Ask vs. Guess Culture

"It’s rude to put someone in a position where they have to say no to you"

I feel this in my bones. When I was a kid my dad went off on me after we visited someone's house and I saw cake on the counter and asked for a slice. That was just unacceptable. (Context: He was raised by people who lived through the depression. Food scarcity was a real thing in living memory.)

Even though his reaction was way overboard, I still believe this. Let people offer things, don't ask. (With a lot of caveats depending on context...)

Jean! Cross post this please!

I think "western society" is way too broad a brush. Within the U.S. there's extremes between ask and guess, IME. (Some of that is breaking down due to mobility... regional differences are much less pronounced these days, I think, especially in cities, since there's so much cross-pollination.)

Hmm. I think I've primarily experienced the really dark side of guess culture, so I appreciate your framing of it as a desire for understanding when it's in a healthy context.

I've experienced it in the contexts of narcissism and borderline personality, where the underlying thought is, "I am so obviously the center of the world that anyone with half a brain who's paying a whit of attention should to intuit my needs without my having to speak a word. If I have to speak, you have already failed." And anyone who failed was punished, sometimes intensely.

Ask culture, for me in that context, became about being able to exist as a separate person and express a boundary. I'd much rather put the cards on the table, find out we want completely different, even opposed things, and work from there, than deal with the power imbalance of one person's assumption that anyone who isn't reading their mind is an idiot.

It seems the virtue, as most of the time, is in the mean.

I strongly feel this article misses the point and ends up at a harmful framing instead.

Consider the example in the article: "all the family members insisted we don't drive up to visit our grandmother and see the city instead, we did it anyway, everyone was glad we did".

Or the next example: "with guess-culture people isn’t as simple as asking people what they want to eat for dinner, because they will not tell you what they actually want to want to eat for dinner."

This person, imo, deeply does not understand what is happening in these situations. They have a model of other people as "wanting something but not being willing to say it", and then they solve the puzzle of figuring out what it was, and the other person appreciates it. But, IMO, those people didn't strongly want something one way or the other. They're resisting an unhealthy dynamic: that the writer just wants to know what someone else wants for dinner, but doesn't even want something for dinner themselves.

What others are doing by not being willing to explicitly state desires is they're refusing to play this game of telling you what to do. They're doing this because it really doesn't feel good for someone to repeatedly ask you what they should do. The asker degrades themselves by pawning their agency off on someone else, and spending time with them begins to feel like hanging out with a robot: soulless, scripted, perfunctory.

That is: when you ask for permission to visit your grandmother and then do it because people said to, or don't do it because they didn't, you haven't demonstrated respect or kindness or love; you haven't acted human at all. You've just performed a mindless duty. Whereas if you decide to do it yourself, because you chose to, then you've demonstrated something.

People are shirking at telling you what to do because they don't want to be part of an icky transaction where somebody constantly hands away their agency. They don't want you "guess", they want you to stop asking for their permission to exist.

edit: I realized there's more in the article about the workplace and it's wrong too! This is not healthy at work, but not for the reasons the article thinks.

A person who goes around trying to get somebody else to tell them clearly what to do, and never gets that and therefore thinks they're having trouble with "ask culture", is a drain on the organization, because the amount of work that gets done is often proportional to willpower. Or call it "initiative" or something.

If you're leeching off other people's agency to do anything, then you're draining their willpower and not helping much at all. Likely they're totally exhausted of it and don't want to tell you what to do anymore. Whereas if you start injecting willpower and agency into the system the whole organization will pick up and run with whatever you do (or course-correct if it's wrong, etc).