collapsethewavefunction:

nostalgebraist:

collapsethewavefunction:

funereal-disease:

szhmidty:

funereal-disease:

weareallfromearth:

Raise your hand if the narrative about Cutting Out Negative People has made you more fearful of dealing healthily with grief and fear and things you really need to talk to people about because you are afraid of your friends perceiving you as That One Negative Person Who Is Therefore Toxic.

The whole “cutting people out” narrative in general seems really childish to me. Like, sure, minimize the time you’re spending with someone, even structure your life to avoid them if you want, but people tend to frame it as, like, just deleting someone from your life one day and never explaining why. Which is a tactic for actual abuse victims that has been warped into “something you do to anyone who pisses you off”.

“Raise your hand if the [reactions to] Cutting Out Negative People has made you more fearful of dealing healthily with [people who treat you badly; who make you feel awful and worthless] because you are afraid of your friends perceiving you as [That Childish Person Who Is Overreacting to Being Pissed Off].”

I think that’s an uncharitable reading. Nobody is saying that you should have to put up with people who are persistently treating you badly. But the “cut people out” narrative has so little room for forgiveness or for the fact that conflict is a feature of all relationships. It is okay to be pissed off at someone you love without either of you being “toxic”. The whole black/white “you crossed me therefore you’re dead to me” thing? Yes, I think that is childish.

I feel like I’ve seen people interpret this to the extreme in both directions. I know multiple people who continue to put up with toxic people in their lives who are constantly terrible to them and make them miserable, because the concept of cutting back on interactions with someone who has been important to them in the past is completely foreign. I also know people who hold grudges for eternity and blow every little thing out of proportion.

Personally I know more people on the first side of this than the second, so tend to be more sympathetic to the Cutting People Out narrative, taken in the charitable reading of spending less time with people who make you unhappy. I know it’s been very useful to me, in helping me realize that just because I’m capable of improving someone’s life and making them happier by spending time with them, that doesn’t mean I’m actually obligated to do it if it’s making me miserable and exhausted. But I can see how both messages could be very useful for certain people to hear at certain times.

I’ve definitely encountered both sides of this, but I don’t really like the “cut toxic people out of your life” framing even in the former case, I guess because it seems like it should be unnecessary as an injunction?

If you say “hey, you don’t need to hang onto people just because they’ve been important to you in the past,” this can be useful advice, but it ultimately leaves things up to the advisee’s judgment.  There’s no notion there of “toxic” as a well-defined category, and no notion that one has a duty to remove certain people from one’s circles.

It should be like “you know, once I think about it clearly, I really don’t want to spend any more time with them,” not “huh, I honestly think the benefits of this person outweigh the costs, but what if they’re ‘toxic’ and therefore someone I’m ‘supposed to’ be cutting out?”  It should be smooth and natural, not a matter of adopting some “rule” to follow.

I.e. normalize the act of cutting people out, but don’t make it obligatory for some category of “sufficiently bad” people.  “Sufficiently bad” people will tend to get cut out anyway once cutting people out is a thing on the table.

^^^ This.

I don’t like the idea of categorizing a person as anything in particular, much less something as pervasive and negative as “toxic.” People aren’t things, people do things. When I used the word toxic above, I meant “someone who continues to do negative things, or acts in a way that has a negative effect on you (even if unintentional).” But someone who’s difficult for one person to be around may be a perfect match for someone else, and slapping them with the universal label “toxic” completely elides this possibility.

I do think these kinds of labels are useful when they actually (approximately) correspond to natural kinds.  Sometimes learning that someone is X really matters, if X is a real well-defined thing.

A relevant example might be “abusive” – admittedly a word with a lot of meanings, but it is often the case that recognizing someone as “abusive” changes your whole view of them, in that you may (say) recognize that they fit a well-defined type that is described in books about abuse.  And these books do exist; the patterns of behavior they catalogue are real, recurring patterns in human behavior.  They’re A Thing.

Where as far as I can tell “toxic person” just means “sufficiently bad person,” and you don’t need an extra word for that.  There are plenty of advice columns and the like about avoiding “toxic people,” but to me they just seem like descriptions of disparate types of bad behavior.  The idea “this relationship is abusive” can teach you something new about the relationship; “this relationship is toxic” is just a way of rephrasing the already-known fact that there are problems with it.  (A lot of the advice about “toxic relationships” just seems to be using “toxic” as a synonym for “abusive,” in which case it’s fine as advice, but doesn’t make the word “toxic” any more valuable, since we already had a clearer word for those cases.)

It’s like – if you’re a patriot of your country, “avoid spies” is a sensible maxim because a “spy” is a well-defined thing, while “avoid the insufficiently patriotic” is just a way of rephrasing what you’re already doing anyway.

(via collapsethewavefunction)