Good news for sailors and also me specifically. Support your fellow earthworkers. Heal the planet. Say fuck with me.
* Baruch, Y. & Jenkins, S. (2006). Swearing at work and permissive leadership culture: When anti-social becomes social and incivility is acceptable. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 28, 492–507.
I feel like in the rush of “throw out etiquette who cares what fork you use or who gets introduced first” we actually lost a lot of social scripts that the younger generations are floundering without.
A lot of tough situations where we now feel like we “don’t know what to do or say” had social scripts just a couple of generations ago and they might have been canned phrases or robotic actions but they could still be meant sincerely and unfortunately we haven’t replaced them with any more sincere or easier new script.
a lot of people are giving examples in the notes of things they just find annoying like not using headphones in public, but OP is talking about actual literal scripts of things to say in awkward situations
if you have a date or two with someone and you don’t see a relationship developing? most millennials / gen Zers just end up ghosting. but a social script that might have been taught and rehearsed in the past could be:
“I really appreciated getting dinner with you the other night and I enjoyed your company, but I’m afraid I didn’t feel a spark. I wish you the best, and hope you find that special someone!”
like it sounds kind of trite but it was at least something to say and it can still be meant with kind sincerity. it also communicates in 2 sentences that you don’t want to see them romantically again, but there aren’t any hard feelings about that. that’s it!!! that’s all it takes!!!
Another example is that at parties a lot of people talk about how awkward it is to mingle or talk to people they dont know. But at old timey parties that was traditionally the HOST’S job, and there was a specific scripted way of doing it that eased the process! The host would bring you in, introduce you and maybe even a little bit about you like what you did for a living, and then guide you to a group you could talk to. They didn’t just let you in the door and then ditch you to fend for yourself in a sea of strangers. That would be unthinkable and no one would be surprised if a get-together like that wound up being awkward.
A really good host would actually provide a topic of conversation based on things you and the person they were introducing you to had in common.
At networking events I’ve gone to, where there’s no host who knows everybody, good networkers pick up the slack. They go around the room once making just enough small talk to learn some useful info about a good portion of of the people in the room, and then circle back around and go, “Oh hey I was just talking to X over there and he’s looking for someone who does Y for his next project; you should go talk to him.” You can do something similar at parties, referring people to other people you made smalltalk with you have the same hobbies or like the same kind of movies.
To take a few steps back up the thread to the part about turning down future dates, the same goes for turning down shitty job offers.
“[Thank you for your interest]/[Thank you for thinking of me for this role], however I’m afraid [I have prior commitments]/[I’m not a good fit] at this time. I wish you the best of luck [finding the right fit for your company]/[with your startup endeavor]”
Delete or substitute more relevant lines as appropriate, but it’s a polite way of saying “no” without feeling like you need to overexplain.
Increasingly, people – millennials and younger, rarely anyone older – will not get the hint about this and get pushy, fishing for extra information to let them work around the Polite No, which in previous generations would have been incredibly rude. It’s still incredibly rude, at which point the polite response is, “Thank you, but I gave you my final answer. Best of luck!” no matter how many times they come back. Become a broken record until they go away.
