To be fair, this is also incredibly exhausting. Most peoples' reactions to things are arbitrary at best and constant worrying about how they will take something is just way too much BS to put into my day. I bought pretty deeply into this philosophy once and it just made me neurotic and quiet at a time of my life where those things very much hurt me.
I think being selectively kind makes a lot more sense. I'm kind to children and animals and my loved ones. People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant.
I'm not one of those "grow a thick skin, jerk" types, but there's this cheap sentiment I see about how everyone needs to be more kind and compassionate, and when its not phoned in, it usually ends up as a way to take advantage of others. Its easy for celebrity millionaire Kurt Vonnegut to write about compassion and be quoted by tumblerinas and its totally another thing for some kid no one gives a shit about trying to make his way in the world try to live it.
I find high-concept philosophies are often the playthings of the well-off and comfortable. If you're fighting for your living, its not a luxury most of us can have. Sadly, this often justifies hostility, but I think there's a sane middle-ground here, but curt statements like "be kind" just seems so classist and off-putting to me. Like a soccer mom telling me how wonderful the Maharishi is or how relaxing doing 4 hours of Yoga is (no, she doesnt work, her husband does) and after I got off a long shift and dealt with a lot of shit and a crappy commute.
Cheap sentiment just doesn't resolve the fundamental issue facing humanity today and probably until our final extinction event: we are all competing for the very same resources and competition can sometimes be ugly. It doesn't need to be truly awful and we shouldn't be encouraged to be overly negative and vindictive, but conflict and disagreement happens on a certain level and pretending we can kindly make it go away is just being unrealistic about our fundamental economic beings. Kindness is often taken advantage of as one party feels obligated to engage in it moreso than the other. This is a fairly large problem in gender politics where we raise women to be kind and then they find themselves at a disadvantage to men in the workplace who don't have these values.
Considering everyone here is visiting a hard-nosed libertarian-leaning entrepreneur forum about becoming wealthy quickly, but the second something pseudo-spiritual gets posted suddenly we're all Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree. We're not. If anything, the personality types here are very, very far from any sort of selfless ideal. Patting ourselves on the back because our six-figure salaries let us rise above the struggle doesn't mean the struggle doesn't exist and that struggle means acting in a rational, usually unkind way. High class pseudo-spirituality is such a hilariously hypocritical thing its a running gag on HBO's Silicon Valley, yet here we are Gavin Belson'ing it up. At least I'm honest with myself to say that, no, I'm not "kind" by these standards and that I will argue and fight with you when I feel its appropriate and more importantly -- I will not feel bad about it afterwards.
Sadly, most of the replies to my comment are fairly unkind responses telling me how much of a horrible person I am, especially to retail staff even though I gave no concrete examples of how I act. How ironic. If anyone is truly interested, I meditate daily and follow Buddhist ideals. I just refuse to go to the yogi-like extremes of insincere self-love in an attempt to con my way out of the struggle of Samsara. Accepting the reality of who I am is real mindfulness and liberating, and that person is not this uber-kind enlightened being who is 'above it all' and I doubt anyone here reading this is either. If anything, if we're buying into cheap manufactured sentiment that just happens to be self-complimentary, I'd say we're fairly far from that ideal. The same way we point at the nasty evangelicals will hearts full of hate who pat each other on the back for being so pious. Lets not go that route, as tempting as it is. All the technology is showing you this message was made by sweatshop-style labor. We're just not kind.
> "People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant."
The addition of "retail staff" here surprised me.
I'm a techie who took a break from tech and startups the past few months to help out my S.O., who owns a retail store. I worked the front counter, ran inventory, etc. for the past 3 months.
I had never worked retail before. I got into tech at an early age and skipped most of the "menial" jobs that typical American teenagers have. So working retail was eye-opening for me.
Retail workers get paid shit wages to deal with your crap. Yes, you. Whatever crap you've been dealing with, we have to take it with a smile and help you out. I've stood behind a counter and listened to a homeless guy ramble about anything and everything for 12 minutes (I had a small clock within view.)
Your attitude in this post indicates to me that you could probably use a bit of this type of work yourself. If you think it's beneath you, doubly so.
If you're curious what it's like for a techie/introvert/successful entrepreneur to work retail, I've been blogging about it. (Blog link in my profile) To be honest, the 3 months I spent there made me a far better person than any given 3 months I spent in the tech industry (I've run tech companies for 14 years now.) It humbled me, and gave me far more respect for my fellow human beings. And I learned there's nothing like the priceless joy in someone's eyes when you do something for them and can see pure joy radiate from them. I hope you, too, can experience this.
Not the OP, and cool story; however, what they're paid doesn't matter, it's a red herring. It's their JOB to deal with people and and it's not my job as a shopper to validate the emotions of the counter worker or my co-workers. Ring up my stuff, take my money, and let me leave.
You're chastising him for his "attitude"; what attitude? He's correct and he didn't display any attitude other than simple honesty.
GP's attitude is the same attitude you have when you claim "it's their JOB to deal with people" and when you equate being nice to "[validating] the emotions of the counter worker". Sure, their job is to deal with shitty people with a smile, but it's also your job (as a nice, respectable member of society) to be a person who is pleasant to deal with.
They get paid to deal with customers. It's their job, end of story.
The reason people say it's exhausting to "be nice" constantly is specifically because of people like you. You've made up your mind on something that's completely outlandish and unfair, but you're going to attack him for being "unkind" because he doesn't agree with you.
Stop acting like that and maybe more of these "blunt" people would stop being so damned blunt to you.
> Sure, their job is to deal with shitty people with a smile
There is so much projection here I'm not even sure where to start.
Lets say I'm working with retail worker who has been trained to be as difficult as possible to stop my RMA attempt for something I bought that was broken. I can see things from her point of view and understand her paycheck comes from her financial masters who want her to deny my RMA, but that infringes on my return rights. Now I express this as clearly as I can. Guess what, now I'm an "asshole" because $big_co wants to be able to casually rip people off.
I pretty much got into a yelling match about a serious engine fault on my wife's warrantied car a few years ago. Its only after I was particularly nasty did they relent and do the work. Why does the guy making $12 an hour behind the counter want to deny me my entitled service? Because Jeep told him to limit this kind of very expensive work.
This is so much more complex than you make it. Niceness and kindness do not resolve the fundamental conflict we are having. If anything, it allows the kind person to be taken advantage of. If I wasn't at the dealer with my wife they would have steamrolled her the same way other mechanics have steamrolled her.
The world is a nasty place and how we handle it is situation dependent. Want me to be nice to you? Treat me with some goddamn respect and don't try to rip me off. Because if you don't, you'll deal with a lot of "assholes." "Assholes" who are just working schmucks trying to get through the day without being ripped off.
I think the "kind" people of HN need to stop calling everyone who disagrees with them or have different motivators "assholes." Disagreement, argument, and negotiation are fundamentals in life. Retail staff need to learn to handle that. Its a huge entitlement to be this snotty retail person who hates all his customers. The lady who wants to return the broken food processor isn't a "bitch" because she got you off your freemium game for a minute and she's not a "mindless breeder" because she fed her crying baby on your counter. Or "stuck up" because she had to answer the pediatricians call on her iphone while you were processing the return.
It's possible to be assertive and insistent and yet still be polite and calm about it. The cynic in me would label this as "fuck you said with a smile", but the pragmatist in me notes that "fuck you" really does get a very different reaction from people when said with a smile.
Think of communication as having two layers, an emotional one and a factual one. In your car example, the factual layer remains the same, "You are going to fix my car." But you can either combine that with an emotional layer of "And I am fucking pissed off with you right now because you fucking don't do your job, you useless twit", or you could layer it with "I understand that your job is difficult and you're doing the best you can, I don't want to make things difficult for you, but the contract clearly says that the car is under warranty, the car is clearly broken, and I'm not leaving until it's fixed."
And experience says the emotional one is more effective because most people are primarily emotional creatures. Nice and assertive doesn't work as well as pissed off.
One can be pleasant without being nice, nice is making an effort and is unnecessary for most public encounters with staff while in a store. However, even then, no it's not my job to be pleasant to deal with.
There's a lot I want to unpack, here. I don't think you're wrong overall -- in a work environment, for example, you want to select for people who are able to take criticism in an effective, objective, and non-judgmental manner. That's a minimum bar of level-headedness you should have for people that you interact with regularly, as a general rule.
However, when you open with, "this is also incredibly exhausting", it indicates to me that either a) you find yourself surrounded with an unhealthy amount of hyper-sensitive people, or b) there might be more to the "be kind" methodology that you have yet to internalize. I carried around this attitude for most of my life, and just recently am I coming to understand that truly internalizing kindness, the way the OP describes, is not "exhausting" in any way, shape, or form (unless you have kids. Children break this rule in half).
Another thing that sticks out is "if you're fighting for your living". I agree that, if you're truly fighting for your living, kindness and compassion should take a backseat to climbing Maslow's hierarchy to the point of comfortable reflection. Given that your english seems to be good and you're posting highly articulate opinions on an Internet forum, I'd be very surprised if your line of work forced you to reject kindness as part of your job, and I urge you to consider a new line of work if at all possible.
The thing is - most peoples' reactions to things aren't really arbitrary. There are some outliers, and a good deal of individual variation, but by and large most human emotions follow pretty consistent patterns. It can be hard to see them (particularly when you're young and haven't had a lot of practice interacting with people), but the more you get out and make socially awkward mistakes, the more you can form a mental model of what's likely to be offensive and what's safe.
I agree that it's not worth constantly worrying about what other people think of you, but it turns out that's not usually what other people are expecting anyways. Rather, it's just that when you make a mistake, apologize, try not to make it again, and move on. Everybody makes mistakes - I've seen some folks I consider very socially adept make pretty embarrassing gaffes. But usually the folks who're viewed as socially skilled just brush it off and update their mental model of how not to offend people, while the ones that people get mad at are those who are either completely oblivious or react with defensiveness.
> (particularly when you're young and haven't had a lot of practice interacting with people)
What's with the potshots at younger people that I keep seeing on HN? Things like undermining their experiences, their abilities, or their viewpoints. "Pff, I used to think like you, but now I know better"; "I did the same thing, but then I realized that I was being a moron"; "Let me guess, you haven't <experienced/got X> yet? Then your opinion is useless"; "Young people without kids will stupidly work themselves to death for their employee because they have nothing better to do with their time".
I can't say that I've experienced that older people (talking only adults here) are more socially apt, or compassionate, than younger people. And that sentence was completely optional to the rest of the paragraph.
That's not a potshot, it's personal experience. It's making the point that social skills are a learnable skill that gets better with practice. There's no judgment implied there, and in fact I say elsewhere in the same post that everybody makes mistakes, even people with lots of experience (which is amply evidenced by this comment offending you, for which I apologize...)
Welcome to the world of the self-styled "kind" person. You'll find, more often than not, that they see themselves as wizened masters and can't stand young people because young people occasionally have the gall to say how it is, and that interferes with the elaborate dance we call office politics and general self-serving ass-kissing.
Just because you're good at office politics doesn't mean you're a kind person. It just means you're good at working people over emotionally and catering to them for your own personal gain.
"If you're fighting for your living, its not a luxury most of us can have. Sadly, this often justifies hostility, but I think there's a sane middle-ground here, but curt statements like "be kind" just seems so classist and off-putting to me."
I've consistently found that (in particular when treated with kindness and respect) poorer people respond with kindness in much greater measure than wealthy people. Like the author said, kindness isn't the same as niceness.
> Most peoples' reactions to things are arbitrary at best
"Reaction I do not understand" is not the same thing as "reaction that is arbitrary."
Frequently a decision that appears to make no sense starts to do so when you put yourself in the shoes of the person who made it. Their experiences in life have been different than yours (guaranteed!), so there will be no shortage of cases where you look at something and think "A" while that other person looks at the same thing and thinks "B." But that doesn't make either of you arbitrary; you both have reasons for your interpretation, they're just different.
> People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant
But that was the whole point of the article: it's possible to disagree with others in a way that is still respectful. Keeping that bit of respect in what you say is really all it takes. You don't have to agree with everything they say or spend all day pumping sunshine up their skirts; you just have to have enough respect for them to hold back from turning objection into insult. It's stopping at "I disagree with you" and not taking the extra step to "and therefore you are a bad person."
> Its easy for celebrity millionaire Kurt Vonnegut to write about compassion and be quoted by tumblerinas
Let's say I read your comment and, instead of taking the time to try and address your points directly and individually, I just fired back something along the lines of "you're quite a sperglord."
Would you be comfortable with that response? Would it feel pleasant, or even neutral? Or would it feel like a personal attack -- something that would make you feel an impulse to lash out back at me?
It would feel like an attack, of course. Why? Because I'm not dealing with you as an individual. I'm just picking you up and stuffing you into a bucket with a label on it. It would be dismissive, and people don't like being dismissed.
Now ask yourself: having said all that, can you imagine someone else feeling the same way -- and reacting the same way, as if you had attacked them -- when you dismiss them as a "tumblerina"?
> I just fired back something along the lines of "you're quite a sperglord.
> Would you be comfortable with that response? Would it feel pleasant, or even neutral? Or would it feel like a personal attack -- something that would make you feel an impulse to lash out back at me?
Just as I don't care about your feelings, I also don't care that you thing I am a sperglord. It's your opinion and you're entitled to it.
I agree that we must be nice (smiling, saying "thank you", being polite, etc). I see it as a social convention, a sort of rule like driving in the right side of the road and following the traffic signs. It makes society work smoothly and we, as social beings, are hardwired to react positively to it. Now being kind... That just assumes an emotial investement in the other person, which I simply don't have with 90% of the people I interact daily.
To conclude, I'll respond to the OP's article. It's not the author's fault. His co-workers don't want to work with him because he wasn't nice, besides him being more than capable for the job. IMO it shows how unprofessional they are.
This a million times. For lack of a better term, I find a lot of managers refuse to work with anyone but a "Uncle Tom" geek who will just say yes to everything and smile politely and never, ever correct bad ideas or wrongful assumptions. This leads to bad implementations, impossible requirements, unrealistic deadlines, bullshitting, and other issues people have to deal with.
If you can't work with the guy who occasionally says, "Whoa this is a bad practice for reasons x, y, and z," then that says a lot about how broken that culture is and not a lot about that person.
What part is exhausting?
Emotional fallout can be expensive in terms of time and mental energy.
I don't know you, so this isn't a critique of you directly, but if being kind takes special effort you're doing something wrong. It shouldn't take much work at all. You don't need to be a mind reader and try to predict peoples reactions to things, most of the time it's just being mindful of how you act in certain situations and if that behavior really makes sense (for instance: if someone comes to you with a novice question, do you make them feel welcome, or do you make them feel stupid? Either way takes the same amount of effort, but one has a much better long term payoff.)
> most of the time it's just being mindful of how you act in certain situations and if that behavior really makes sense
I think if this comes naturally to you then you're perhaps more gifted in that area than you may want to give yourself credit for. In my experience most people have a hard time being mindful and it's definitely exhausting at first. I certainly have trouble with it and it takes work to remember.
I reference the perennially over-quoted Kenyon commencement speech by David Foster Wallace only because he put it - where "it" is the trouble most people have with mindfulness - much better than I ever could:
> If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
> The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
> Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
> Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
Yes, kindness is incredibly exhausting. It requires you to consider the impact of what you say and do, and not just blindly forge ahead. Every single time you do or say something. It takes quite a bit of energy to do that, and just ignoring other people's emotions makes life much easier.
But dealing with an unkind person is also exhausting. And many people will, at some point, choose to not interact with that person unless absolutely necessary. That might be worth considering as well.
Does that mean you have to constantly agree with others? Not at all. But there are different ways of disagreement. One choice is "Well, you're wrong, and stupid, and here's my way". Another one is saying "I hear what you said, and I acknowledge you feel that way. But I'd like to point out there are things you might have missed". Sometimes, pointing out those missed items is the kindness.
Fake kindness - "I love everybody so much, and we all should just relax more" - is something you rightfully abhor. And I think you are right that it is a plaything of the privileged.
But concern for another person's wellbeing? I've experienced it from a wide gamut of people of all ages and classes. From a 3-year old sharing their cake, to a middle-aged manager taking hours to help me understand my career, to a 80-year old woman living on a meagre income, concerned people living next to her would feel welcome in the neighborhood.
If I could ask a favor of you, consider that kindness. Not the reshared Vonnegut quotes, but simply living with an awareness of others emotions. Not in deference to those emotions, but with respect for them.
Agreed, it can sometimes be exhausting. But I think being kind is (to be rather mercenary) very practical also: I've found it is much easier to get people to listen to and go along with opinions stated kindly (it is also exhausting to try to get through to people who've stopped being receptive because they're feeling attacked or shamed, or anticipating that feeling).
And it's definitely possible to disagree, even sharply, in a considerate manner - eg focus on the point of disagreement, not on the person disagreeing; avoid name-calling; point out that the issue you disagree with may be valid in other cases; etc.
Hmm. I don't think you have to be phony to be kind. In fact, I think it's easier to be kind, not more exhausting. If you think a little bit about how the other person might feel, you save an enormous amount of time dealing with them getting angry or upset. With egos out of the way, you can focus instead on the problem you both want to solve. This makes both of you look good and it might make a friend out of someone who could have been an enemy.
I'm a lot better at this today than I used to be, mostly because I don't take work so personally today. I still want to do well, but if I screw up, I don't take it as an indictment of myself as a person. This makes it a lot easier to, say, admit something is my fault QUICKLY -- if it is -- which allows us to focus on the solution instead of whose fault it is.
There are (IMO very rare) occasions where a soft word won't do the trick, and that is what the big stick is for. But almost everyone, even very obnoxious people, usually respond very well to a little bit of niceness, and it costs basically nothing to give it a try.
So you are two persons, your work person and your home person. Sounds very exhausting to me. "C'est le ton qui fait la musique". I'm sorry for you that you have to deal with a lot of shit but 4 hours of yoga (this is exaggerated of course) is not so much if you have an 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work, 8 hours relax schedule. It seems to me you need to change some things in your life. And then you can also be a nice person.
A soccer mom is a very valuable person who also does work, work that kids appreciate a lot, don't be so belittling. If you are jealous of her, try to find a partner with a good career that allows you to be a soccer dad.
What an odd post. Speaking of irony, I find it hilarious that you feel the need to single out "tumblerinas" while inflicting us with the details of your ponderings on the nature of human kindness (apparently it's inherently insincere!).
But you still don't seem to have a point beyond that it isn't good to ignore real conflict while faking nice and it's annoying when affluent people assume all people can adopt their lifestyle.
I'd suggest you go back to basics and figure out what it could mean to be kind to others while still getting what you need and not being a doormat. Because at this rate you'll soon start accidentally quoting Mean Girls and treating it as a coherent life philosophy.
> To be fair, this is also incredibly exhausting.
Empathy is a skill and, like any other, it gets easier with practice. Eventually the mental overhead is minimal.
I think being selectively kind makes a lot more sense. I'm kind to children and animals and my loved ones. People at work, retail staff, etc should be prepared to not have their emotions constantly validated and deal with disagreement and other things that are unpleasant.
I'm not one of those "grow a thick skin, jerk" types, but there's this cheap sentiment I see about how everyone needs to be more kind and compassionate, and when its not phoned in, it usually ends up as a way to take advantage of others. Its easy for celebrity millionaire Kurt Vonnegut to write about compassion and be quoted by tumblerinas and its totally another thing for some kid no one gives a shit about trying to make his way in the world try to live it.
I find high-concept philosophies are often the playthings of the well-off and comfortable. If you're fighting for your living, its not a luxury most of us can have. Sadly, this often justifies hostility, but I think there's a sane middle-ground here, but curt statements like "be kind" just seems so classist and off-putting to me. Like a soccer mom telling me how wonderful the Maharishi is or how relaxing doing 4 hours of Yoga is (no, she doesnt work, her husband does) and after I got off a long shift and dealt with a lot of shit and a crappy commute.
Cheap sentiment just doesn't resolve the fundamental issue facing humanity today and probably until our final extinction event: we are all competing for the very same resources and competition can sometimes be ugly. It doesn't need to be truly awful and we shouldn't be encouraged to be overly negative and vindictive, but conflict and disagreement happens on a certain level and pretending we can kindly make it go away is just being unrealistic about our fundamental economic beings. Kindness is often taken advantage of as one party feels obligated to engage in it moreso than the other. This is a fairly large problem in gender politics where we raise women to be kind and then they find themselves at a disadvantage to men in the workplace who don't have these values.
Considering everyone here is visiting a hard-nosed libertarian-leaning entrepreneur forum about becoming wealthy quickly, but the second something pseudo-spiritual gets posted suddenly we're all Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree. We're not. If anything, the personality types here are very, very far from any sort of selfless ideal. Patting ourselves on the back because our six-figure salaries let us rise above the struggle doesn't mean the struggle doesn't exist and that struggle means acting in a rational, usually unkind way. High class pseudo-spirituality is such a hilariously hypocritical thing its a running gag on HBO's Silicon Valley, yet here we are Gavin Belson'ing it up. At least I'm honest with myself to say that, no, I'm not "kind" by these standards and that I will argue and fight with you when I feel its appropriate and more importantly -- I will not feel bad about it afterwards.
Sadly, most of the replies to my comment are fairly unkind responses telling me how much of a horrible person I am, especially to retail staff even though I gave no concrete examples of how I act. How ironic. If anyone is truly interested, I meditate daily and follow Buddhist ideals. I just refuse to go to the yogi-like extremes of insincere self-love in an attempt to con my way out of the struggle of Samsara. Accepting the reality of who I am is real mindfulness and liberating, and that person is not this uber-kind enlightened being who is 'above it all' and I doubt anyone here reading this is either. If anything, if we're buying into cheap manufactured sentiment that just happens to be self-complimentary, I'd say we're fairly far from that ideal. The same way we point at the nasty evangelicals will hearts full of hate who pat each other on the back for being so pious. Lets not go that route, as tempting as it is. All the technology is showing you this message was made by sweatshop-style labor. We're just not kind.