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You can absolutely have friends that you have unfruitful conversations with. The idea that every interaction needs to be positive to constitute friendship is ex
by nixpulvis 3y ago
You can absolutely have friends that you have unfruitful conversations with. The idea that every interaction needs to be positive to constitute friendship is extremely unhealthy and sterilizing.
- seydor 3y agoyou can have such conversations with anyone, they are not a friend. friendship implies a certain emotional investment, which implies a certain bias
- daveslash 3y agoI agree. I think in modern American vocabulary, "Friend" is thrown around quite loosely to mean "somebody who I know and I'm not adversarial with". Personally, I have very few friends - people with whom I have an emotional investment, who I'd trust to call if I had a bad breakup or needed money or some sort of personal help. But I have tons of casual relationships with folks that I'm on friendly terms with.
- nixpulvis 3y agoI don't understand your point.
- luma 3y agoI have fruitful conversations with friends, and exactly none of them have been arguments about our favorite programming languages. This dude just wanted a pretense for a blog post about Very Strongly Held Feelings Concerning PLangs.
- shrimp_emoji 3y agoI have fruitful arguments about programming with friends. You just have to find people that enjoy banter and aren't insecure, which isn't very easy.
- lloydatkinson 3y agoAnd also very American-ised. This forced positivity seems to be a cultural aspect of American life.
- ChatGTP 3y agoI agree with the forced positivity thing, I work for an American firm and if you're not positive, you're reprimanded. I had to be told several times to learn to feedback constructively. While I do appreciate this, and I understand it, I just feel like a robot now, not a human at work. So much tip toeing around issues it all just feels so fake and there is little room for emotion. Sometimes, I think it's ok to just be honest with people , but not in America for some reason.
- NikolaNovak 3y agoFWIW, my experience (being a 45yo who immigrated to North America at 15) is that "Culture of fake niceness" predates "Culture of Emotional intelligence and empathy" I find in last few years, many people/groups/companies are working toward increased emotional intelligence and empathy. I see that as a good thing. It just gets mixed up with the original "somewhat real but also somewhat fake classless friendly positive culture". It's... nice that I can call my client Bob and my VP Laurie, instead of Mr Neubauer and Mz Jameson. It's nice that we speak as equals. It's however false to then erroneously assume that we are equals or that we have equal relationship, so there are layers and nuances to lessons a newbie to north american corporate life needs to learn and internalize. Anyhoo, what I'm getting to: the "original corporate fake positiveness/niceness" indeed could suck the life out of me. The "new & improved show empathy and grow emotional intelligence" I quite enjoy; it's a good challenge for systems-oriented nerd actually. I always think "What leads us to Star Trek future" and I think empathy is a key factor. So showing empathy in code review is good. Showing sterile niceness and avoiding constructive criticism is bad. It can be easy to mix them up though. My 100 Croatian Lipa, FWIW :->
- ChatGTP 3y agoInteresting take on it, and I've seen things trend in that direction, which is a good thing, I agree.
- justin66 3y agoThere's no need to conflate "unfruitful" and "negative." Plenty of people have fun arguing without persuading one another of anything, more or less the definition of an "unfruitful" conversation. It's negative when someone's not having fun. Or more to the point, when someone feels the need to post on the internet about how defective the "friend" they were arguing with is.