And I think you always lose something if you say no to someone—always. It is always coercive. It just may not be visible on the surface—but they will resent you a little bit for it, and the more you do it the more resentment will build up.
This is simply and straightforwardly false. Different people live in different worlds. I make no claim about what percentage of people live in the same world as MSRayne; it could plausibly be as high as 90%, given everything I have seen of humans and human society.
But it is absolutely not a universal, in the way that MSRayne’s experience has led them to legitimately believe.
I don’t like this “different worlds” thing. It looks like a copout to me. “Well that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” Either I’m right or I’m wrong, after all. A claim about the world is either true or it is false, and I wish to believe it is true if it is true, and that it is false if it is false. Either people’s opinion of me consistently lowers slightly when I say no to them or it doesn’t.
That said, that’s a great post. I’ve read it before but forgot about it. Particularly when he says “I don’t think of myself as clearly having a ‘type’, but people I date tend to turn out similar in dimensions I didn’t expect when I first met them.” That is actually true for me. I’ve never “dated” anyone but people I get crushes I almost invariably find out later are drug addicts, which is… concerning.
It is not the case that my opinion of people lowers when they say no to me (in many cases I can notice it unambiguously rising).
It is also not the case that the people around me consistently lower their opinion of others (including myself) when those others say no.
But I can’t speak to your experience, and whether you’re correctly perceiving a different thing happening to/around you, or whether you’re misperceiving something. I default to trusting that the thing you report is, in fact, happening, and it’s just … different, from what happens to/around me.
Separately,
This is simply and straightforwardly false. Different people live in different worlds. I make no claim about what percentage of people live in the same world as MSRayne; it could plausibly be as high as 90%, given everything I have seen of humans and human society.
But it is absolutely not a universal, in the way that MSRayne’s experience has led them to legitimately believe.
I don’t like this “different worlds” thing. It looks like a copout to me. “Well that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” Either I’m right or I’m wrong, after all. A claim about the world is either true or it is false, and I wish to believe it is true if it is true, and that it is false if it is false. Either people’s opinion of me consistently lowers slightly when I say no to them or it doesn’t.
That said, that’s a great post. I’ve read it before but forgot about it. Particularly when he says “I don’t think of myself as clearly having a ‘type’, but people I date tend to turn out similar in dimensions I didn’t expect when I first met them.” That is actually true for me. I’ve never “dated” anyone but people I get crushes I almost invariably find out later are drug addicts, which is… concerning.
It is not the case that my opinion of people lowers when they say no to me (in many cases I can notice it unambiguously rising).
It is also not the case that the people around me consistently lower their opinion of others (including myself) when those others say no.
But I can’t speak to your experience, and whether you’re correctly perceiving a different thing happening to/around you, or whether you’re misperceiving something. I default to trusting that the thing you report is, in fact, happening, and it’s just … different, from what happens to/around me.