It came up on HN recently, about how work is a place where it can be best to leave some things unsaid, because it invites assumptions about your character and capabilities that might not be true, or positive.
The expectation of not oversharing needs to be met by a commitment of not over-asking, but I suppose that's really too much to expect in an age so degraded that all the obligations across lines of social class are understood to run in only one direction.
Waiters wait. If you need anything you make eye contact and they come over.
Servers are overly friendly and will interrupt conversations to ask if the food is up to standard, etc.
I've always thought it was due to tipping. Servers need to be active and show they're being attentive in order to get tips.
I've been bothered far more by wait staff in Australia than I ever have in the US. Must be down to the location and the restaurant.
I'm super american, born and raised and now living in the western Midwest. When the wait staff talk to me, I'm genuinely interested in hearing about them. I like meeting new people, even if those people are being paid to meet me. I legitimately enjoy learning about the lives of the people I meet, even briefly.
Is that an American thing? Is that a bad thing?
Possibly it was because it wasn't very crowded and the junior waiter was trying to look busy in front of their supervisor.
The median American in any restaurant with chairs not bolted to the floor can be assumed to operate on roughly the level of a marginally clever, but ill-parented and intemperate, four- or five-year-old child. Even nice places have to deal with this, because neither the child nor the American recognizes any such distinction.
The waitstaff need you to convince them they won't deal with this with you, which you can quickly and easily do by dressing appropriately - I know, but an American would need to be told - and comporting yourself in the correct fashion you described. A place worth eating at will recognize this and leave you pretty much in peace thereafter.
Coincidental, even the ghettos of Baltimore/Detroit likely have a higher GDP per capita than most of continental Europe, and this is validated by the increasingly hilarious US-euro monetary exchange rate.
I'm comforted by seeing lots of snapbacks and "SUPREME" printed on clothes by the five-year-old minded Americans around me, because the alternative is hollier-than-thou European mentality of 1. requiring money to use public bathrooms, 2. not giving water by default at many restaurants (and being too poor for ice when asked for it), and 3. spitting in the food of/protesting the existence of the expats/tourists/immigrants who bankroll your entire nations existence in the first place.
Reap what you sow. Watching the UK get flung deeper and deeper into its recession as a result of one of the most hilariously stupid and preventable economic self-pwns ever (brexit) is especially delicious to watch. Reminds me why we threw off our tyrannical monarchists in the first place.
> higher GDP per capita than most of continental Europe
> increasingly hilarious US-euro monetary exchange rate
But barbers tend to go into that business because they like talking to people. And you're right, every barber I've ever had has pried into my life. But I've also been more willing to share life experiences with barbers, and listen to their experiences than any other profession. Not sure why.
It is like going out for a smoke on a party to talk with some prospect partner.
Having an excuse to talk other than talking makes it easier.
You are not flirting. You are smoking.
It's a pity that when we realised the cancer sticks[1] aren't so healthy, we just got rid of them instead of trying to replace them with an activity that also allows colleagues to down tools and socialise for a well-determined short time.
(in the Old Country, anyway: over here, many businesses have a coffee break/round of snacks at ~9 and ~16)
[0] apparently one of the prereqs of becoming a welding instructor is knowing all the places in a booth lazier students will attempt to hide their unwelded rods
[1] see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41318314
¹ /watch?v=j58V2vC9EPc ² /watch?v=P_dza9y6cg0
> barbers tend to go into that business because they like talking to people.
There's someone on staff at my local grocery who once told me she likes working the register because of the human contact, so whenever she's there and there isn't already a line I head for the register instead of the self-checks.
"Intimacy" is a word and concept much misunderstood in this culture as relating only to sex, but at root it has to do with the passage of social and personal boundaries; its root intima refers to the inside of something, and so "intimacy" more usefully describes a spectrum of closeness or a point thereupon.
In that frame, the work of a barber is very slightly more intimate than that of many professionals. I don't know whether it's for having helped create that context - nobody makes you sit down in the chair - in which folks feel a little easier about speaking of things they never ordinarily would. But if I wanted to explain the "barbershop effect" I think it's something I would want to investigate.
Nosy people are a fact of life, and their existence shouldn't invalidate norms against over-sharing in inappropriate contexts.
(And then there are moral reasons, too.)
The moral consideration carries real weight, as you note; lying in a survival situation is one thing, but this kind of problem relatively rarely meets that standard. But even if the potential moral iniquity and certain hazard is entirely ignored, the policy as a practical matter simply cannot work for long.
They just define lying such that the shielding and misrepresentation they do don't count.
Nobody brings their "whole selves" to work, let alone their "selves." I had a lot of blue collar jobs as a teenager and still pick up the occasional shift at my uncle's shop for a call-out. They're guarded but somehow also make professional office life on the west coast rn look like a pearl clutching competition hosted at a flooded blanket factory.
It is my understanding that about 50% of the cultural values companies prescribe to their teams are values they don't want to see adopted. Speaking up when something is wrong, open door policies, and work-life balance are the usual suspects. Continuous learning and development are also values that employees are often invited to practice, though not when there's work to do!
It's all aggrandizement with very little critical thinking about how these policies and values would actually change the workplace. And the companies often hate when they do.
These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends.
Honestly, I'd love it if companies took the tack of giving employees projects based on the skills they want them to develop, instead of the skills they already have.
Hmm, I wouldn't say so. In many countries it is illegal for an employer to prescribe what their employees should do on evenings and weekends, including up-skilling. Handing out promotions based on what an employee does outside work hours would quickly lead to labor disputes and penalties.
I don't deny that employers have this expectation, but it's often another case where if they actually enacted it, it would result in fines. And even in countries where this doesn't matter from a labor law perspective, a continuous improvement grindset culture (where employees work to improve for their work duties on a significant percentage of evenings and weekends) would often lead to morale loss, employee self-neglect and burn-out. Imagine how it would feel to have responsibilities after work (spouse, kids, parents, community commitments, chores, etc) when everyone is grinding to get ahead. You'd have no career prospects, too - a recipe for disengagement. Once again, a company would not actually want the consequences of enforcing this team value.
A better value would be that the company should provide improvement opportunities for their teams (conference tickets, time off work for professional certificates, etc), but same as before - they wouldn't want the real consequences (additional time off work) for having the team actually live such values.
I don't think anyone in most companies truly meaningfully lives those values, nor do they work with these values in mind. They may be slightly swayed towards doing something in line with the values ahead of their next performance review, but beyond that - not really. And that's best for everyone, including the company.
Right - it's left "between the lines". In the US - salaried employees don't have any protections here AFAIK, so even if it became formalized, they wouldn't get fines.
I truly cannot tell if this is sarcasm.
But we don't get any dedicated time to actually do that training during business hours. The implication of course is that managers expect it to happen on evenings and weekends.
Along with "giving back" to "the community" in the form of unpaid labor. There is a class system at play where the owners and financiers--not the builders--benefit the most. And they make sure of it. They've effectively co-opted everything that made the early (mid-late 90s) Internet many of us grew up on good and turned it into a money printing machine. Acknowledging that you the worker are a skilled person worth investing resources in, rather than an interchangeable component in the money printer, would give you power they're not comfortable with you having.
Has your manager actively asked you what you want to work on or do?
Sure, same here. What I don't understand is the idea that such pervasive mendacity and self-delusion should acceptably characterize a kind of culture that anyone is expected to regard as worthy of respect.
I realize it has a lot to do with the difference between organizational desiderata and organizational incentives, or put otherwise between asserted and revealed preference. Still, this is a problem in design susceptible to methods of analysis and adjustment recognizably derived as much from engineering as sociology, and it is not a novel field; I first learned of it from books published in the 1960s. The regression in ambient knowledge since then is remarkable, not to say shocking.
So I'd say the amount of attention and rigor applied to values and management principles is roughly commensurate with the amount of attention and rigor applied to product and engineering concerns. That is to say, just barely enough to get by. Yet somehow we print money...
Finance is a cancer in the body of the industry. This is why we say so; this is what it does.
(Not saying I agree or disagree with the essay but it seemed topical)
I enjoy working with computers. I happen to work at a particular company doing computer things. Only one of those is an innate "what makes me, me" thing. Even if computers didn't exist, I'd still probably tend to gravitate towards things that are fun for the same sorts of reasons.
This isn’t hypothetical; I have worked with people who’ve had to quit this form of work for the following reasons: Carpal tunnel that prevented using keyboard and mouse, brain injury, neck injury that made it impossible to sit at a computer (or desk), long Covid and “brain fog”. I imagine that vision impairment might lead to the same.
If any of these were to happen to me, would I still have my sense of self? Are we more than our love of technology?
Now imagine you're a third generation UBI recipient. Your parents never worked, and you're surrounded by people who don't even "work" in the way which you describe it.
At that point, I have very little hope, even for people predisposed to it like you.
I'm not sure that's a guaranteed future. Even today we offer subsistence living with welfare and food stamps, and nobody ever brags about not working because they're on the dole. Even if UBI is better than the current welfare system, it's not likely to be enough to support a middle class lifestyle. People will still work because they want to get ahead in life.
My grandmother is 100 years old. She has led an incredible life filled with all kinds of achievements. Her passion for reading, learning, languages and art, have all shaped me. She’s blind now, and basically deaf. She can no longer read, which is very painful for her (I can read to her when I visit). How much value does she still have? To me, as much value as she ever did.
What is her identity?
Neither is likely to be a much richer channel than the other, I think.
The odds of those around you noticing is something you have some power over, if you're thinking about it ahead of time.
I'm not saying not to plan around Morse, just that it's a little early to assume there must be no other hope - and always too early to place much faith in being able to exert control over circumstances where, more or less definitionally, this is not a reasonable thing to expect.
That probably sounds scary. I can't help that. Dying is a scary topic, I imagine likely much more so for actually doing it, which I as yet have not. But I do know some things about how to handle fear, and one is that it helps a lot when that doesn't come by surprise - when you don't have to start totally from scratch to build what equanimity is available.
Less so than any one specific response, what I'd focus on trying to prepare for is that. You can't really know what tools you will have available in such a moment. You can't really know you will have any. Whatever there is, though, you'll have an easier time to recognize and use for being able to better see past that fear.
That's not everything, but it says more than you might yet have realized.
Conversely, being beholden and holding onto identities that have no bearing on your success or direction in life which you believe does in fact determine those things seems equally dangerous, no?
> You're not only your job, but you're also a parent, a child, an athlete, a hobbyist, etc.
You're actually none of those things. In the words of Alan Watts, [0]
The principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with
reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth, and our names
about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, with ourselves.
We exchange these names of ourselves, ideas of ourselves, language describing ourselves, with others, hoping that the full reality of ourselves will be communicated, in whole and not in part, to others, who will actually see past the symbols and recognize the selves to which they point. In actuality they conflate the symbol and the self, the representation for the reality, falling victim to the deception of Baudrillard's simulacrum, of images that "mask and denature a profound reality."
Hence the injunction of the philosopher Kwaw to the daimios of Japan in Aleister Crowley's parable Konx Om Pax [1] to call themselves "the Synagogue of Satan, so as to keep themselves from the friendship of the fools who mistake names for things," while advocating not a "Satanist" way of life, but rather a Taoist one seeking the equilibration of opposites to achieve first inner personal harmony and then outer societal harmony.
A postmodernist would see the label "Satanist" and immediately conjure up images and notions of evil and "the adversary," confusing the name with the actual thing, the deeds and the philosophy of the synagogue, never bothering to inquire beyond the label and the name into the nature of the thing itself, letting their priors and biases make uninformed snap judgments for them. A modern instantiation of Kwaw's tactic can be found in The Satanic Temple, who advocates not for "evil" (whatever this word means) but for the advancement of rationality and reproductive rights. Yet this phenomenon extends far beyond The Satanic Temple and religion and extends to all of life more broadly, and this simplistic reduction of the world into one-word labels and mental filing cabinets is what lends to the exact same tribalism pg notes in his essay.
Ascribing labels to one's self limits your degrees of freedom by circumscribing your capabilities and characteristics within the bounds of the label. For if I am P, then I am not (not P) and immediately I have entered into a dualistic discourse of "me" and "not me" or of "self" and "other." Now you are beholden to a past, a history, and limited by that which you have identified with, rejecting what you are not yet but could at one point be. The very clinging to what scraps of "identity" one has accumulated around one's self is precisely what leads to this fragility of personality once those identities are forcibly taken away.
Ironically postmodern ideologies admit of "non-binary" sexualities that reject simplistic dichotomies and labels, but fail to extend this mode of thinking to other domains of life that would benefit from the same treatment; instead they insist on fractionating all of society into discretized identity groups and factions instead of recognizing the unique individuality of each human being, failing to acknowledge that continua instead of hard dichotomies exist and reality is not so cleanly divided. These ideologies purport to have moved beyond stereotypes and assuming everyone had the same lived experiences growing up, and yet continues to do exactly that with simplistic filing away of people into labelled cabinets of "identity."
All abstractions are leaky, including abstractions of self. Postmodern (Facebook onwards) social media has enabled a new era of idolatry; where once we erected statues and idols in a vain attempt to capture the ineffability of gods, now we publish online profiles and reels in a vain, narcissistic attempt to capture the ineffability of the self.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYp-mWqB1w
[1] http://www.astrumargenteum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Ko...
You'd be happier with the neo-Orthodox, I suspect, some of whom at least are not total charlatans. You should read Paul Kingsnorth in particular, who gives a much better account of the ideology you and he share; I would not normally make such a recommendation, but you'll believe what you believe in either case, and at least from him you'll see how a consistent account of it may be given.