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0 pointsnostrademons10y ago0 comments

No, it's not. The message is "This is my experience."

I think much of the HN community is accustomed to a style of discourse that deals in big ideas with immediate applications: "This is where tech is going." "How I hacked the YC interview process and got in." "Here's what's wrong with the Javascript dependency mess."

Much of the world doesn't think this way, though. For much of the world, their goal is to be heard, and to be understood, and to have their existence as an individual human being validated. When articles speaking from this angle come out, people react with "What's the point?" And the point is precisely that people react with "What's the point?", and they shouldn't.

The author said as much in her last sentence: "It’s the work I want to own." But there's no way to make that connection to readers who are accustomed to thinking of the big picture without trivializing the little picture.

Related video clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM-gZintWDc

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AnimalMuppet10y ago

Many of us write to communicate facts. When we read, we expect the writer to be doing that, too. We get frustrated if they take far too long to deliver on too little payload of facts.

But sometimes other people write to communicate feelings, not facts. Sometimes I see this in my marriage. My wife says something, and my reaction is, "So?" But she wanted me to share in the experience, not just to know something. If I listen just for facts, I miss what she's trying to tell me.

Now, for those of us who are fact-oriented, it gets annoying to have people talking to us the "wrong" way (i.e., not our style) all the time. But we need to be able to learn to handle the other style, at least at the level of a somewhat-fluent foreign language. (I say so, who does not do very well at this...)

skylan_q10y ago

The author said as much in her last sentence: "It’s the work I want to own." Upward mobility is largely a myth www.buzzfeed.com

To say it's just a story about her experience is subversive, to say the least.

NhanH10y ago

> When articles speaking from this angle come out, people react with "What's the point?" And the point is precisely that people react with "What's the point?", and they shouldn't.

Oliver Sacks's late writing is of the latter type you describe, and various eulogies type of writing occasionally popped up on HN as well. So I don't think it's just the type of the writing that isn't well received here.

nostrademonsOP10y ago

Some'll get it already. The HN community isn't one monolithic hivemind, it's a bunch of people who each have their own perspectives. But I'm trying to connect with the people who don't, who still think in terms of the big picture, and so my comment needs to be phrased in the same terms that it complains about. It's hard to make a perspective shift, because you are trying to see things that, by definition, you did not see before.

I remember wrestling with this when a friend of mine posted her personal experience, as a woman and as a psychologist and as someone who has been discriminated against, a year or so ago, and she said "You're a hero for making the effort. I mean that."

home_boi10y ago

Did anyone else expect at least a tiny blurb about the difficulties of finding other opportunities?

I feel like that is central to the topic.

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