I understand both of these attitudes and am genuinely unsure what spot on the sliding scale is best for the community. *Personally* I find the thing @theunitofcaring is describing extremely annoying, because basically all the unprompted advice I hear is totally worthless. But this is mostly because none of it is *new* and I think it’s probably good on average for *other* people to hear it.This is an interaction that I had frequently until I learned how to identify it. I”m describing it in case it’s helpful to other people to learn to identify it.
person: You should really try [thing]! (Thing could be ‘meditation’ or ‘a retreat’ or ‘rock climbing’ or a food/dietary thing or a job…)
me: Hmmm, I’m really busy right now but maybe later.
person: Oh no, see, it actually gives you more time/doesn’t take any time at all/helps you get things done! If you’re busy that’s a reason to do it!
me: Okay but there’s still time up front and other costs -
person: Oh, hardly any of it! I can get you set up right now! I’ll do that. I’ll pay for it, if that’s a barrier, I just want you to succeed.
me: - that’s very nice of you but I just don’t think that’s going to work right now.
person: Ah, okay. That makes sense, I completely understand, it’s no problem. Do you have a sense of why it won’t work for you -”
me: Uh. Aside from the time thing, stuff like that just usually doesn’t help me and I’m okay with where I’m at right now and don’t want to add commitments -
person: Ah, but you don’t have to commit! And I don’t think you should be okay with where you’re at right now, you deserve so much better, there’s lots of room to grow. And this isn’t like the things you’re thinking of which didn’t help you…
I used to end these conversations by agreeing to do things I didn’t want to do. The tool that helped me stop doing that was noticing when someone is treating a ‘no’ as an opening for negotiation. You say ‘no’, they affirm and ‘respect’ and acknowledge that, they request more information, you try to provide more information - because this community values high-information communications, and because it seems reasonable to give someone an explanation of why you’re not interested in something important to them -
- and then they get to refuting or countering your reasons. And at that point I often felt trapped, because I’d given reasons, and if the reasons were refuted it felt really dumb and unreasonable to just go on saying ‘no, because I still don’t want to even though you’ve addressed all my concerns’, and so I’d end up saying ‘yeah, I guess that answered all my objections, sure’ and doing things I didn’t want to do.
What fixed this was just noticing the pattern enough that when I started getting into situations like this I could think to myself ‘oh, here we go having a negotiation over my ‘no’’ and then say ‘hey, sorry for not being clear, I don’t want to debate this, I’m not interested and I’ve learned to trust my instincts on that’. It still feels rude, but, like, it is either the case that the person has no idea they are pressuring you and would rather not pressure you, or they would rather pressure you and are a dick and it is okay to say no to them.
I really hope that people don’t start responding to all nos with “OK.” Personally, I probably say no to more things than is optimal, and I’m trying to be a more active person who goes out and does more things. People actively offering to solve my problems or objections makes me feel great and enables me to do things. I really value that, in this community, people will, kindly, push me on things where they think I’m wrong, or my stated reasons don’t justify my actions, and trust me to say “I won’t do X for secret reasons.” I really appreciate that this community very much accepts “I have reasons I don’t want to talk about for doing / not doing Y.” For people who have trouble saying that, I think that what you’re describing will be really helpful. I am strongly reminded of your Meditation on Boundaries, which someone recently told me helped change their life for the better in a significant way.
I think that solutions to “I’ve heard it all already” will look very different to solutions to “I have trouble saying no to people unless I can come up with a good reason and this is harmful to me”, except for the solution of “be able to block a line of questioning without breaking conversational flow”, and if rationalists were capable of solving that we’d be a very different community. I’m also not sure where it’s optimal to be, but I think that right now we’re not even on the Pareto frontier, and we can probably improve. The fact that, at least in my experience, “no for reasons I’m unwilling to discuss” is an acceptable answer is a good step. One strategy I’ve used when topics come up that I genuinely don’t want to discuss is to say that I don’t want to talk about it, then lead the conversation into a new direction so people don’t feel unsure about what to say. I’m not sure what else has worked for people: I think collecting tactics both for “how to say no in a way that’s comfortable” and for “how to say yes to things and ask for help accomplishing them” would be useful if they’re then implemented.