The Curse of Knowledge

I sometimes encountered a pattern at work: when I raised a problem with one of my colleagues, rather than focusing on the solution, he focused on repairing his own image. For example, when I pointed out that there may have been a better way to structure code, the response I got was often something like “Are you questioning this because you question my abilities?” Every disagreement became a referendum on his self-image by proxy of talking about code. Disagreements are fine at work, but not this constant litigation of whether he was a good or a bad programmer. I actually left that team because this was such a persistently annoying issue that it made the environment unnecessarily stressful1. I realized that soothing the colleague in question was so mentally draining for me, it often felt like a hostage negotiation.

No, of course I don’t question your abilities; you are doing great regardless of my feedback, it’s just that I think we could try X to do Y better.

I had to preface every interaction with him by reassuring him and I don’t think that’s a good way to work - walking on eggshells around someone’s need to feel utterly unthreatened isn’t conducive to it.

The worst part was that the soothing didn’t even work. Regardless of how much I prefaced my actual point, he still found a way to feel hurt, as though his abilities were being questioned, so I made myself smaller for nothing. A healthier way to do coding work in a team, in my view, involves an understanding of criticism as a vehicle for getting stuff done. “This code could be structured better” does not mean “you are stupid”; it means “this code could be structured better.”

I started noticing this pattern in my conversations with family members or friends as well - some mild criticism or setting a boundary resulted in conflict because people interpreted the criticism or boundary as an indictment of their character: “Because of this, you’ll now see me as a worse person.” I won’t! I’m just trying to accomplish something!

I didn’t notice this pattern of behaviour before reading TLP, so interpersonal conflict felt like a natural extension of life - of course people get hurt; I get hurt too. After reading TLP, though, it’s become painful to notice that there are a lot of people who will take things personally regardless of how hard one tries not to hurt them. I can work on excising this from myself, but I cannot excise it from other people - one can point it out, or try to soothe them, but one can’t truly fix them. Sometimes there is no correct wording, because the wording was never really the problem. Accepting that the only person who can help someone become less fragile is the person themselves is hard but necessary.

Now I notice when people are hurt by me even though I did not mean to hurt them, and I start questioning myself: am I a bad person for having caused that pain? The hard part is tolerating being experienced by the other as cruel, ungrateful, disrespectful, or cold without rushing to repair my image in their eyes. The darkly funny part is that I can suffer a narcissistic injury in response to theirs. They feel attacked by my criticism; I feel attacked by their perception of me as cruel. At least now I can sometimes notice the impulse to repair my image before I obey it. Increasingly, though, what I feel is not injury but sadness: sadness that ordinary disagreement so easily becomes a referendum on love, respect, or worth.

Footnotes

  1. There were other reasons to leave, but the unpleasantness of this particular teammate certainly contributed to my decision to leave. ↩