Straight Dealin'

TL;DR Don't mess with people. It doesn't help.

Something's been bothering me a great deal recently, by which I mean for roughly the last two years or so. To put it concisely: people are shady as hell, and it's infuriating.

I myself am guilty of this, so let's get that immediately out of the way; I'm not claiming by any means to be the patron saint of social interaction. Those of you who know me personally know that I range between compulsive bluntness and neurotic sarcasm, without a great deal of a middle ground, and clear communication is not necessarily my strong suit most of the time.

That being said, I absolutely cannot stand passive-aggressive non-communication. I don't really know how this got started, but I'm assuming both that it's not a unique feature of privileged white people (because that just isn't that many people, really) and that it has a great deal to do with our progressive dehumanizing detachment in the digital age (yadda yadda, more on that some other time).  To be specific, I don't mean the normal vanilla interactions I have with people, because those are lovely. I'm specifically talking about what happens when I've had difficulties with people.

The phenomenon goes like this: I say something, and there is no response. For clarity, I don't necessarily mean nothing is said. If something is said (or more often typed), it usually reads something along the lines of "haha everything is cool!" or something to that effect. Now, this is in a situation where I plainly know that everything is not, in fact, cool, because we've had some sort of a falling out. This is never a declaration that a situation has been resolved.

People say this sort of thing to me to avoid conflict, simply put. In recent years I've improved vastly as a person. I've become more able to express myself, more understanding and patient with others, much stronger and more comfortable with myself, and more honest with people. I'm much more outgoing with regard to strangers than I used to be, and with people I know, I present my case far more plainly recently.

The net effect of all these changes in my personality is that I have a much lower tolerance for limp-wristed spineless bullshit like this than I used to. Interacting with people in my age has become, in many cases, a gigantic slaughter of a guessing game in which I have to try and gauge what reaction a particular statement will elicit, and how to engineer the outcomes I want by fiddling with an endless number of tiny knobs and buttons.

I think this has a great deal to do with how we communicate with one another, or more specifically the means we use to do so. It's extraordinarily easy to shade people in the world of smart phones; if you want to communicate that you're ignoring somebody, all you have to do is poke their message so it shows as read, toss your hair defiantly over your shoulder and say nothing in response. After all, there's always someone else texting you these days, so it's easy to resolve conflicts by just not interacting with them.

If there's some better deal developing for you at the moment, you can ignore me. If I say something you don't like, you can ignore me. If, God forbid, I point out to you that you're doing this, you can... you guessed it, just go ahead and ignore me. This is a very effective strategy young people have developed for both delaying the inevitable and pissing off people who genuinely care the way I do.

I'm going to point out for the benefit of the audience that in face-to-face interaction this is impossible. You just simply can't pull this type of crap when you have a real, in-person conversation with me, not least because all the imponderabilia of true interaction are things I'm exceptionally good at seeing and understanding. (Most people have a truly atrocious poker face, as it turns out, but more on that some other time.) The muscles in your face twitch, and I know I've made a mistake. You shift around in your seat, and I know you're uncomfortable. These are things I can fix. I can't work with the blank nothingness and filtered wording of text-based messages.

I understand, obviously, that honesty can be difficult and nerve-wracking, especially if the truth is something unpleasant to say. I also understand that I'm 6'4" and a genuinely scary individual to many people, and I can be extremely intimidating without meaning to. That being said, I have the heart of a big dumb bear, and I care very sincerely about my friends and affiliates, and I'm not actually going to tear your arms off with my brain or anything like that.

This is getting to be quite a ramble, so I'll wrap up with this: if you don't want to see me, tell me so. If you want to insult me, do it. If you want to fight me, get in my face or sit the hell down. I'm a big guy, and I can take it, and any offense you deal me directly is going to heal in the twenty minutes it takes me to invent some new memory as to what actually happened. Take it from me and my long experience that it's much better to just rip the Band-Aid off and get it over with than to sit around for years on end thinking about this type of social foolery.