Actually fr! Studied a year there and I had no driver license back then… Which was fuckin painful as there was little to no other infrastructure! It was also fun to start uni with a 2 hour consultation about school shootings…
But the worst thing? They fucken start every conversation with a ‘how are you’ and look at you like you are boinkers if you say anything aside from ‘good’! Well I am not fuckin good at most times…
Lived in multiple eu countries as a contrast and its incomparably worse, while there is an amount of money I would go back temporarily but I would never settle down there
Wait, so y’all don’t have to lie and tell people you’re doing good? This is an American thing?
Ehhhhh, this is not standard in all places. If someone asks me how I am I will answer honestly but vaguely. “Living the dream, I’ve been better, meh, good, pretty good.” It’s common for other people to answer the same way, too. The part that’s not as socially acceptable is to go into detail about it if you don’t know the people well/people don’t have follow up questions about it.
Yeah pretty much. Most of us don’t even ask.
Wow
That would save so much bullshit if I could just skip that stupid pleasantry.
I tell people how I’m doing now and then to throw people off. Feels sort of like a power play, but they usually seem to think “wow this guy is full of himself.”
If anyone asks me how I’m doing my bog standard response is “Fucking terrible but apart from that I’m OK.”
They probably get annoyed because you didn’t say ‘fine’ and now they have to think about you to see if you’re kidding or not which should hopefully make them think about asking in the future
That’s the idea.
It doesn’t work most of the time. I got a talking to from one manager. That one kinda entertained me.
I have a coworker who greets me with “Hi, what’s up? How’s it going?” and then just continue walking without expecting an answer. It’s such a pet peeve of mine, lol. We’re not Americans, we live in Europe, and this person is definitely an exception, but it still catches me off guard every single time.
“How are you?” is a greeting, not a question.
…Unless it’s from a close friend.In the US. That’s the point. If I get asked that, the other person generally has some degree of interest in my genuine answer
Well then the question mark is a lie
I’ve never understood the argument that you shouldn’t complain about the environment you interact with because other people interact with worse environments.
Like, okay, that’s good to keep in mind with respect to privilege and assumptions and such, but like…
I can’t deliver a first-hand account of someone else’s life, and I can’t identify the possible solutions to their problems as well as I can for my own — let alone access their world as well as my own, to try to fix some of the problems.
I think on some level the people who say “focus on those other people’s problems” know that those other problems are less accessible.
It’s not that they want you to do better activism. It’s that they want you to do none.
It’s basically whataboutism
I’ve never understood the argument that you shouldn’t complain about the environment you interact with because other people interact with worse environments.
I call this the “children of Africa” -argument. Basically, it’s an argument that you can never complain about anything or do anything to better something, because “some kids are starving in Africa”; someone always has it worse. It’s purpose is to belittle and brush aside either the problem worded out or the person saying it (or both).
