This has happened to almost all of us: we’ll be having a great conversation with someone, and suddenly they’ll bring up a subject that draws nothing but contemptuous silence as a response.
The wrong topic can end a job interview or destroy a burgeoning relationship before it has a chance to grow. Furthermore, it can cause those around you to instantly lose respect for you and even distance themselves so they won’t be judged poorly by association. If you find yourself leaning towards discussing the topics below, stop, and ask yourself why you think they’re okay.
1. “X is fine, because it doesn’t affect me.”
A startling number of people seem to have little problem with injustice and abuse as long as it isn’t happening to them personally. This is known as “selective empathy”, and generally occurs when people are far removed from (or apathetic to) things that are happening Elsewhere, to Other People, whom they don’t know personally and will never interact with. They don’t worry about climate change because their own backyard isn’t on fire, and they aren’t bothered by wars between those whose skin colour isn’t the same as their own.
For some people, their apathy might stem from burnout due to the sheer number of horrific things happening around the world on a daily basis, causing them to withdraw mentally and emotionally to function on even a basic level. That said, for the vast majority of people, it really is a case of not caring much because they aren’t personally affected.
I actually ended a relationship over this kind of behavior: I was upset about a conflict going on in another country, and my ex mocked me for caring. “We don’t know those people. They’re a different religion, in a totally different part of the world, so who cares?”
People with souls and a conscience, generally.
2. That typing in AI prompts to create something makes you just as much of an artist/writer as someone who has dedicated years to honing their craft.
Most people will lose respect for you if you insist that using AI to create art or literature makes the prompter an artist or a writer. It does not. In fact, using AI to “create” and calling yourself an artist is like placing an order at a drive-through speaker and calling yourself a chef because you receive food after submitting that prompt.
AI generates images by stealing work from a variety of artists — without their consent — and then adapting it to the prompts being fed to it. There is no creativity involved here. Instead, it’s an amalgamation of other people’s work, without giving them any credit or compensation.
Real art and writing skills take years to hone and only improve with constant practice and dedication. Calling yourself a creator because you tell AI what to do for you is an insult to creatives everywhere.
3. That the Earth is flat.
This one shouldn’t even be an issue, yet it still comes up on a regular basis. Apparently, a startling number of people worldwide believe that the Earth is flat, despite an astonishing amount of evidence to the contrary. There’s even a “Flat Earth Society” group online that claims to have evidence that supports this claim.
While the idea that we live on a Discworld-like planet might be a fun thing to contemplate, it simply isn’t reality. If you truly believe that we do and can’t be convinced otherwise, fine — that’s your prerogative. Just be sure to keep that to yourself unless you want to be shunned by your peers and potentially forced into psychiatric treatment.
4. Details about someone else’s personal life.
Few things can make someone lose respect for you as quickly as hearing you gossip and share details that were told to you in confidence. You might think that it’s no big deal, and that the person who shared details about their health, marriage, or sex life would be totally okay with you sharing that info with your partner, colleagues, or favorite barista, but that generally isn’t the case.
Think of how you would feel if you shared something intensely private with a person, only to discover that they had broadcast that topic around all your social circles. That would feel pretty terrible, correct? Furthermore, how would people feel about the gossip monger, other than the awareness that they can never be trusted? That’s how they’d feel about you if you behaved this way, too.
5. That people who are suffering brought their misery on themselves.
Victim blaming is never a good look on anyone, and will cause most people to lose respect for you very quickly. You might imply that someone is poor because they didn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or that a person who survived an acid attack wouldn’t be in that predicament if they didn’t provoke someone, and so on.
This shows a startling lack of empathy, and also implies that you’re quite unaware of just how easily misfortune could happen to you or anyone else close to you. If you’ve been fortunate enough to evade abuse or destitution thus far, that’s great… but that’s likely been down to a whole lot of lucky circumstances, and your luck may change at any moment.
6. Insisting that dinosaurs aren’t real (or that they coexisted with humans).
Apparently, an astonishing 40% of Americans believe that dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time, while many others don’t believe that dinosaurs are real. They insist that there was no evidence of them prior to the late 1800s, and that the fossils were created to test people’s faith in the divine. This perspective is usually adhered to by Young Earth Creationists, but many others worldwide also share this belief.
Everyone is entitled to their beliefs, but if you happen to share this one with people whom you hope to keep in your life, be prepared for pushback and potential ostracization. There’s a huge difference between believing in a particular narrative because it’s part of your religious teachings and insisting angrily that scientific evidence like radiometric dating is wrong because texts written by people who didn’t know where the sun went at night indicate otherwise.
7. Listing the cost of everything you own.
It’s great if you’re successful and wealthy, but it’s a mark of low character (and really quite vulgar) to perpetually bring attention to how much everything you own costs. It gets especially trying if you’re doing this as a form of one-upmanship, implying that you’re “better” than the person you’re talking to because you’re wearing three thousand-dollar shoes.
Wealth can be made and lost in a heartbeat. If you suddenly lost everything you own in a house fire, or money ceased to have any value, who would you be? What would people say about you? How would you be of service to your loved ones and community? Place greater emphasis on being a good person than on thinking your worth is linked to material objects.
Final thoughts…
We can tell a lot about how others feel about us by observing their body language. If you bring up a topic that causes people to lean away from you and cross their arms over their bodies, or if something you find funny isn’t laughed at by anyone else, that’s a sign that the topic is inappropriate or offensive. In a case like this, your best bet is to apologize sincerely and then do some personal reflection as to why you thought it was okay to mention it. And then treat it as a perfect opportunity for growth and social awareness.
