*a quick promise to you: our newsletter will always only ever be written by humans and never by robots. we wish we could say that this is out of love & respect for writing & the environment, and while those are both true, it’s mostly that we really tried a couple years ago for months on end to get the robots to write in this very weird (but always hilarious, obvi) tone and it just…has not delivered. easier AND funnier to keep it highly manual and we are very okay with that. thank you for your understanding.

while normally how a mansplainer gets his water, “well, actually” will explore the different angles of an argument or conversation & favor celebrating nuance & complexity over the short-term satisfaction of “hot take culture”.

Recently, I took a lil part-time gig doing staffing for a friend’s company. This week, I emailed a candidate who applied for a job at the client company so I could schedule a phone interview with her. I gave her my availability and asked her to let me know which of the NINE appointment slots I had would work for her.

In her response, she did not acknowledge any of the nine times I was available THIS WEEK ALONE, and instead, gave me her availability, which was unfortunately very far apart from mine. I responded apologetically, that I was not available during those times, and provided my availability again, with new slots. She told me that she had a full-time job, so this was her availability, which did happen to include one time that I had already offered twice.

Here’s the thing, reader: When one applies for a job, one knows that they will have to go through interviews for a new job. Those interviews are generally conducted during everyone’s working hours. One should accept the idea that one may need to work around the schedules of the people they are hoping will give them a job. This particular candidate did not believe that she needed to do that. 

I responded again, reaffirming politely that I was available during one of those times she offered and asked if we could schedule. I also gently let her know that, in the event that we move forward, she will need to interview with a hiring manager and will have to work around their schedule. I should be clear that I removed all emotion or tension from these emails - I’m just a girl trying to schedule an interview with someone who wants a job.

The candidate responded, very upset with me. She told me that she believed the interview process should allow for some level of flexibility (it should) and mutual accommodation (it should) where both parties are genuinely interested in getting to know each other (right again). She pointed out that I was clearly writing emails past my evening working hours, so it’s clear that I could be flexible, I just wasn’t. She withdrew her name from consideration and let me know that my communication skills were the problem; they made the company look bad and she wouldn’t want to work there as a result.¹

I was, of course, a little puzzled. I agree with her - interview processes SHOULD be mutually accommodating. Both parties SHOULD be ready to be flexible. But somehow, this woman had decided that simply providing her availability WAS her being flexible; that the burden of ACTUAL flexibility should rest on someone else to be flexible around HER availability. She even went so far as to comment on my working hours, as though to say that if I have time available in my day to send an email, then I have time available to accommodate her schedule. She believed, in that moment, that her rigidity WAS flexibility; that her simply communicating that rigidity WAS accommodating me.

We’ve been rewatching The Good Place recently, so I’ve been spending every waking non-working moment revisiting a lot of my postsecondary education in ethics and thinking about the premise of at least Season 2: What DO we owe each other? As human beings who have no choice but to live in relation to others, how do we want to be treated, and then, by extension, how do we believe others should be treated both by us and by the rest of the world? Generally, what I see when I look around our world (most particularly at our country), is a Great Inflexibility: This outright demand that others see us and accept us for who we are, flaws and all, but a resistance to offering the same for those we require this of.

On many levels, this one-sided requirement is not new. Throughout history, especially in the US, this belief has had a stranglehold on us, that WE are owed, but that we do not do the OWING, whether it’s time, understanding, money, property, or even the benefit of the doubt. If you think about the concept of marginalization for more than two seconds, you will easily see: Those of us who are white had ancestors who believed they were OWED the ownership of human bodies and labor, so that our ancestors themselves could profit. Throughout history all the way to present day, imperialism whispers to us that we are OWED this land, simply because we want it, or even believing we have a birthright to it, as though being born was the hard work. For decades, the belief that others “having” (like women having career growth, queer people having marriage, trans people having ownership of their bodies and identities) means that we will NOT have, or that we will have LESS - like everything in our lives is pie and there’s a finite amount of slices available.

I think it feels a little different now, or can feel like we are suddenly more aware of it, because of the growing insularity and egocentricity of our society caused by things like social media, allowing each of us to have our own stage and demand an audience witness us. There’s the evolution of the parasocial relationship, where social media has stripped layers of barriers between us and Those We Watch, or the way corporations seem to only be capable of extracting from others, demanding loyalty from workers, believing they are OWED some extraworkforce debt simply by being employers. You’ll notice they don’t believe that loyalty and debt should have to work both ways.

While it might feel different, at its core, it’s essentially the same feeling. We want other people to practice The Golden Rule, but we’d prefer to have the responsibility end with them.

Last weekend, I read a Reddit post from a patron complaining about an inclusive space in my neighborhood that I love, because they believed that the employees gave them a weird look and made a joke at their expense. The employees responded very politely to clear up the confusion - it had literally nothing to do with the patron - but that wasn’t enough. The patron insisted that they understand that other people in earshot could (even mistakenly) believe that a joke was about them, so they should be more sensitive. There was ironically no understanding from the OP about the insistence that everyone else in the room center OP every moment that they’re there. They demanded understanding from others, while dismissing the staff’s request for understanding of the context.

How many thinkpieces have we seen these days bemoaning the loss of real community, the understanding that inconvenience is the price we pay for rich and deep relationships? They all call out the way we expect others to show up for us, but when we’re asked to do the same, we call it “emotional labor” or “crossing boundaries.” The ill-advised editorial² making the rounds where the author ended a very close, and by all accounts, very GOOD friendship because her friend had been taking GLP-1 meds and hadn’t told her. And don’t even get me started with people on planes: Taking their shoes and socks off, listening to their devices without headphones…how do we not just SEE that we are living in a world where we are owed a Main Character role and don’t owe sharing the spotlight with anyone else, but then REALIZE that we are probably guilty of the same? 

And YES, these examples all have caveats. They all have humans at the center of them who really ARE reading the situation through the lens of their own experiences and past. I’m not arguing against compassion for them. I AM saying that it is curious when compassion is expected BY them, FOR them, but not for others around them who are ALSO human and ALSO have their own lenses and experiences and pasts.

We are entitled to our experiences. We are entitled to our feelings. We are not entitled to the absolute objective truth of either, and we are not entitled to force that “truth” onto others. (Also, at some point, we REALLY need to revisit this whole “impact matters more than intention” because while it may have been important at some point, it’s now just a weird obfuscation of consequentialism and it’s not objective fact, it’s just ONE ethical framework that has its own deep flaws.)

The problem with the microcosms of these day-to-day feelings of insularity and egocentricity is that they DO extrapolate out to macro ways of social thinking. WE are owed safety in our homes, but the people fleeing dangerous situations in their countries are not. WE are owed this land stolen from others, but anyone else who needs it is not. WE are owed safety when we go to the bathroom, but trans people being forced into the bathroom of their biological sex, despite their gender presentation…they can get fucked. WE are owed the benefit of the doubt when our children play in the yard with their toy guns, but Black children are not. WE are owed a slush fund of taxpayer dollars to pay for our legal fees after we incited an insurrection, but those who need housing, food, healthcare, childcare…they are not owed the same allocation of tax money.

I truly do not believe that this is a Human Nature Problem, and the proof is that we CAN and many times DO improve. We ARE capable of thinking outside ourselves. I also wonder at times if this is a uniquely American problem, fostered by a deep sense of individualism/individual liberty, without understanding that no individual can exist without the whole (if the supply chain issues of the last decade have taught us nothing, I would HOPE it could at least teach us that). Does the social ideology influence the individual or is it the other way around? It’s probably some poisoned, self-perpetuating cycle, but the good news is that cycles CAN be broken.

How do you do it? Get in the habit of challenging your own narrative and your own experience. Ask yourself how someone else might have experienced the same thing. Make a real effort to routinely put yourself in the shoes of others and see things from their perspective. No one requires you to understand or even agree with all of someone’s choices, but understanding where they are coming from and what is driving them is a huge first step.

We should not ask of others what we are not willing to do ourselves. And if we’re going to be such individualists, if we are to engage in SO much navel-gazing, the least we could do is go a little further inward and ask ourselves what WE owe to the others we expect so much from.

¹if you can even believe it, she actually used one of her only available time slots to CALL THE CLIENT COMPANY AND COMPLAIN ABOUT ME that i was a problem for them. fortunately, the client company reviewed the emails and was like…uh…you…weren’t rude though? BECAUSE I WASN’T. AND IT IS ABSOLUTELY FUCKING UNHINGED BEHAVIOR TO ENDANGER SOMEONE’S LIVELIHOOD BECAUSE YOU’RE MAD THAT THEY DON’T HAVE ANY AVAILABILITY THAT MATCHES YOURS THIS WEEK SO YOU CAN HAVE AN INTERVIEW

²i personally find this editorial incredibly ill-advised, not even just because like…girl…how on earth are you going to take personally what someone else is doing with their own body, but also because she says toward the end that she understands that this might be an overreaction. that her ED recovery REQUIRES this overreaction. this might absolutely be true. AND ALSO if you are in a place where you can’t even stay friends with someone whose own private life choices aren’t in matrimony with your personal needs for recovery, EVEN WHEN SHE IS NOT FLAUNTING THEM, then you most CERTAINLY are not ready to put an editorial like this into the world and see ALL the very EARNED criticism you will receive. it was super irresponsible for both the writer to themselves, and the editorial board to the writer, IMO

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