downplay emotional resonance.
Common a formula as it is, could be a muddle for you or I if we don't have her underlying predispositions.
I have zero idea what “The antidote is engage executive regulation (to supress the anxiety and flight response), and downplay emotional resonance.” even means.
>Makes me wonder though about how we inevitably generalise people's personal stories into rules of thumb
Applying rules of thumb takes a heck of a lot less mental effort than tossing everything into a mental bucket of "other people's experience" and then drawing on specific aspects as relevant to the situation.
Sure, I get that simplification is essential to think and live.
But rules of thumb about how people generally are inevitably lose fidelity for individuals, making then often entirely wrong.
For example anxious people find certain things help their quality of life, but those things may be toxic to someone without an anxious disposition.
In the same way that we love someone who 'has the answer' - its cognitively relaxing - i suggest we are too easily led to sudpend judgement on issues which entirely deserve our full consideration
Pretty impressive someone took the time to even write this.
If you are going to anything: BE ON TIME. We have more reasons than ever to be on time or even early, live directions, maps, scheduling. Things happen and some times can be non-exact, that's totally fine. But if you're showing up 2h late to a show, or event on the regular there are issues you need to fix in your life. How did people without smart phones manage!?
If you cancel/try to reschedule a group event the same day, more than once, it is unlikely I will ever give you a concession on time or place in the future because you're a pain in the ass.
I've had these kinds of main character friends who will cancel on an event the morning before, then offer a reschedule that same day to a later or earlier time. Repeatedly.
This signals to me: "I am more important than the other people that are coming, so they should change their schedule for me." No thanks. I'll drop you a note when everything is happening but until you hit the mark I'm gonna disregard everything you say. It has driven my other friends crazy to their point they have asked me: "Hey what's up with your friend Emily?"
Other people have lives, just like yours!
Don't offer to come in the first place if you can't make it. There are times when you can't make it due to an emergency, and that's fine, car breaks down, relationship issues, work explosions, w/e.
You can be busy, or whatever I don't give a shit, it's your life sort it out. You can't do everything. You made too many plans: I don't care. You decided something else was more important at the last minute: This one is a guarantee I'm inviting you to less things. This seems harsh, but do this rodeo more than a few times and it will make YOU crazy. Also, "neurotic freak" is a weird way to write "jerk".
Probably there is a huge selection bias here as I have two friends that are now less good friends due to whatever this cancel algorithm is. I've lived it and fixed it! :D Save yourself a click, read Nonviolent Communication, and improve your life.
Reminds me of The testaments (the sequel to handmaid's tale). There was a bit on that fact that no-one actually wanted for Gilead to happen, but the movement started too fast and everyone was too scared to diverge. It took a life of its own.
I think this is a legitimate social behavior where for various reasons you don't want to divest from a commitment (don't want to be an outlier, FOMO, don't want to hurt people, ...). Ideally you would fix that through communication, but we're also human after all, and have to deal with reality of social constructs and culture. You don't always have the emotional capital with people to just bail. Sometimes you're in a situation where you know that, were you to bring up that you'd prefer not to do something, the other person would immediately cancel to accommodate, even though the cost (emotional, not $$) for you to do it is lower than the cost for them no to do.
And then sometimes you enter a loop about something scary that you only do because your friends are in. A year ago I did my first major multi-day ski touring traverse. A physically and psychologically taxing thing, where once you're committed in it, you don't have a choice but complete (you can't ski down, you have to finish the loop, no matter how hard it is). I was scared AF, trying to find a good excuse to skip. It didn't and we did it, and it was the best thing I've done in all 2021. Talking about it afterwards, turns out we were all in that mental space, scared and only motivated by the fact that we'd do it together. If 1 person had emitted doubts, we would have all bailed. In the end, luckily no-one did.
So I don't think the idea behind it is necessarily bad, and I don't think you're a baby for not telling someone you're not ecstatic about something.
> The other day some friends and I were reminiscing about an app idea we had years ago that would allow you to “blind cancel” on your friends. That is, flag if you were open to canceling a plan, which your friend would only see if they also flagged it. Basically, it was Tinder for bailing. This was our ultimate dream: an official, guilt-free conduit for the quiet hope that your friend wants to cancel, too.
Extend the logic to tinder: is tinder just a mechanism to childishly avoid social discomfort (expressing romantic interest, risking rejection)?
I think tinder serves a second purpose which is the consent component. I think social mores around what is an acceptable romantic environment are changing. It used to be a given you might meet a partner at work. I think it's verging on inappropriate given changing gender roles in the work place, and that extends to other environments as well. You might assume a bar or club is an acceptable environment, but lots of people go to the club to dance and not meet someone.
I think there's some truth to that. On the other hand, it does allow you to connect with people that you would've likely never incidentally crossed paths IRL to express romantic interest in the first place.
Technology is a symptom; not the disease. We wallow in narcissism and convenience because of the relatively enormous wealth we, and our country in general, enjoy. Being able to buy just about anything that we want (at least some version of it), and being able to insulate ourselves in a tiny bubble of like minded people and thought has infantilized us. Technology -- enabled by the wealth of the Western world -- has enabled it, but wealth is at the core. We can AFFORD to be babies. So we are. Boy, howdy! We are.
One of the most neurotic pieces I've read; that said, I understand now that a lot of people are not comfortable with their identities, that they are still "trying things on"
Cornel West has this depiction of pity vs compassion, which I think is a good model.
Pity is a spectator activity - you observe someone from the outside, you sort of judge them, make a token action, and then feel good about it. Pity is the agreeable option. You go into the party alone because it's something you can do. You stay with your friends on the dance floor because you don't want to leave them there.
The feel-good is not necessarily the right metric, though. It's more of a local maxima.
The adult mode would be compassion. Compassion is active participation. You are concerned enough to change someone's situation. Going to the party alone is an act of compassion. It's uncomfortable but you're doing it because you think the host should also have a good time. You're not going alone to avoid the bad feeling, you're going alone because you want the host to have a better evening.
There's also the compassionate option of leaving the dance floor with your friends. If you really think your friends are being babies, then the compassionate option might be to all leave together and enjoy it from a distance. But it sounded in this situation that they might actually be having fun in the crowd (it's hard to tell). So the compassionate option would be asking them if they're fine there and want to step out a bit. If they are comfortable, then excuse yourself in a manner that doesn't guilt them into following.
The quadrants make it seem a little black and white, but I think the axes are off. I would put one side to being passive and the other to being compassionate. Selfish might also be a misleading term, because in this case, it's being compassionate towards yourself, where you're experiencing a lot of discomfort but your friends aren't.
The fact that most comment threads for this post exist baffels me... it's like... 'lets analyze confrontation and create weird uncanny formulas for what are complex and always spontaneous human interactions' I don't like it at all.
Reading this thread is surreal. If this is the litmus test for being an adult, we’ve really jumped the shark as a society (certain groups, anyway). It’s like watching a group of domesticated cats debate which characteristics makes them a tiger.
also: don't make plans you don't intend to work to keep (esp. for the sake of being agreeable in the moment) - would much prefer someone doesn't make a plan they don't intend to work (emotionally or physically) to keep - learning to use yes and no responsibly is one of the more important aspects of maturing
Took me a little while to get used to this in Vancouver, but at a certain point I just came to terms with the fact that people have become accustomed to being weak, lazy, and avoidant. So when I make plans with someone I don't know that well, if it's important to have less ambiguity about the plan, I make sure it's specific. I find that if people agree to something specific, they're less likely to bail. The ones that have, I'm no longer friends with, and they eventually just earn a rep as flakey social climbers, because it's common for them to just agree to things that they know they can't make.
If I'm the one who bails, I try to just be honest about it, but it's usually something that has changed to become an impractical event. "I'm not all that enthusiastic to join a house party starting at 11:30, because everyone will want to sleep in 25 min and I won't make any meaningful connections". Which usually happens because the person was flakey about inviting me in the first place, and the good part is over.
One of the big moments of enlightenment I've had was the importance of emotionally detaching from the world.
What does that mean? If you see your ex on the street, emotionally detached is not running away from her and not running toward her. If she says, "I'm going to Hawaii for vacation," it's not asking which island or deep details. It's saying, "That sounds nice." You care but you don't really care. You're emotionally detached.
Doing this for the whole world sounds easy but it's one of the hardest things you can possibly do. Imagine if a million people suddenly loved you. It's almost impossible not to feel elated. Now imagine if a million people suddenly hated you. It's almost equally impossible not to feel devastated. But you can do it; and if you do it, you can unlock true happiness, true freedom.
It's like this article says, but I don't see it about being an adult -- it's about being truly free.
>If she says, "I'm going to Hawaii for vacation," it's not asking which island or deep details. It's saying, "That sounds nice." You care but you don't really care. You're emotionally detached.
That's not really "emotional detachment", though. It's not very different from actually running away the moment you see her, it's just less obviously cowardly. If you were really emotionally detached you would ask for as much detail as you could and it wouldn't affect you in the least.
Incidentally, not asking any follow-up questions to such an announcement is an obvious sign of disinterest. It's just a more polite "I don't care in the least about this thing you're telling me and I don't want to hear any more about it". Everyone knows you're doing it because that's exactly what they say when they don't want to hear about some topic.
It's the only example, and you gave it in lieu of a definition. Do you mean the same thing I mean by "emotional detachment", or do you mean something different?
I think you got it; I think the term is clear. It's not having any additional emotional response beyond what you find in an interaction with an acquaintance you see a few times a year. There's no additional emotion.
Agree, it's a hard thing. Question I'd pose: is the detachment borne out of avoidance, or conserving emotional energy so you can deploy it where it is useful? There's a difference.
I latched onto something like this for my digital self, and it mostly broke traditional social media for me. After all, what does it matter if people you probably won't meet approve of what you post? All that time and energy for what...a slightly higher number in a database somewhere? For all the "humans are social animals"-type platitudes that try to explain the necessity of social media, it always ended up being a huge net energy loss.
But, my life is better when I am emotionally engaged in multiple spheres simultaneously: marriage, family, work, friends, hobbies. It's impossible for things to be going well in every sphere at once, so you spread out your emotional involvement among it all such that the inevitable dips are easier to deal with.
No, you can care passionately about more things if you don't let the world influence you.
The philosopher Rene Girard talks about it better than I ever could. Basically, when we reach a certain age, we start to want to fit in with the world. This is a natural and important process -- for a while. We'll often choose attributes of ourselves to extol and expand, in order to fit in with our selected strategy. We will imitate behaviors and attributes of those in that group. And during this time, we will find that subgroup that we're integrating with will want certain things -- and we will in turn want those things. He says we subconsciously start to desire what others desire because we imitate their desires. He calls it "Mimetic Desire."
The problem is that as a bunch of us are all desiring the same things, we become rivals, reaching for the same objects. Worse, we may not ever really want what we're reaching for.
I'm saying, "Divorce the world" -- an amicable, emotionless divorce. Just as you moved into a group, move out. Just as you imitated, stop. And that will free you to find your true passions, your true desires, your true opinions, your true self. And what's shocking is that now attaining things you desire will often be a million times easier because everyone isn't hunting these same things alongside you.
Thanks, that makes more sense. The whole 'true passions, true desires, true opinions, true self' is a bit wishy-washy for me, but I appreciate the idea of thinking twice about whether you actually want something, or if you are just blindly wanting what the world has told you to want (especially in this age of ubiquitous advertising and mass media).
> Doing this for the whole world sounds easy but it's one of the hardest things you can possibly do. Imagine if a million people suddenly loved you. It's almost impossible not to feel elated. Now imagine if a million people suddenly hated you. It's almost equally impossible not to feel devastated. But you can do it; and if you do it, you can unlock true happiness, true freedom.
I don't understand the paragraph at all. Are you saying detachment is like being hated? If yes I have no idea why. If not why would it be so hard?
No, it's not "liking" being hated, it's that it doesn't deeply disturb you.
Imagine you and a buddy have been arguing lately but you still go out hunting together. A bear appears out of nowhere and charges at your friend. You shoot and miss the bear but hit and kill your friend. There's not enough evidence to convict you of murder, so you walk free, but literally everyone around and whom you know thinks you murdered this person.
The trick is to let that wash off of you. You know you were trying to save your friend; there's not much you can do to change that opinion. Just let it not affect you as much as possible.
> The trick is to let that wash off of you. You know you were trying to save your friend; there's not much you can do to change that opinion. Just let it not affect you as much as possible.
I thought you were saying to reject the feelings of the masses or something, but you're saying I shouldn't care about what the people close to me think either?
There is a tricky balancing act here. Detachment because you are at peace with yourself and untroubled by the vicissitudes of the world because they don't affect who you are is good. Detachment because you are avoiding negative feelings that you aren't able to handle and process in a mature way isn't.
Distinguishing those two can be very difficult and in practice it's often a mixture.
I have a tendency to some of these types of quirks, as well. I don't know the author's situation, but the reason why I ruminated over other people's thoughts for so long was because I was brought up in a household of narcissists and sociopaths. I had to step very carefully depending on what mood the people around me were in, lest I be smacked down (usually verbally, occasionally literally) for saying or doing something to set them off. It becomes exhausting and as you can imagine leads to numerous personal and social problems. They start so young that you never have a chance to realize that it's neurotic behavior.
That said, I don't care for the label "baby". Different people have different skills – socially, intellectually, etc. – and not having a particular skill or set of tools doesn't make you a "baby". It makes you ignorant of those things. I think the label of being avoidant was much more precise language.
That last paragraph is just a list of things I wish I could express to all the friends I had with serious anxiety issues in high school and college. Specifically this line:
> I still have to remind myself all the time that it’s not actually helpful to hypothesize about how other people feel, or base my decisions off a constellation of unspoken factors.
I was taught at a young age to always do what you first agreed to even if a better opportunity comes up. It has a few exceptions but as a heuristic I think everyone would benefit from using it.
> flag if you were open to canceling a plan, which your friend would only see if they also flagged it.
I've had this idea for indicating along a series of steps of being willing to advance a relationship without harming it by expressing your desire for the next step too early for the other person. It would have real value I think because there really is potentially ruinous cost to being perceived as jumping the gun.
Why is being avoidant "babying" yourself and thus bad?
Taking the first example of arriving early at a dinner party with hosts you aren't familiar with, why do we need to bully ourselves into arriving early? From my perspective, the "adult" thing to do would be to wholly own whichever decision we make and the resulting consequences. Not showing up earlier with means you lose out on a great chance at making a meaningful connection with someone new, but it's more comfortable and hey, sometimes we're just out of social energy, that's okay too.
Taking the second example of a building mosh pit, if a large group of people are moshing, and all your friends are comfortable, maybe it's a sign that things are safer than you think. In that case, I would think that staying would provide an opportunity to move outside of your comfort-zone and maybe experience something new, and that's definitely not babying yourself. Nor is it treating your friends as babies, since you are relying on their judgment. And as the author states, we're also free to move to the back: that's not treating anyone as a baby either. In my mind, the key is again owning the decision and the consequences.
> Your own choices in these situations might go in different parts of the graph. I think it’s less about the specifics and more about understanding what it means to assert—but not baby—yourself, given who you are and what you need.
That's why the author proposes asking yourself "am I being avoidant?" In the mosh pit example, the answer might be "yes" if you trust that what applies to your friends applies to you. If you really are out of social energy, you might answer "no" and take a little extra time at the wine shop.
The substance here is "check in with yourself rather than automatically doing what's easy or comfortable" not "make the same decision I would."
I love this, it's very recognizable. I love how structured this is. This is to me what the books of Ayn Rand were about: rational self interest. Rational as in social and kind, but with a healthy regard for the interests of the self (good luck figuring those out btw, but man is it important in almost all aspects of life). Ayn Rand to me was not about being anti- or pro-state, or about the "motors of the economy" that deserve to reap the benefits. Rational self interest was my primary take away from Howard Roark and Dagny Taggart.
Aren't those people that wouldn't be with you tonight (or at any time), if they didn't really want to, the best people to be around? Those people that are with you because they genuinely want to be, they should be treasured. What value is there in those others? What are they doing with their lives anyway? What are you doing dragging your feet again and again to places you don't enjoy? Do you even remember what you, YOU, really enjoy? I struggled a lot with this. In this sense, Ayn Rand helped me "grow up" as OP puts it. Yes, Roark goes way further than I would probably ever go, but Roark is not me and I enjoy a bit of harmony seeking in a group (up to a certain level that is), or setting an atmosphere. Ayn made heroes out of entrepreneurial, intelligent loners, imho that is not a core requirement of her philosophy (or way of life). It is about knowing the self, also when that self is more of a social animal, a bit of pleaser from time to time even.
Imho it is true that self-esteem correlates with how much joy you will let yourself feel in life. Too much and you hurt others, too little and you hurt yourself. There must be a balance.
I don't know. Not wanting your friends to know you don't want to go somewhere in case you end up going isn't a bad thing, I think. but calling people babies, isn't very mature IMHO.
Consider that it's just an abstraction for "immaturity" and it seems to make more sense. They're not intending to shame someone - except perhaps themselves - for being a baby, they're just describing behavior (albeit, vaguely) as undesirable.
> Why is not wanting to hurt peoples feelings (or being honest about your own) weaselling out
Not wanting to hurt peoples feelings isn't weaseling out. What is weaseling out is assuming what will hurt their feelings, and acting based on that assumption, because you don't want to have a conversation with someone about their feelings.
> What is weaseling out is assuming what will hurt their feelings
I'd say "hedging". what if you have that conversation and it does hurt their feelings? Now you can't undo it, which is why the assumption is needed - you probe the question without showing your hand.
You are discussing a different polarity in communication: do you just care for your own feelings or for the other person’s? That should be a factor in good communication!
The article is discussing a different polarity: direct vs indirect communication. Direct communication is being honest and open about your feelings and those of others to the best of your ability. Some people only seem capable of indirect communication, where they say what they think the other person wants to hear and assume their own needs somehow come through, then are upset when the other person takes what they say at face value! And they assume the other person has some ulterior/hidden motive like themselves and try to read more into it than is really there.
but it has nothing to do with trust. You can trust someone to keep a secret, but not to be disappointed. an earlier post argued against assuming someone's feelings - in that case you can't be confident what the result of communicating your feeling are, unless you are confident b/c you don't care.
It’s all about trust. You can’t develop an intimate relationship with someone who hides their feelings. Being fake in a misguided attempt to avoid disappointing people is deeply unkind (and probably exhausting).
But in any case, I never said you should never call someone immature, but that in this case as an alternative to name-calling someone a baby, it doesn't mean much. Pinning some social situation on someones communication skill, or friendship, or personal virtue for example.
> It only recently occurred to me that what we actually needed was to grow up—get to know ourselves, learn to communicate. Trying to weasel out of all that with an app is, well, basically the entire value prop of Silicon Valley, but more importantly antithetical to growth. Managing your social life requires self-knowledge: Will you be in the mood next week? Will they be mad if you cancel? Will you have fun tonight even though you’re dragging your feet? The trick to answering these questions, I’m finding, is not technology or mind-reading or asking for surpluses of empathy. It’s to stop being a huge baby.
The 'baby' nomenclature, while definitely not polite, is a striking way to describe someone who isn't confident enough in their friendships or their self-understanding to bail on plans with honesty.
Also, the title of the substack is "Maybe baby" so probably playing on that.
It maybe striking, but also IMHO inaccurate. Friendships exist in many degrees, they can't all have perfect communication, or be journeys of self-discovery.
As with so many criticisms of "technology that enables laziness," this analysis ignores disability. Yes, it's a good thing to communicate with your friends! However, if you have significant social anxiety, "Tinder for bailing" could be a useful assistive technology. (And before you say "get therapy" - yes, of course, but that takes time and people should be able to live their lives whether or not they meet arbitrary standards of normal behavior.)
Largely a good article, but before you decry the plastic widget that holds the book open, consider that some people are missing a finger.
How many people are experiencing day-to-day anxiety /because/ they were enabled to avoid social interactions for so many years through apps and services like this?
If the plastic widget for holding books open is occasionally lopping off fingers so you need to use it more, it might be worth decrying.
Honestly, I think a large part of my peer's (I'm solidly millennial) social anxiety stems from never having to deal with a lot of uncomfortable situations.
I'm old enough that I remember a chunk of life pre-internet. Having to use corded the phone to call hang out with your friends, having to talk to parents and strangers to get a hold of your friends, calling a date to have their parent answer, having to knock on doors for church, etc... all built me up to have basically no qualms with talking to strangers, but certain younger close friends of mine can't answer the phone for the food delivery to give them the door code to their apartment.
It blows my mind sometimes, but I genuinely do consider it a consequence of technology enabling them to avoid doing those things regularly.
> How many people experiencing day-to-day anxiety /because/ they were enabled to avoid social interactions for so many years because of apps and services like this?
That's a great question! I would love to see some data on this, but until I do, I don't really see any reason to believe this. Anxiety disorders are not a new phenomenon.
> Recent accounts suggest that levels of social anxiety may be rising. Studies have indicated that greater social media usage, increased digital connectivity and visibility, and more options for non-face-to-face communication are associated with higher levels of social anxiety [32–35]. The mechanism underpinning these associations remains unclear, though studies have suggested individuals with social anxiety favour the relative ‘safety’ of online interactions [32, 36]. However, some have suggested that such distanced interactions such as via social media may displace some face to face relationships, as individuals experience greater control and enjoyment online, in turn disrupting social cohesion and leading to social isolation [37, 38]. For young people, at a time when the development of social relations is critical, the perceived safety of social interactions that take place at a distance may lead some to a spiral of withdrawal, where the prospect of normal social interactions becomes ever more challenging.
>> As with so many criticisms of "technology that enables laziness," this analysis ignores disability. Yes, it's a good thing to communicate with your friends! However, if you have significant social anxiety, "Tinder for bailing" could be a useful assistive technology. (And before you say "get therapy" - yes, of course, but that takes time and people should be able to live their lives whether or not they meet arbitrary standards of normal behavior.)
As someone who has done the therapy I can tell you that that app, while it may help you in the short term, is only going to make things so so so much worse in the long term - to the point where you can't live your life anymore. Medicating social anxiety with avoidance is similar to medicating pain with drugs. It just gets worse and worse until it's worse than you ever imagined. Every time you don't avoid something you're taking a step in the right direction. If possible I'd highly recommend therapy :)
> Medicating social anxiety with avoidance is similar to medicating pain with drugs. It just gets worse and worse until it's worse than you ever imagined.
The implication here is that there is always an alternative to medicating pain with drugs. There often isn't - other than letting the patient be in horrible pain forever. I'd argue that this is true for many kinds of clinical anxiety, too.
I don't know that it would be so easy, tbh! Using this effectively would require that your friends be bought in, and would be willing to use the app. That in and of itself would likely require some difficult conversations.
While I broadly agree, I would like to point out that there are plenty of people that successfully manage chronic pain with a static dose of painkillers, even opiates in many cases. A particular Slate Star Codex article comes to mind.
Yeah I guess I was thinking more of numbing mental pain with drugs as opposed to physical pain and the spiral that could lead to (taking more and more until you can no longer function). In the case of anxiety for example:
1. Avoid work socials.
2. Hybrid working.
3. WFH.
4. Camera off in meetings.
5. Skipping meetings entirely.
Maybe not the best example but you've went from minor avoidance to help you keep your job and avoid your anxiety to major avoidance that will lead to you losing your job - and on top of that your anxiety will have increased to a level that recovering is much more difficult than if tackled earlier.
I think she touches on this point a bit with this paragraph:
"Technology babies us all the time. “Never talk to a wage worker again!” the embarrassing Seamless ads promise in so many words. “Everything you could dream of without leaving your apartment! Community without communing with a single soul!” Putting aside the marginal good these apps do for people who rely on them, their ads are clearly focused on a capable, upper-middle class that’s learned to take its neuroticism a little too seriously. They exploit what probably started as compassion-driven conversation about burnout into a recursive push for comfort at all costs. When we stretch that ethic to its limits, we make simple things like taking a phone call or being honest with a friend into something much scarier than they actually are."
I think the author of this post would likely respond by noting that people with disabilities are not babies and can maturely handle that an article decrying an app doesn't necessarily apply to them and is not trying to rob them of an assistive tool.
The first anecdote in a post is about the author deciding not to build something that could be a useful accessibility tool, specifically because she sees it as a net negative - which might not be how she would think about it if she'd included people with disabilities in her analysis.
Of course, this is not the end of the world; but there are cases where this kind of thinking could be much worse. "We won't put in an elevator - people should be okay with the discomfort of climbing the stairs." In fact, people did that so much that we had to pass the ADA to stop it!
As someone who is currently in therapy for social anxiety, I think it is quite a stretch to equate an app that helps people ghost each other without feeling bad with elevators for people who can't physically climb stairs.
Even so, by placing them on the same scale, I think you're suggesting that there's a difference only in degree and that the two are on the same moral plane. But I think the difference is significant enough that they are qualitatively not the same.
It's interesting to see how this author used to look like, and contrast that with what she looks like now. IME, attractive people generally feel they have a license to be shitty to others, and won't have any self awareness or remorse about it.
Once the looks fade, then the self-reflection and introspection begins. It is difficult to be introspective and humble when you're in the 99th percentile, when you feel like you're on top of the world.
Yes, and it would be doubly true. Attractive men behave in the stereotypical alpha manner, very aggressive without any empathy. Society will excuse them because they are attractive and wealthy.
Invariably when I choose to behave like an adult I feel empowered and ultimately at peace with myself and others in the end. If I choose avoidance, resentment builds, and further avoidance follows.
The idea that avoidance behaviors can be selfish or agreeable cuts through much self-deception. This can be helpful when I tell myself "I'm just being nice" because it adds the proviso: "yeah, but I'm not being an adult." Which I could see being a really helpful inner monologue in those situations.
This is also intimately connected to the concept of "taking responsibility", which begins with not avoiding something which "someone else" might deal with so you don't have to.