Is “What do you do?” a poor question to ask a new acquaintance?
My favorite etiquette guru says yes--a good conversationalist can do better. Here are a few reasons:
Thread--
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1 - Almost everyone asks. It’s not at all creative, subtle, or savvy. Asking it suggests we doesn’t have the ability to leave the most well-trodden path of small talk.
The man who refrains from the most obvious question becomes more intriguing in the eyes of others.
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2 - The question is reductive. It buys into dumb elite notions of professional hierarchy--that a person is what they do, and that everyone who is someone has an interesting sounding job.
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This is patently false in 2021. The most interesting man I've met in the last year is not an engineer, doctor, or writer--but a plumber.
Asking him the obvious question too early in our acquaintance is a way of reducing him.
(On a related note, asking this question too sharply might suggest that we are networkers, climbers, status-seekers, gold-diggers—rather than people who can simply enjoy the company of others.)
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3 - Maybe most importantly, the question disadvantages homemakers. When you ask a stay-at-home-mother what she “does,” she often responds with a little embarrassment that she doesn’t work but only raises her children.
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This is because, again, the question imports all sort of backwards assumptions that devalue those not contributing to GDP in the most prestigious ways.
Like homemakers, who are actually doing more much important work than banking executives.
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Such ladies should be honored, not made to feel like they ought to apologize.
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It could also be said that mercenary corporate culture and backwards economic policy have left a lot of people out of work or forced them into less glamorous jobs, through no fault of theirs. Asking "what do you do?" tends to cut these people down.
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What should we ask instead? My guru suggests something along the lines of a person's projects, hobbies, interests, loves.
“How do you spend your time?”
“What do you like to do?”
Etc.
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These questions are also easier to follow up. I've got no response when George tells me he's an accountant other than, "Oh, okay."
But if George tells me he likes to lift weights or garden or go skiing with his children, I can run with that.
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And if they really like their job and want to talk about it, this will give them ample opportunity...
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That gap in the Pyrenees is called Roland’s Breach—legend has it that Charlemagne’s most famous knight cut the rock away in the final moments of his life. 🧵
Roland was the medieval Achilles and the last survivor of Charlemagne’s rearguard at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass, where they were treacherously ambushed. As the end neared, he dreaded the seeming inevitability that his sword Durendal would fall into Saracen hands.
He could not allow such a thing to happen.
This was no ordinary sword—made in Heaven and given by an angel to Charlemagne, who then gave it to his nephew and champion. So Roland tried to break the sword by striking against the Pyrenees.
You know St George killed a dragon, but do you know what the dragon was about?
It wasn’t just a random mythological creature, much less one of those nice dragons who will carry riders on his back. It was a venom-spewing devourer of children.🧵
Long before George arrived, the men of Silene decided to do something about the fearsome beast in their country, so they assembled and marched off. But when they were face to face with the monster their hearts gave out, the Golden Legend reports. They fled.
And the cost of their cowardice would be steep. The narrative continues: "And when he came nigh the city he envenomed the people with his breath, and therefore the people of the city gave to him every day two sheep for to feed him, because he should do no harm to the people.”
One of the unsung heroes of the third Crusade was a priest who dove from the battlements of the Jaffa into the sea and swam to Richard the Lionheart’s galley with a cry for help.🧵
Richard had been in Acre making preparations to return to England to deal with the urgent business there (traitors trying to take his kingdom). The Crusade was over, he thought, a brilliant but doomed campaign which he planned to return to after taking back his own kingdom.
Then he heard about Saladin’s surprise attack against Jaffa.
He sailed back to Jaffa and arrived thinking that it was too late; Saracen banners had been raised and the city appeared to have been taken.
A pattern you recognize when reading history is that we can count on being outnumbered. The enemy is so often legion.
One of the greatest mechanisms for maximizing this numerical superiority was the janissary program of the Ottoman Turks. 🧵
This thread will get dark, but a note of hope emerges at the end (as always).
Turkish for “new soldier,” janissaries were elite infantrymen unleashed against the enemies of the Ottomans, like the Christian people of the Balkans.
What made the corps truly devastating was the origin of these soldiers: they were taken from Christian families as boys, indoctrinated in Ottoman ways, and then turned loose against their own people!
Just how dark were the Dark Ages?
Were they hopelessly backwards and barbaric—as we've been led to believe—or were they a time of surprising innovation?🧵
To clarify, I’m talking about the actual Dark Ages, from about the Fall of the Western Roman Empire to the 11th century, or so. I am not talking about the Middle Ages, which are sometimes called "dark" but which obviously weren’t dark.
Intellectuals like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Gibbon are on the record as saying that the Dark Ages are defined by barbarism and backwardness, and their claims have gladly seized upon by public school teachers and pop culture-makers.
On September 12, 1683, one of the greatest cavalry charges in history took place at Kahlenberg Hill, overlooking Vienna, where Jan III Sobieski and his winged hussars saved Christendom from disaster. 🧵
Just a few days back, the Viennese fired distress rockets into the night sky to let any friends who might be out there know that they needed help—now or never. The city had been under siege for almost two months by the Ottoman Turks.
The Turks had already blasted multiple breaches in the walls and the Austrians only barely repulsed them. They couldn't hold out much longer.