That was my reasoning before too. It's a deep rabbit hole of mental reasoning and social signaling, not to mention self-consciousness. I've often felt that it t

That was my reasoning before too. It's a deep rabbit hole of mental reasoning and social signaling, not to mention self-consciousness. I've often felt that it ties into the programmer's constant pressure to achieve syntactic accuracy and efficiency at solving problems. Not to mention that awareness that we're constantly making many small mistakes or misjudgments while coding. (Aside: It's got to be having a profound effect on society, given the pioneering that technologists have done getting us into the age of social tools like the iPhone and Facebook.) I've experimented with "What if" too. I imagine it works for others, but for me, and perhaps something about my tone of voice that I'm not realizing, it sounds patronizing, so it hasn't worked as well.