I haven't found this to be a problem.
Sounds like the author needs better friends and/or a more supportive social circle.
The social obligation to be bad at things
21–30 of 248 posts
Re: The social obligation to be bad at things
#22"When you say you are good at something, that's arrogant."
Learned that the hard way.
When I was young (college in the 90s), I had a Software Development class. We formed small teams and created a piece of software in a waterfall methodology.[1]
Why I thought I was so great: I had taken independent study in high school to learn algorithms and data structures to take the Computer Science AB(now discontinued) AP test (covers recursive algorithms and dynamically allocated data structures, in Pascal at the time) and got a 5 out of 5.
So when we got together to discuss who would work on what, and we needed to code our own data structures in C/C++ for the project, I was excited and said "I'm the master!" of that. There was an older member of the team (who even developed and sold his own software product, a program to print booklets, for DOS already) who later in the meeting made a very sarcastic reference to me being the "master" of that and it really stung.
[1] Looks like they still have it. They added github, UML, and user stories. C S 371 https://pixl.nmsu.edu/files/2017/05/syllabus-SDev-2017-1-V10...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science#AP_Compute...
Re: The social obligation to be bad at things
#23Stop caring what other people think of you. The ego is the problem.
Re: The social obligation to be bad at things
#24> A thing I got pissed off at a while ago was reactions to someone talking about having weekly one-on-ones with his wife My guess is that it would have gone over a lot better if the person had stated that he had weekly scheduled dates with his wife. > When someone tries to do something good and we don't think it's the right thing, we punish them. Why are you announcing your good deeds to the whole world? A lot of rel…
> Why are you announcing your good deeds to the whole world? A lot of religions and cultures condemn things like that.
Most religions are built upon stories of other people's good deeds. It seems hardly fair to disallow people from airing their own :)
Re: The social obligation to be bad at things
#25> A thing I got pissed off at a while ago was reactions to someone talking about having weekly one-on-ones with his wife My guess is that it would have gone over a lot better if the person had stated that he had weekly scheduled dates with his wife. > When someone tries to do something good and we don't think it's the right thing, we punish them. Why are you announcing your good deeds to the whole world? A lot of rel…
> Why are you announcing your good deeds to the whole world? A lot of religions and cultures condemn things like that. Most religions are built upon stories of other people's good deeds. It seems hardly fair to disallow people from airing their own :)
Most religions are built on third-party narratives of other people's good deeds; it's absolutely self-consistent for them to have negative view of first-party narrative of the same topic.
Re: The social obligation to be bad at things
#26I remember the Car Talk guys Click and Clack talking about their tongue-in-cheek (or maybe not) advice for being married. It was something like:
"The very first time that they ask you to do the laundry, say 'Yes, honey! I'd love to!'. Then, do it so horribly bad. Turn everything pink or whatever. Shrink, ruin some clothes. Then, they'll never ask you to do the laundry again."
Re: The social obligation to be bad at things
#27Stop caring what other people think of you. The ego is the problem.
Ehhh, I think I might agree with what you're trying to say, but I don't think I'd say it this way. What other people think of you is a great source of information which shouldn't be discounted. In fact, I think there's a lot of value in soliciting feedback from the people around you.
We have a name for people who don't care what other people think: narcissists.
What I think you're getting at is that you can't please everyone, and there are many cases where risking someone's opinion of you is the right thing to do.
Re: The social obligation to be bad at things
#28Can I agree with his overall premise but disagree with thinking that scheduling weekly one-on-one's with your wife is in any way a good idea? I also wonder if the social obligation to be bad at things - that is, to avoid arrogance at all costs, even at the risk of withholding potentially useful advice - is more an American thing than a worldwide phenomenon. Not being embarrassed when you can't spell words correctly s…
A "one-on-one" is a weird way to phrase it but I've done regular "relationship check-ins" and it worked pretty well. It wasn't weekly though, that's too much for me, I'd probably go for monthly.
Recurrent meetings is another thing people rarely do in personal relationships that I found works pretty well.
I got the idea from the fox in the Little Prince:
The next day the little prince came back.
"It would have been better to come back at the same hour," said the fox. "If, for example, you come at four o'clock in the afternoon, then at three o'clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o'clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you . . . One must observe the proper rites . . ."
"What is a rite?" asked the little prince.
"Those also are actions too often neglected," said the fox. "They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all."
So I tried it. For a while I had a recurrent Wednesday lunch with a couple of friends, and I had a weekly scheduled date with my girlfriend at the time. It really does work like the fox says, after a while I started being happier the day before, expecting the event - in a way I don't for one-off scheduled things. Of course, I didn't call them "recurrent meetings", that's business-speak.
Re: The social obligation to be bad at things
#29"When you say you are good at something, that's arrogant." Learned that the hard way. When I was young (college in the 90s), I had a Software Development class. We formed small teams and created a piece of software in a waterfall methodology.[1] Why I thought I was so great: I had taken independent study in high school to learn algorithms and data structures to take the Computer Science AB(now discontinued) AP test (…
I have to question why someone with that level of seniority would need to be in a software development class. Generally my experience with people who are demonstrably successful is that they are not insecure like you described. Is it possible they were bluffing?
Re: The social obligation to be bad at things
#30The point about space and understanding to try new things and not be amazing at them isn't a bad one, but the thing about having 1:1s with your partner that is drawing ridicule isn't the idea of having a scheduled, weekly check-in with your partner; it's that business-talk is intentionally de-personified and using it in a personal context implies a lack of respect for the human you're dealing with.
Consider that I called it a "weekly check-in with your partner" above. That phrasing focuses on the existing relationship and the consideration of checking on how they're doing. A "1:1" is called that to distinguish it from other meetings that involve more than two people, and drops all the connotations of concern or supporting an existing relationship. That's what people are reacting negatively to.