this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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Neither of those are New Year’s resolutions.
“The day my niece was born” is actually exactly the type of thing I’m talking about. You didn’t wait until new years, or your birthday, or something else unrelated to your motivations. You picked “now” because that was when you felt the desire.
So yes, special days can matter, but the days that matter to YOU are way more important than a day some guy named “Gregorian” chose 2000 years ago.
Nice backtracking on “some other event,” that’s better than what 90% of the internet would do!
I still think it’s fine to use external dates for self improvement. I’m not very religious, but I love lent specifically because it’s a socially encouraged time to change a habit that lasts nearly the two months it takes to make a new habit or break an old one.
One year it was soda because I drank a few cans a week, since then I very rarely have any in the house. Last year I gave up meat, which is something I would never have pushed myself to do on my own.
It’s just a lot easier to test a change when it’s not permanent. There’s certainly an argument to be made that a full year of change at new years is too long to successfully commit to, but that doesn’t mean the whole thing should be discounted.
You’re assuming it was backtracking rather than a simple clarification.
That’s unnecessarily unpleasant, and it’s cool you want to feel like you won the argument, but if you add in the context of “new years eve” and then read it as “some other event external to the reason you want to make a change” it’s not backtracking.
In fact it’s just context you missed because of your own life experiences and emotions.
Which is cool, but you look like an ass when you try and secure a win by pointing out your own misunderstanding rather than hearing my clarification.
It's an argument on the internet, there are never really winners. It seemed like backtracking because saying that a dissenting response is "actually the type of thing I'm talking about" carries an implication that the person responding misunderstood you, rather than acknowledging the possibility that you did not clearly/fully communicate your thoughts. As far as I and I assume the person you responded to could tell, that wasn't "actually the type of thing" you were talking about. Backtracking may have been the wrong term, but there was a level of condescension in your comment that was so close to being sincere that it rubbed me the wrong way. Combine that with me half-disagreeing with you and that made for a response with some snark at the front. I am a little sorry for that. Also, why would you write "because of your own life experiences and emotions?" Unless the discussion is focused on something related to how people become the way they are, that statement has about as much meaning as "this is an aspen. You can tell it's an aspen because of the way it is." All it says is that you assume there is something wrong with the person rather than actually say anything about what that person has said or done. At worst it's empty words and at best it's an empty ad hominem.
You're quite right that there are no winners to internet arguments, but this didn't need to be an argument.
I think things often escalate in online discussions because tone and intent don't come across well. Sometimes we start writing a comment and find ourselves struggling to put words to our point, possibly due to other tasks demanding our attention. Often we don't realise a clarification is needed until after people have already read our message.
Given those factors, if we want to avoid turning discussions into arguments, we need to assume good faith from the people we're talking to. That can seem like an absurd prospect given how many people online are arguing in bad faith, but if you can't reasonably assume a particular person in a conversation is arguing in good faith, are they really worth your time?
For example, I didn't read the person you're replying to as being particularly snarky, and I'm surprised that you read them as such. You've written a decent amount here that seems determined to be having an argument, but I'm not sure what the actual argument at hand is. It seems like you might be feeling the need to defend yourself based on the miscommunication that happened up-thread? Which I can understand, but I don't understand why you feel the need to break things down to the nitty gritty wordy bits. If I were being uncharitable, I would probably consider you to be trying to stir shit up and start arguments where there are none. However, if I am assuming good faith of you (which feels reasonable, to an extent, because you clearly spent time writing this comment, and I also appreciate that you partly apologised), then I still read you as being defensive, but in a way that I'm far more sympathetic to, because I do it sometimes myself.
I think you captured the grim nihilism of most internet arguments well when you said that no-one really wins in an internet argument. Certainly though, there are losers, and sometimes when I find myself arguing for longer than I should be, it's because I feel like I'm trying to "save face" in a way, and avoid being the loser. Sometimes it's when I have fucked up and communicated my original point unclearly, and sometimes it's because I feel like people are unjustly accusing me of something (by implication, usually). However, that mode of discussion sucks for everyone involved, and ultimately, wanting to avoid that shit is a large part of why I'm here on Lemmy, where I find I have more discussions than arguments.
I fear that my comment here will seem overly accusatory or judgemental, but I hope that you'll recognise that I have no stakes in this discussion and wouldn't have spent this time writing this if I was just trying to throw shit. Your parsing of condescension in the above comments is not invalid any more than my reading of those same comments as being patient and reasonable is. Words can be slippery, even for the most skillful of writers. But I think you'll find that assuming good faith of the people you're communicating with can lead to far more productive discussions because people become more inclined to show you more slack in turn, which is nice.
Tell me more about my “faults” and “condescension” and “ad hominem”, then reread your comments. Yep, there’s some condescension from me here, but you’re also once again trying to throw judgement. “Glass houses” and all.
You win, Have a nice day.
Not the commenter you were arguing with, but I really liked that last sentence. I’m going to hang on to that feeling.