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RealityVoidlast Sunday at 9:38 PM2 repliesview on HN

I feel you, I totally do. I get wanting to vent and wanting to be heard but solutions should come first. Honestly, when I hear people annoyed about offering solutions I get their need to engage with them differently but I also kind of believe they have a dysfunction about how they relate to the world.


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btillylast Sunday at 9:57 PM

This attitude reminds me of another phrase that I've internalized.

Choosing to be right, is choosing to be alone.

Whatever you choose to put above trying to get along with others, limits who can be part of your group. In the extreme, you will feel absolutely justified. And yet be absolutely alone.

As an example, language communities that focus on being able to find the ideal way to program (eg Lisp) tend to splinter. The languages that achieve broad acceptance (eg Python) do things that most people recognize as bad.

This doesn't mean that we should always choose to get along, rather than being right. But failing to address emotions up front has damaged so many parts of my life, that I firmly wish that I hadn't stood for so long on how right my behavior was.

I hope that your choices are working better for you than my past choices did for me.

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tbossanovalast Monday at 4:10 AM

If solutions always come first then you might never get a chance to vent. Maybe venting clears the annoyance from the brain enough to make it easier to understand any solutions that might be offered. Also sometimes I have been offered solutions that seem obvious to me, like did you really think I hadn’t thought of that? Which is especially piquing haha

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