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> NPC coworkers I very much dislike the trend of calling other people NPCs. When you feel tempted to see someone else as an NPC, it might be helpful to rememb
by Trasmatta 2y ago
> NPC coworkers
I very much dislike the trend of calling other people NPCs.
When you feel tempted to see someone else as an NPC, it might be helpful to remember the concept of "sonder":
> the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/sonder https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/...
- gigatexal 2y agoYeah. Red flag for sure. Therapy is this arm-chair doctor’s recommendation.
- dang 2y agoI agree it's an unpleasant trend but please let's not cross into personal attack ourselves. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Trasmatta 2y agoFair enough, I'll edit my comment to just call out my dislike of the term without making it personal about the author. (for anyone seeing this later, my comment above was originally more of an attack on the author, which is what dang was rightly calling out.)
- drawkward 2y agoThen maybe take the whole post itself down?
- dang 2y agoI don't see any need. The thread is ok on the whole. On HN, the onus is on commenters not to react to the bits they find most provocative. There's even a site guideline about that: "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- drawkward 2y agoI am referring to the post itself, not the thread, where the writer seems to be pretty sociopathic in his dismissal of the inner lives of others as NPCs. That is truly insulting.
- dang 2y agoI don't think it makes sense to weight that one detail more than the entire rest of the article. It's better to drop the worst outlier, as the guidelines ask, and focus on the rest of the content. There's another point too: it's easy to misinterpret what someone means by a single token like that. It may have an obvious meaning to you, but it isn't clear what the author had in mind. This isn't nearly enough information to justify an extreme conclusion like "sociopath", and when you jump to such a label, what you're doing is not so different than what you're complaining about in the OP.