I know that some people are
legitimately busy with whatever they may have going on in their lives, but I
feel like the majority of folks out there that say they’re too busy are some
combination of lazy and uninterested. Lazy is one thing, we all have those days
and moods, but I think being uninterested is interesting to explore.
People really don’t want to say that they aren't interested or that they don't care or that the proposed plan is just plain stupid. I mean, if your friend wants to go to the zoo and you really don’t care to go, don’t
say you’re busy, say you aren’t interested, turtles creep you out. I think
maybe, in part, our society has become so sensitive that people can’t and won’t
be honest with one another if they feel like the answer might hurt feelings.
But then we’d have to get into why being honest would hurt someone’s feelings.
Why would saying that you’re not interested in going to the zoo hurt your
friend’s feelings? Is she an overly sensitive person to begin with? Is she
maybe one of those idea people that thrives off of people being jazzed about
the same things she’s jazzed about? I doubt it’s a tone things because we all
pretty much text nowadays anyway, even this blog will lose some of it’s punch
because my inflection isn’t obvious to everyone reading it. Though I suppose
your tone is implied by the person reading the text, so even if your response
is totally acceptable when you said it in your head, they could read it and
interpret it totally differently.
Ok, so back to the point…I do this shit too and I’d like to
stop perpetuating it. I want to start being fully honest. I think being tactful
is a wonderful thought and I think that the fact that people are inherently
kind enough to not want to hurt other people by telling them the blunt truth is
kind of a nice sentiment.
Nice sentiments aren’t always going to get the job done
though.
While trying to be 'nice' you might end up in one of those conversations where you get
invited to the zoo and say you can’t go today, and then your friend says, no
problem how about tomorrow, and you come up with another excuse and they say, that’s
cool I understand, why don’t you tell me what day works for you and we’ll go
then…that’s when one of two things happens: you either cave, because she's your friend and you don’t want to hurt her feelings and she's being super
flexible, OR you finally go with honesty, which is you hate zoo’s because once
when you were a child a giraffe licked your face when you were trying to feed
it and you’re emotionally scarred for life. At which point it’s like, jeez that
was an awfully long way to go to get to the truth when you could have avoided
the whole first part of the conversation by opening with that story. Then by
the time you got to the point in the conversation where you tell your childhood
trauma story, you and your friend could have come up with plans that you are
both interested in, or you could have told her that you’re really not in the
mood to hang out this week and you’ll call her next week. I want to not have to
keep track of 100 little white lies that don’t mean anything, because if they
don’t mean anything anyway, what was the point in telling them?
I guess if you’re going to go along with my plan for
universal honesty, you have to keep in mind that people are going to be
throwing their honesty your way. Are you secure enough and thick-skinned enough
to take the honesty and not take it personally? If you aren't, then maybe just keep doing what you're doing, but don't be that guy who is honest to a fault with all his friends and then gets all butt hurt when someone tells him going to Greenland in December is a terrible plan; it's like really cold up there all the time and you want to go in the dead of winter? You came up with a shit plan and someone should tell you so.
I suppose I'll see what happens and maybe I'll write about it later on in these entries, unless I get too busy...
No comments:
Post a Comment