A Profession Is Not the Whole Biography
Society meets a person with the question “what do you do” and quickly takes the answer for a description of the personality. A profession really does change how you see…
Who Should Make the First Move?
Water doesn’t flow under a stone that lies still. — Russian proverb In a durable cultural script one person proposes and the other chooses. The first risks a refusal, the…
Advice by Invitation
Society respects a person who has the right advice for everyone. The recipient usually hears a different message inside the unrequested wisdom: “I understand your life better than you do.”…
A group breaks up into people
Collective hostility looks like a solid wall. In one-to-one contact the wall sometimes breaks up into individual people, each of them less certain than the group as a whole. A…
Help Without a Lifetime Subscription
A culture of closeness easily turns help into an open-ended obligation: if you managed it once, you owe it from now on. But not every expectation becomes a duty just…
A grade with an expiry date
School culture easily turns a mark for one assignment into a description of a person: top student, C-grade kid, capable, lazy. In fact a mark measures the performance of a…