Why Frenemies May Be Hazardous to Your Health
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Relationships are to be judged by consistent behavior over weeks, months and years. If I have to keep guessing if I'm going to get the stick or the carrot from someone, to me it's a no-brainer that I shouldn't expect kindness from them.
I can’t read the actual study, but this description makes it seem like the ambivalent feedback case is the growth opportunity. “That was great” and “that was completely terrible” aren’t really actionable feedback, but “that was decent but I would change this” is helpful. Maybe helpful advice is more stressful because it is a chance to change and grow and those are stressful activities? So maybe if we want to push ourselves, we need more frenemies?
Put another way, should going through life with the minimal possible stress be the goal?
Also, if you're consistently not on the same page with someone, or are even consistently in bad terms with them, you tend to keep some distance at least emotionally.
If you are, on the other hand, (mostly) consistently on good terms with someone and end up being closer, most of the interaction is probably going to be positive -- even if that sometimes includes constructive criticism. (Good constructive criticism is probably not really ambivalent either; there might be clear good and clear bad things, with an overall feeling of both people having the other's best interest in mind.)
Either way, you know what to expect: you can protect yourself from negativity by keeping your distance, or you can expect mostly positive experiences with someone who you let closer.
Inconsistently positive and negative means you don't know whether to keep your guard up or down.
Totally fair point. If that was the entirety of the feedback then it isn’t helpful at all. I was assuming that it was the topic sentence and followed by specifics.
I wish I could see the actual study, rather than a two sentence interpretation of it.
In my friendships, am I doing most of the work to text, call, or hangout or is it relatively equal? At work, if I do something that helps you, do you help me in return, or do you turn around and screw me over?
Getting away from the relationships which are non reciprocal has given me a lot of mental peace over the past few years. Most people are not like this, but something like 1/5 to 1/10 of people are.
Groupthink and design by committee sucks. Creative tension is incredibly useful.
What would the Pixies have been without Frank and Kim? What would the Beatles have been without Paul and John? Etc.
I think the article is too busy pointing blame fingers and devoid of any useful advice about making sure everyone feels safe to have some conflict and having rules everyone agrees to beforehand for argument and even arbitration if things get messy.
The truly manipulative sociopathic type is rarer but they're the ones who behave that way deliberately in an effort to control others, keep them off balance, influence their behavior and so on. A classic example is the 'secret-gatherer' whose friendly outreaches are designed to gather compromising information which can be leaked at some opportune moment, aka 'the blackmailer'. Thankfully most people aren't like this, but identifying the ones who are and avoiding them like the plague is a valuable life skill.
Should we not have a degree of tolerance towards this and even chronic cases because some people's lives a just severely fudged up sometimes i.e. Health reasons outside of their control.
I wish I was 18 again without the worry of the worries I have today, carefree almost 100% of the time but life attaches it's baggage on all of us and it's to be expected that some people will be down, can't expect people to be the reproducible version emotionally every time.
No social life is really really bad for your long term health outcomes. It’s net negative for you however you spin it. Please reconsider this way of living. Best wishes.
Unlike blabbering about nonsense during coffee breaks, sun exposure causes the production of vitamin D, and therefore has a positive effect on health. It's a comparison of a very different things. Of course, too much of everything can cause negative effects and so does the same sunshine.
>No social life is really really bad for your long term health outcomes.
No, it's a fake problem.
In any case, good luck out there & thanks
edit: I’m talking about close friends and family. I think acquaintances offer very little in comparison. I feel I could also live without them. Except once in a while they turn into a close friend, and I suppose I wouldn’t have close friends, or perhaps even my own family, without them.
Fyi, this pop-psych wisdom was never meant to be universal. For hardcore introverts, little to no social life can be the healthy optimum (assuming you're functioning in society and not counting your coworkers as part of your social life, etc).
They just don't say that because it doesn't apply to most people. Hardcore introverts are relatively rare, and it risks misinterpretation by normal people to not fix their social lives wondering if they're one of those.
I am not sure what you mean. I work on some side projects alone and ideas are my own.
>learn new things from?
Internet has all the information I'd ever need.
Yet, both of us need each other to know where we stand.