Beware of the ‘never explain yourself’ philosophy.
It’s a nice little idea, and I agree with it at points, but as someone who has taken the ‘never explain yourself’ philosophy to an extreme, I can tell you it gets pretty messy.
You’d think being a ‘never explain yourself’ person would make you come off nonchalant, authoritative, mysterious. But in my experience, it actually just amounts to you being severely misunderstood by a lot of people.
In the absence of information, people often fill in the blank with negative information. If you don’t share a bit -- keyword, a bit -- of your life with people, they will assume you’ve got nothing going on. And I guess you can’t really blame them, the brain filters for negativity by default.
By withholding explanations you don’t end up some cool misunderstood sigma with his back to the wall -- instead you become more like a blank avatar upon which people project their worst thoughts.
Too many head-contacts with that reality made me realize something.
Explaining yourself is fine. Most of the problems start to arise when you try to justify yourself.
Like let’s say you recently decided to break up with someone, and now you’re telling your friend about it. It’s one thing if you state it rather matter of factly, like ‘ya I just realized I could do better.’ It’s a whole nother thing if you go on this breathless rant about how you felt unappreciated and how many red flags the other person had, and how much better you think you could do because of point x, y, z.
It’s almost like the breathless rant makes the listener think that you’re trying to convince yourself. You’re saying something you want to believe, but don’t yet fully believe, and because of that you need to add all this emotion on top to make sure your point hits home.
It doesn’t work though. It actually seems like the emotion, the passion behind the argument, is what makes the other person skeptical of you. It implies that you don’t believe your logic alone is enough to stand on, and that’s not a good taste to leave in someone’s mouth.
You know, there’s this Nietzsche quote where he says something like, ‘we often contradict an opinion for no other reason than that we do not like the tone in which it is expressed.’
That’s basically the problem with justifying. Justifying is explaining plus emotion. Even if the argument you’re making, or the information you’re explaining, is rational, because you’ve caked on all this emotion on top, your point gets buried, and the listener is left remembering mostly how hard you were trying to convince them.
— Jack
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