Tired of all the little dishonesties
Lately, dishonesty has been standing out to me more. Not dishonesty in other people -- dishonesty in myself.
All the time, I'm noticing myself subtly misleading people. Never with outright lies. Never out of malice; never for much personal gain. Usually it's out of a desire to avoid upsetting people.
Like, it's not uncommon for a friend/acquaintance to do something that bothers me. And then I *don't tell them*. I keep acting cheery, despite whatever bothersome thing they did. That's misleading!
Or, like... if a friend makes an irreversible decision that I think was kinda bad, I usually won't say anything.
I wish I could just switch to telling people everything. Or telling my friends everything? But it seems intractable. A ton of people don't want feedback.
And it's hard to convey what a small deal a lot of these things are. "I didn't like it when you did X" can make it sound like I am commanding them to stop, and I'll be mad if they don't. But that's not how I feel.
I just want people to have the information so they can use it to make better choices. (Maybe this info means they should stop doing X; maybe it means they should stop being friends with me; maybe it means they should stop doing X iff they get the same feedback from 3 more people. That's up to them!)
I kinda wish we were all more honest about everything. I wish I could tell everyone what I think of them, and vice versa. I wish my value-aligned friends told me whenever they think I've made a mistake, or I'm doing something off-putting, or whatever.
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Ben Weinstein-Raun, Amber Dawn, Sam FM and renshin like this.
Ben Weinstein-Raun
in reply to kip • •I strongly agree with this.
Also, if you happen to be wanting to give me feedback, I highly encourage this, of course including having an anonymous feedback form (link in profile).
A thing that helps me with a million communication annoyances, at least when both people are used to using it, is the idea of generalized happy prices: to express the magnitude of a preference, just say how much money you'd be happy to pay for that preference to be satisfied, or what amount you could be paid in order to feel overall happy about the trade, even if the preference isn't satisfied. Sometimes money can actually change hands to make everyone happy; sometimes not; but at least it helps to get across preference strengths.
kip likes this.