Basically nothing about the response on social media to my prior post has shocked me.

The very first response was "this is a strawman". Duh. It should go without saying that everyone's perception of others can't be 100% accurate. I definitely get why some people put "Don't eat paint" warnings on their content, because apparently that's the default level of discourse online.

Much of the rest of the criticism is to confuse "don't be so nice" with "be a jerk". There are plenty of ways to politely insist on getting your needs met in life. Much of the frustrations Sawyer is experiencing with his interactions are to some degree self-inflicted. This is because he responds to far too much, unwittingly training irritating people to irritate him more.

This is the most common failure mode of "look how hard I tried". The harder you "try" to respond to everything, the worse it gets. Trust me, I learned this the hard way. If you instead ignore the irritating, they eventually "get the message" and slink off. It's a simple question: Would you rather be happy, or right? I need to be happy. I don't need other people to know I'm right.

I'm also not shocked that wading into drama / "red-meat" territory got me more engagement on a post than anything else I've got up here to date. This is just how things work online -- controversy of some kind is necessary. Yet another reason to stop being nice; goring someone's ox is just the kind of sacrifice needed to satiate the search engine gods, apparently.

This is not to say I don't find it distasteful, indeed there is a reason I do not just chase this stuff with reckless abandon. What I want is to have a positive impact on the community at large, and I think I may just have done it (see the image with this post).

Even though I gored a few oxen-feels posting this, it's clearly made a positive impact on at least one person's life. That alone makes it worth it. I still take the scout's vow to do a good turn daily seriously. Keep stacking those bricks, friends.