141–150 of 493 posts
This made me think about a small aspect of Brazilian culture. If someone is selling something expensive like a house or a car, they will probably get mad at you for offering to pay a value much lower (or maybe not even that much lower) than what was advertised.
Me: if I need help I will ask for help. I do NOT want you to offer help unless I ask and I especially do NOT want you to just join in and help if it looks like I'm struggling. I feel entitled to the satisfaction of having done it myself, if I can.
Her: if she needs help she won't ask for it but hopes her frustration is apparent and help will come. Finds it very uncomfortable to watch people struggling and feels compelled to offer help or just join in and help. Feels annoyed if help doesn't come when she needs it.
As you can imagine this caused quite a bit of conflict between us, at least until I understood what was going on.
But I think in every other respect I'm a guesser.
The "Ask vs Guess" name rhetorically frames it in favor of the Askers. Asking sounds reasonable, guessing does not! But really it's not about "Guessing", it's about understanding. It's about community, and relationship, and trust. What this culture really wants is for you to pay attention and understand the people around you, rather than treating everything as a transaction.
> What this culture really wants is for you to pay attention and understand the people around you This sort of framing highlights the worst case scenario of "guess" culture imo. Where members assume that outsiders to the "guess" culture only need to "pay attention" to pick up on all the right norms and assimilate into the community that they spent decades growing up in (and that everyone ought to, in the first place,…
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If you've learned anything in your 20-year mental health journey, I hope it would be that not everyone is exactly like you, nor needs the same things you need. It's remarkably self-centered to assume the prescription that's suited you is exactly right for everyone else, don't you think?
That’s also definitely true! Some people are lucky to not have significant childhood trauma which means it was never needing to be resolved
If it worked for you, that's great! No joke, that's fantastic. But not for nothing, too, is there the old joke about the guy who just started a 12-step program and now no sooner sees someone take a drink in a bar but assumes they're an alcoholic.
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Multiple times it mentions that "guess culture" is frustrating and difficult, and that she and her brother prefer ask culture because it's easier.
"Ask" culture is prevalent in places where people come from diverse backgrounds. Cultures might also not be uniformely "ask" or "guess" across all topics. Therefore, when people with different value systems and communication cultures meet, "guess" culture simply doesn't work because other person's needs and intentions are often unexpected.
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I sometimes like to say the facts out loud and challenge people so here it goes. We live in the safest, least racist, least sexist, least antisemitic generation in history. At the same time, automation and productivity has reduced demand for human labor, and people increasingly can’t afford the rent. Perhaps the answer to many disparities isn’t systemic sexism, racism etc. but economic factors. Whatever you are worri…
> At the same time, automation and productivity has reduced demand for human labor We have approximately the lowest unemployment rate in modern history.
It doesn’t count the people who have opted out of the workforce.
It doesn’t count the job insecuroty of the gig economy. Or the people with terrible conditions.
It actually underscores the fact that both sexes flooded the labor pool in the last few decades, automation increased and wages got depressed due to all these factors.
USSR also had near-total employment, for men and women, way earlier than USA did. And ironically, the rent cost a ton less. But people overall couldn’t afford that much.
Your grandfather could have supported an entire family on one man’s paycheck, and paid for an entire house. Today, millennials onwards can’t afford any of that. The generation of adults with the least savings in probably a century.
But, as I said, we still have it amaing. Medical advances, technology like air conditioning, electricity and so on. The Internet spreads so much knowledge around the world. I’m just saying that the remaining problems are often rooted in economic issues, more than a rise in “systemic X ism”
I am from the northern US (Protestant Scandinavian/German) and my wife is from the southern US (Protestant English/German) [1]. In the first several years of our relationship, we had several big disputes about how to treat each other, and how to treat guests. After a while we realized that she had been brought up to feel extreme insecurity over responding to the needs of guests, and I had been brought up to be blithe…
This is fascinating to me, because I'm from the southern US and strongly align to "ask culture" and my wife is from the northwest and strongly aligns to "guess" culture. I wonder how much it's about individual family background and not strongly regional?
"yall doin okay?"