I find it hard to answer ‘why do you want to work here?’-style questions in job applications, even if I really do want to work at the place. I think this is partly because I hear those questions as a request or demand to say something nice about the company; after all, one imagines that ‘idk, I need a new job and the salary is literally three times what I’m currently making’ wouldn’t go down well. And part of me resists this… even if I could say something nice without lying and I’m not only applying for mercenary reasons.
When I was a child, every birthday and Christmas, my mum would encourage me to write thank-you letters to people who’d given me presents. I hated doing this and inevitably dragged my feet on it, because it felt insincere and formulaic in a way that’s hard to put my finger on. It’s not that I didn’t like the presents—though that was presumably sometimes true—and anyway, it’s valid to thank someone for going to the trouble of giving you a present, even if you don’t really like it. Rather, I ‘knew’ (or believed) that the recipient would know that I’d only written the letter under duress, due to social obligation. After all, given that I grew up in an era when telephones existed, this was literally the only context in which I wrote letters to these people. Surely they would know that I hadn’t just spontaneously woken up and authentically felt moved to write them a letter? And surely they, like me, would therefore feel icked out by the interaction? Having to perform this insincere, for-form’s-sake interaction felt exceedingly unpleasant.
We might call this phenomenon Cordelia demand avoidance, after the character in Shakespeare’s King Lear. King Lear asks his three daughters to tell him how much they love him, and plans to divide up his kingdom between them on this basis. Sneaky Goneril and Regan flatter him outlandishly; his third daughter Cordelia really loves him but refuses to take part in this exercise in arse-kissing, saying ‘I cannot heave my heart into my mouth’.
Some other examples:
My partner is spontaneously very affectionate and complimentary, but he doesn’t like expressing affection on demand. Once, at some workshop, I was encouraged to ask a loved one for a compliment, so I naturally messaged my (then new-ish) partner. He refused to compliment me, on the basis that this wouldn’t be a trustworthy signal of what he really felt. Since I don’t have Cordelia demand avoidance in that particular context, I was upset: ‘what do you mean you can’t honestly say anything good about me?! Don’t you like me?!’
People often seem to dislike things like self-performance reviews or feedback-giving exercises at work. I think this is often because they don’t naturally have interesting things to say about how they and their colleagues are doing, and to the extent they do, their opinions aren’t always work-appropriate. So they’re forced to come up with something that doesn’t feel authentic.
I sometimes wonder whether I should try to blog on a schedule, but something that stops me is this kind of demand avoidance; I wouldn’t want to feel like I had to write something when I nothing felt alive to me. When I read things that I wrote this way, they seem very hollow and kind of bad to me anyway, although possibly readers can’t tell them difference.
Do you have this thing? Or, are there any other specific contexts where you tend to feel demand-avoidant?
Interesting! I don't mind doing it "on demand" because it gives me a chance to collect some thoughts and focus on what is it that I appreciate. But I respect those who feel it's not genuine and I love the Cordelia quote. I always enjoy hearing or reading about people whose reactions are not the same as mine.