Name: 愛想が良すぎる人の問題点 (The Problem with Over-Friendly People)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T06:43:39.000Z
Duration: 6 min 24 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

様態の副詞

There's a particularly poignant way one can be a social disaster:

A pattern of behaviour driven by the very best of motives

which ends up feeling as irritating as outright rudeness.

laughing at the jokes of the senior management;

wishing Sir or Madam a highly enjoyable stay

lavishly endorsing their would-be partner’s every opinion about recent books and films.

The over-friendly are guilty of three large errors:

Firstly, they believe they must agree on everything.

If the other says the world is going to the dogs,

If a second later, there's a prediction of a utopian technological future,

When we say something clever, they're thrilled.

Their ritual approval may seem attentive.

In truth, it's a version of not listening at all.

but they're not the ones that we happen to value.

our credit card is from their favourite bank,

we apparently have a nice way of holding our fork…

if it isn’t connected up with our own sense of meaning and achievement.

but to be praised inaccurately is its own kind of insult.

Thirdly, their friendliness is remorselessly upbeat.

They point out how well we look, how impressive our job sounds,

but they dangerously raise the cost of revealing any of the lonelier, darker,

more melancholic aspects of our characters.

Firstly, that disagreement isn’t necessarily or always terrible,

that it may be exhilarating to be contradicted

when we don't feel that our dignity is at stake

and that we're learning something valuable at the hands of a combative interlocutor.

Secondly, that people only want to be complimented on things that they are actively proud of.

The value of the currency of praise depends entirely on it not being spent too freely

and so the truly pleasing person knows they must pass over many things in discreet silence,

so that when they eventually do bestow a blessing,

Thirdly, that we are cheered up not so much by people who say cheery things,

as by people who appear to understand us,

which usually means, sympathise with our sorrows

to the anxious, hesitant or confused parts of our psyches.

What enables the pleasing person to please is their capacity to hold on in social encounters,

even with rather intimidating and alien-seeming people,

to an intimate knowledge of what satisfies them.

They instinctively use their own experience as a base for thinking about the needs of others.

allows themselves to forget their own likes and dislikes,

under the pressure of an excessive humility

which suggests to them that anyone impressive

could not not possibly share in the principles that drive their own psychology.

At the core of the pleasing person’s charm is a metaphysical insight:

that other people cannot, deep down, ever be very ‘other’

and therefore that, in core ways, what one knows about oneself

will be the master-key to understanding and getting along with strangers;

not in every case, but enough of the time to make the difference.

Over-friendliness isn’t just a feature of one-to-one encounters;

it’s an entrenched flaw within modern consumer society more generally.

This explains why the airline exuberantly wishes us a perfect day upon landing in a new city,

or why the waiter hopes we’ll have a truly wonderful time around the first course

pulls such a large smile along with their suggestion that we try on a new pair of trousers.

Here too, the cause of an asphyxiating friendliness is a sudden modesty and loss of confidence

around using oneself as a guide to the temperament and needs of a stranger.

Companies become over-impressed by the apparent ‘otherness’ of their clients

and thereby overlook how many aspects of their own selves

are being trampled upon in a service context.

They sidestep the knowledge that just after landing back home after a trip abroad,

we may feel horrified at the thought of our responsibilities in the family;

or that moods of introversion and sadness can accompany us even inside a clothes boutiques.

They behave as if they were cheerful Martians encountering broken,

The fault of the excessively over-friendly person can, in the end, be traced back to a touching modesty.

They are guilty of nothing more than a loss of confidence

in the validity of their own experiences as a guide to the pleasure of others.

The failure of the over-friendly types teaches us that in order to succeed at pleasing anyone,

that we might well displease them through a candid expression of our being.

Successful charm relies on an initial secure sense that we could survive social failure.

is perhaps the best way to seduce them properly and confidently.

We must reconcile ourselves to the risk of not making friends

to stand any chance of actually making any.