Comment by spiffytech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spiffytech | Hacker News Reader

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I have a chronic condition that comes up lot because it dominates my life. It touches everything I do, so bringing it up is unavoidable.

Early on I liked people trying to help. But after years of working on the issue, I've learned how specialized my situation is and how useless most advice is for me.

But friends & family don't have anything to offer besides the usual armchair advice. When I open up to someone new I always have to go through the phase of defending why I can't "just" do X, and that gets very tiring.

I'll get someone to understand that neither they nor I know how to improve my situation, but people eventually forget why X is off the table and I have to defend my decisions all over again.

I don't want to whine about it - I don't need to vent, and I've looked into everything anyone's thought of. It's just that this is an inextricable part of what's going on with me. If I can't talk about this with a person, I can't really talk about my life at all.

I think there's a misunderstanding in what I'm saying, or perhaps people aren't understanding that listening is actually quite a skill to practice and is really quite draining. It isn't free to ask people to listen to you, there is a cost associated with it.

Asking people to listen but then they can't input is something I find incredibly arrogant, egotistical, selfish, basically it's a terrible human trait and I'm surprised there are so many apologists in this thread that defend this kind of behaviour.

Again, I'm not talking about off the cuff "how was your day" "oh my angina is playing up again" "WELL THEN YOU SHOULD DO THIS AND THAT" kinds of conversations... I think that is obvious.

I mean the 30 minute ones where someone is sounding off to you about their problems. Yeah, I am going to give you "advice" (as in, this is a problem lets figure out how to solve it). I'm genuinely surprised this is seen as A Bad Thing. Especially given our community is one of hackers and yanno, people who get hired to solve problems...

Yeah, there could be a communication gap here. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're talking about truly excessive situations.

The mild versions of the patterns you're objecting to don't seem problematic.

As someone who's problem might be unfixable, sometimes I just need a sounding board and don't expect actionable advice. And sometimes people just want to vent, but I try to save that for my therapist.

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