When I was young, I would get in trouble and try to get around the rules. But at some point I realized that most of the time you aren't getting in trouble because you are breaking the rules. You are getting in trouble because you are making the rule makers unhappy. Once I had that realization I was able to focus on relationships with the rule makers and figure out what they actually cared about. This allowed me to break the rules just as much but without getting in trouble.
From a comment on Hacker news, referenced in Ran Prieur’s 058.
This was very much my experience in school. I didn't have good relationships with the supervisors in my school, even though I had good grades and didn't do anything to really get in trouble. But I don't know, they just didn't like me, which is fair because their job doesn’t consist in liking me in the first place. On the other hand, other more troublesome kids were closer to the supervisors, and I guess they had to in order to survive in the school environment.
It's one of those games where you can see what it is all about, but the whole dynamic is so disgusting in the first place that you can't be bothered to do what is required to “win”.
The particular strategy above is a form of fawning, which might be one of the most widespread social strategies from what I can tell. In other contexts, it's called ass-kissing, people pleasing, bending backwards, or as I like to call it, making daddy/mommy happy. School isn't about learning, it's about making daddy/mommy happy. Work isn't about productivity, it's about making daddy/mommy (the manager, the boss) happy. On and on.
That's one way to play the social game. The downside is that you can't honestly look at yourself in the mirror afterwards and have self-respect, so there's that. As Louis Rossmann often says, Do what is easy to live with, not what's easy. It's easy in the moment to contort yourself into the highest-probability Authority-pleasing shape 9 but it's not easy to live with.
4 As intentional as large collectives can act in the world, which is to say not evenly distributed in their hierarchy, because the decisions probably only come from the top and not from the workers who actually have to implement them and actually perceive the impact on performance and the state of a bloated system.
Go back to the list of blog posts
2024-08-25