These days, I try to abide by the following rule: *before I try to help anybody, they must ask for it*.
This solves all sorts of problems: being the reply guy, confusing venting with asking for help, removing autonomy, ignoring writing as learning, and so on. I think I must have read this simple rule in some esoteric book a long time ago, but it still rings true to me now, decades later.
I’m sorry if I failed adhering to it in my past interactions with you!
Sometimes it’s hard: somebody is describing a problem and I suspect I know how to solve it. I start typing. Then I remember and I check again. Does it have a (non-ironic, non-rhetorical) question mark in the text? Does it say: “Help?” or “Does anybody have an idea?” If not, they might just be venting. Maybe their mind is made up and they no longer care. If I show up, explaining the thing, it might look as if I’m defending the very thing they hate. I don’t want to be that guy.
And so I delete the reply I started to write.
Sure, many people say that if somebody doesn’t want a reply, they shouldn’t be posting in public. That’s not the problem, I think. The problem is figuring out, what kind of reply people actually want.
#Life
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In a follow-up, @stevenroose asked whether I noticed any changes. I guess less interactions going awry are hard to measure, so I don’t know. There is no science here. But in the interactions with my wife I used to hear a lot of “please just *listen* to me” and “I don’t need a solution, I just need somebody to talk to”. Often I’d (even if I disagreed with the solution). Online, I simply notice myself deleting messages before (or after) sending them. And when I get curt pushback I think to myself: “I guess they weren’t looking for my answer in the first place. I shouldn’t have sent that.”
– Alex 2021-03-16 07:43 UTC