God I hate Midwest Nice so much. At its worst, it emotionally stunts people for their entire lives. They're taught early on that expressing anything more severe than mild disappointment is taboo, so they never develop the language or tools to process and communicate real emotion.
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Replying to @BaseCase
Experiencing large doses of East Coast Aggro and German Brutal Honesty make me feel like all communication cultures are plastering over some failure to communicate. In the end I prefer the occasional faux-niceness to either of those
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Replying to @benedictfritz
Yeah, every culture winds up with its own pathologies, for sure. When I think of Midwest Nice, I'm thinking about the extreme manifestations of it. It's fine to put on a happy face in order to get through the line at Subway; it's bad to be unable to tell your child you love them.
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Replying to @BaseCase
Interesting! I haven’t really experienced that connection between the two. The dark side to me seems like an inability to live life the way you want because you are bound by a sense of duty to others. But I also think that sense of duty has a certain value to it
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Replying to @benedictfritz
I think it's the nature of terms like this to be kind of fuzzy and mean something different to each person who hears/uses them. I'm probably being a little loose with definitions, too. Would love to get more nuanced/less sound-bitey about it off of Twitter sometime :)
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