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“Tough Love“

I’ve been seeing lately several examples of “Tough Love”. The concept is that you want to make someone improve, but instead of encouraging them and offering constructive feedback on how they can improve, you berate and abuse them (not only verbally sometimes) about how bad they are.

The logic behind this (if one can call it that) is that the person in question will be motivated to improve on their own, and will “toughen up” in the process, making them more resilient to such behaviour in the future. Now, if you have a brain you can probably see some issues here.

First let’s say we blatantly ignore the fact that not every person functions the same, and is not motivated in the same way. Even then, what you get is a person that has indeed improved in whatever it is they were doing, but at what cost? They will end up cynical and unhealthily suppressing their emotions, which in itself will cause a whole other range of problems I’m not even going to mention here.

But more importantly, this “Tough Love” almost never actually comes from a place of love. It comes from a self-perpetuating “if I had to go through this, you have to as well”. It comes from a power play kink and in general is a very selfish attitude to providing feedback. Because actually providing useful feedback that will make a difference is difficult, and you have to make an effort for it, whereas just dismissing someone as useless or stupid is easy and quick. You don’t have to think about it, and you can vent your frustration in the process, a win-win! Both wins are for you of course.

I have seen several examples of this in practice. First, in education. Underperforming students (how “performance” is actually measured in education is a whole other can of worms) are treated not just like undeserving of education, but actively offensive to the concept. Of course if you treat them like that you are going to end up with them obstructing lessons, and causing problems.

You can see how this concept has been driven into our collective conciousness by taking an example from pop culture: Whiplash. Now there were good things about this movie to be sure, and I can’t really be sure if the authors condone the teacher’s attitude or not. But it does glorify tough love as a concept, by presenting us with a “successful” example. When confronted with his approach, the teacher attributes it to “his duty to society” to produce the next great musician. This is actually a common theme with proponents of this approach (and other problemantic behaviours), advocating that “society” is who is benefitting in the end. But in fact it is their own purely selfish motives to be seen as great, as important, and crucially, as powerful.

Another example where I saw this first-hand is the army. Here there is also another excuse for it, as actually being in an active warzone is an extremely stressfull and taxing situation to be in, and you have to be mentally and physically resilient enough to withstand it if you’re ever deployed. In that sense, there is somewhat of an argument to be made about this approach, but it has to be done by people who understand why and how, to people who also understand why. It is a difficult job, and should not be handed to anyone who just likes being in charge. Extensive proper psycological evaluation should be obligatory for everyone involved.

A last example where this kind of attitude is glorified is for anyone working in a kitchen. There I do not have personal experience, and I do not claim to know how to properly run a kitchen. But I know that abuse is never mandatory, and choosing it over clear and direct communication is simply lazy.

In general, if you ever find yourself in a position where you have to guide or instruct people, especially if you are working in education, don’t be lazy. We are all people in the end.

#tough love #rant

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Hello World

So apparently Tumblr still exists. It really feels like a lifetime ago I last logged in this website. I guess in some ways it is.

So why come back now? Well I’m not really sure to be honest. I think it mostly has to do with the realisation that I haven’t created anything non-work related for a long time. That in itself is not a recent realisation, but it did occur to me recently how much I missed creating.

All those years ago that I was regularly using this platform I was involved in several creative projects (not on Tumblr but it doesn’t matter). Music, writing, photography, I was really exploring stuff. After a while it all slowly went away. Probably starting a regular job and having more responsiblities contributed to that, but that’s just an excuse.

At some point I did try to start another blog, tech-related, work related, but I also dropped this soon. I should try to pick it up again. I think I will try to write a bit here this year. Let’s see if I can keep it up.

What should I write about? Probably rants about things, maybe I’ll even try my hand at some short stories. I will be writing in English now just in case anyone’s interested in what I’m saying. It will be a sort of dumping ground just to get me to make something.

After all, it’s not really anonymous as someone half motivated could find out my name, and I even have some people here who know me, even if I don’t know if they’re still using the platform. I hope this will make me at least try to create a bit instead of just consuming.

#intro #blogging

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Games -can be- are art

#transistor

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Isn’t it funny how the worst thing that happened to the world was people

#shower thoughts

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Taipei, Taiwan

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How the fuck am I supposed to sleep with all this free knowledge available on the internet

Nullsleep (via ioblk)

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#talos principle

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I was sent this GIF version of my last project by Eli Bary ([email protected])

I’m flattered and impressed.

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Meta batch code: The “virus” in Vice (2015), when executed, apparantly displays but not executes this DOS batch file code which mainly consists of display commands. The staff member at the terminal reacts appropriately: “Jesus Christ, this can’t be right.”

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Jie Ma  -  http://jiema.cgsociety.org  -  https://www.facebook.com/reaperexjie  -  https://www.behance.net/jiema37

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Fallout 4. Official Concept Art from Bethesda.