We get a lot of “Why don’t they just…” in government. I feel it’s one of my main duties of being a council member - to explain why “they” don’t “just” to all of the residents. It’s ok, I don’t mind it. I feel like once people know what the actual situation is, they calm down and accept the answer.
I noticed pretty quickly in 2015 that my dad was asking a lot of “Why don’t they just…” questions of the federal government, which I think is a staple of local AM talk radio. I do believe this is how America has gotten into its current situation, as people voted for the guy who would “just” and he’s actually doing it.
In my experience, no, it’s not people seeking clarity on the problem by asking the question, it’s people proposing an unsuitable solution, usually because they apparently failed to comprehend some important detail I already clearly and explicitly mentioned.
If I’m not seeking an answer to the problem, the people I choose to interact with are typically good at reading that fact. I don’t generally get a lot of unsolicited advice except, say, from my parents who just kind of seem to come with the instinct to offer advice everywhere. In other cases “why don’t you just” is a valid response to me and sometimes does address an obvious solution I didn’t know about or had completely missed. So in my case? I dunno. 50-50. Though I don’t usually hear that phrasing. It’s more like “Well, have you tried …” or “What if you …” Overall, though, personally I don’t have a problem with the phrasing “Why don’t you just” as it generally leads to trying to brainstorm the problem, in my experience with the people in my life.
It’s reminiscent of this xkcd cartoon - a certain amount of self-knowledge from the artist, one suspects:
Some people aren’t ready to consider that their knee-jerk reaction may not be the in-depth solution being sought.
I think it’s also a function of your audience size - I’ve seen other people on social media iwth large-ish follower counts specifically asking people not to respond to every post with advice. E.g. “I just said I couldn’t’ be arsed cooking, I don’t need a barrage of your go-to recipes or to be reminded that take-away exists, thanks very much”.
The online “Reply Guy” has many guises, but know-it-all problem solver is, alongside joke-explainer, one of the worst.
I think it’s probably just a really deeply ingrained feature-cum-bug in our social behaviours; many years ago, I went on a training course related to counselling; there was a whole module dedicated to (and titled something like) ‘Stop talking and curb your urge to offer glib advice. No, really. Shut up and listen.’
People mean well, and very often, feel that they can help by blurting out ‘Well, what you should do is…’, before they’ve even finished hearing about the thing.
My favorite variant of this is, “We need to start thinking outside the box.” I see this in local parent groups about local school issues (most recently around how to handle remote learning days), and 100% of the time when someone says, “We need to start thinking outside the box,” it’s shorthand for, “I don’t understand this issue very well, and I have no useful proposals, but I don’t think the people in charge are doing the best thing.”
My favorite part of it is that they’re saying it about leadership who, when confronted with a hurricane that wiped out clean water to the entire city for almost two months, started drilling wells on school campuses so students could come back earlier than city water came back. These are not people who need to be reminded to think outside the box.
I should probably note that ‘Why don’t you just…’ is often the milder form of the phenomenon that I see. Very often it’s more like - and this is still not the most extreme case - “I don’t understand why ANYONE would do Q. Why don’t you just do P? I can’t believe you don’t know this. Are you an idiot?” (And where P is some not-remotely-suitable suggestion or solution).
Like, the guy who tried to tell me that a better solution to my 3-2-1 backup regime would be to buy a 2TB USB stick and carry that with me everywhere and just work from that (and to compound this idiocy, this was at a time when all 2TB USB media on the market was fake and would be guaranteed to lose your data).
It really depends entirely on who’s giving the advice. With some of my work colleagues, it’s split evenly in thirds – about 1/3rd chance the advice misses entirely, another 1/3rd chance that it misses but provides some useful insights, and 1/3rd chance that the advice is fine as-is.
With other people, advice is usually given just as a way to end a conversation or discourage some other approach, not to actually fix a problem. “Why don’t you just XYZ” = “I don’t care about your problem in the slightest, and I definitely don’t want you to do ABC, so here’s a token of simulated helpfulness to make this whole conversation go away”. Less than 10% usefulness in these situations, typically.
I would say usually, maybe 3/4 of the time they haven’t fully grasped the problem
-but-
I think there is an implication here that this is a negative; that it’s a know-it-all appointing themselves expert of a situation they just heard about.
I would say it is more often a person asking that hesitantly, recognizing they might not fully understand the situation yet, and that the answer to their suggestion will help them quickly appreciate the problem.
I suppose that I should mention that my positive assumption about the question is probably influenced by the fact that I’m a teacher. Most of my interpersonal interactions are with people who don’t know the things I know, and know that they don’t know the things I know, and it’s literally my job to find out what they don’t know and ensure that they know it.
I think there might be a significant difference between cases that happen in real life vs cases that happen online. Not just that tone is more obvious IRL, but also that there’s this confluence of loudness and ignorance online.
Having said that, I do remember encountering it quite a lot IRL in my IT career, where I would be tasked with solving a problem, which I would do using best practices and great care and skill, only to find the proposed solution being torn apart (in ‘yeah, but why don’t you just’ fashion) by people who really should have just let me do the thing they were paying me to do.
“Why don’t you just” works very well when you have worked out the problem, have used your solution successfully, and someone is doing it in an awkward problematic way which could be easily addressed if they just did it your way. This doesn’t happen all that often but it does happen. Why don’t you just put a hotpad under it? or, why don’t you just add paper to the top drawer first? or why don’t you just have the doughnuts delivered to the office? is the level this works for.
Often though, the subtext is, ‘why don’t you change your basic personality so that this becomes easy for you, the way it is for me?’ This is, for some reason, rarely found acceptable.
Out of curiosity, what is your motivation for sharing?
I’m not saying this is you, but I’m getting the impression from some here that just want someone to listen and be impressed by the problem they have to deal with?
Okay. There are times I am sharing with a significant person, be it family member or friend, just in the vein of this is what I am currently frustrated about. What I am looking for then is empathy, not engagement with or even interest in understanding the problem.
Is that the crossed connection misread going on here?
As my applied chemistry professor would say:
“Are you sufficiently cogent to formulate a question which would demonstrate to me the magnitude of your incomprehension”.
When I see someone wrestling with a problem, I am fully aware that someone who is competent and who has already put significant effort into the issue, can be expected to have tried the obvious solutions (and that those obvious solutions did not work, for nonobvious reasons).
So I often ask “Why don’t you …” and then am excoriated for my unthinking arrogance. Only, I did not ask “Why don’t you just…” - my question was an actual question, meant literally - there was a reason for (the mentioned solution) not working, and I want to know that reason, to augment my mental image of the problem.
Generally I do not express suggestions as questions. When I ask “Why is your zipper open?” I want to know the answer (e.g. “Because it is broken.”), not suggest that the zipper be closed.
This may be a failure to communicate. It shows up so often as a condescending rhetorical question that if I don’t mean it that way, I try to preface it: “I’m sure there’s a reason that I’m just not seeing, but what’s the reason you don’t…?” If I ask with enough humility, then either the person can explain it to me, or they can (if I genuinely have an idea they haven’t thought of) accept it without losing face.
Not that I wish to answer on behalf of @pulykamell but in my own case, the advice is very often tangential to the subject - no problem is perceived or was presented, no advice was sought; a thing was discussed, and an onlooker noticed something (not necessarily the main topic) that they just couldn’t hold back from offering advice on.
Another frequent counterpart is the question of the form “OMG why did you do it like THAT?” - implying that the speaker feels whatever implied alternative way is self-evidently superior. The subject can be as mundane as peeling a carrot.
Phrasing matters a lot. Personally I will never say “why don’t you just XYZ”, but rather “what if you tried XYZ?” The latter is more collaborative and open-ended. It offers new information and asks what the receiver thinks about it, rather than suggesting they’ve overlooked the obvious.
