If it does make sense for Anne and Dan to never go to Denny’s, it’s only because your example is SO extreme. It makes no sense to try and derive a general rule for appropriate social behavior off of some fringe case. Besides, you went ahead and moved the goal posts when you started listing other reasons for hating Denny’s. If I’m not mistaken, the debate is still about having negative preferences towards the food.
Are you really suggesting that in the general case of a group of people with one picky eater that utility is maximized when the group concedes to the individual? Every time they go out? To the same place? Not that I think this happens often, if ever. But surely it is common sense that individuals sacrifice their own utility for the group quite often.
If I got this upset about other people not wanting to go to a restaurant they didn’t like, I’d start seeing a therapist.
I like going to Five Guys (burger and fries chain with a small menu) for lunch. I have a coworker who doesn’t like Five Guys…so I don’t ask her to go to Five Guys with me. I don’t consider this problematic at all and I don’t hold it against her. If I want to go to Five Guys, I can go by myself or with one of my other coworkers who do enjoy eating there. If I want to eat with this particular coworker, I’ll suggest some place other than Five Guys. I don’t even know why she doesn’t like Five Guys, if she thinks their food tastes bad or if she’s worried about how healthy it is or what, and I don’t care. It’s none of my business. I would never expect her to go to Five Guys with me, because I know she wouldn’t really want to and I don’t get any pleasure out of pressuring others to do something they don’t want to do. Our relationship isn’t based on eating at Five Guys together, and it would be a pretty shallow relationship if it were.
So Mr. Picky doesn’t want to go to lunch with the rest of you. Big deal. Surely this is preferable to listening to him complain or watching him pick forlornly at a side salad. If he’d rather have lunch by himself than eat something different then let him have lunch by himself. I really do not see why this should be a problem for anyone else.
*If you get all worked up about a coworker deciding not to spend their lunch break with you then you are concerned with what they do on their own time. Maybe you could try getting over yourself.
As has been explained over and over. If you (the generic you) ONLY go when you only GET your way, while everybody else takes one for the team once in awhile, the social group is IMO gonna think your a picky selfish twit. And the only person getting socially harmed is “you”.
Yeah, in theory you should be able to run around 24/7 in a Star Trek uniform and do nothing but talk about you stamp collection when engaging in conversation. Nothing immoral about it. Its all a matter of taste.
But, like being the PITA irritating picky eater, SOCIETY IS going to judge “you” for it and it aint going to be to “your” benifit either.
I have a vision of Spock, on his last breathe of life, saying “the needs of many outweigh the needs of the few”, as he tries to choke down some Captain D’s fishsticks during a group lunch outing.
Maybe you would think that, but I wouldn’t think that, because I do not share your obsession with what other people eat. I do not expect anyone else to “take one for the team” when it comes to what we eat for lunch, and I’ve never felt pressured to do so by my coworkers. I’ve worked with some pretty awful people in my day, but none of them gave a damn what I had for lunch.
*Why are you the one getting all worked up about it, then?
It’s a free country. I can eat what I like, and other people can eat what they like. If our tastes overlap then we can go out to lunch together. If they don’t then we won’t. There are other ways we can socialize if we want to. Heck, even differing tastes aren’t a barrier to having lunch in each other’s company – we could pack our own lunches or get takeout from different places and eat our different foods in the break room together.
Do you really think wearing a Star Trek uniform all day every day is equivalent to never eating at Five Guys?
*I don’t think society as a whole shares your views on other people having to eat food they don’t like in order to fit in. I know I don’t. I think this is a bizarre control or conformity issue that you and a few others have, and I think you’d encounter these alleged “irritating picky people” a lot less frequently if you could just get over it.
I love how you guys keep trying to define picky eaters and the folks that hate them in such absurd extremes.
You seem to think we get mad when the Jewish coworker won’t go to Pauls Pork Emporium. Or that the diabetic that won’t go to Suzies Sugar Shack is an irritating picky eater. And so on…
While “we” all have our own various definitions of irritating picky eaters, I dont think anyone here’s is remotely like that.
I worked with folks that virtually never when out to lunch with the work crowd. Some to save money, some for dietary reasons…nobody thought them picky eaters. But there were eaters whose main motivation was to BOTH go out (with the group if at all possible) AND get WHAT THEY wanted lunch wise. This, in COMBINATION, with a narrow range of food that was acceptable to their picky taste buds, made them irritating picky eaters.
Why on earth is anyone “taking one for the team” when it comes to lunch? Especially an office lunch where you’re with people you see 8 hours a day (or other people you see fairly frequently). What’s the need for such rigid group conformity?
Or in other words, if Anne goes to the trips to Arby’s and skips out on Denny’s, Dan goes to Denny’s but not so much to Arby’s, Bill and Charlie go to either restaurant when the mood strikes them what’s the issue? It seems extremely weird to me care that much about the fact that everybody’s eating together.
You’re the one who replied to my post about a coworker who didn’t like Five Guys with this Star Trek thing.
*No, I think you get mad when someone refuses to go to a restaurant they dislike. That’s what you’ve been saying in post after post, that it’s some horrible thing for someone to refuse an invitation to a restaurant they don’t care for. By your standard I should be furious at my Five Guys-shunning coworker. Well, I disagree. No one should be pressured into spending their all-too-fleeting lunch break and hard-earned money at a restaurant they don’t like. I can’t think of a restaurant in my area I dislike enough to avoid altogether (I’ve even been back to the place that gave me food poisoning), but if there were some restaurant I hated then I wouldn’t go there even if everyone else in the office wanted to. I’d say “No thanks, but you guys have fun!” And I’d expect them to accept that with grace, not act like I’d spit in their faces and told them to drop dead.
*I don’t see why this should be a problem if, as you’ve said repeatedly in other posts, these picky people wouldn’t go if the rest of the group disagreed with their suggested restaurant for lunch. Of course picky people prefer to have their own way, everyone prefers to have their own way. If a picky person starts throwing some big tantrum about not getting their way then that would be irritating, but it’s the tantrum and not the pickiness that would be the problem. No one here has defended tantrum-throwing though, and I know that I have said that people (picky or not) should not attempt to impose their food preferences on others. It’s not okay for a picky person to try to make a more adventurous eater stick to the picky person’s bland meal, and it’s not okay for the more adventurous eater to try to make the picky person eat some exotic dish. It can be nice to offer to share food, or to suggest something you think the other person will like, but no one enjoys it when someone else tries to force them to eat something they don’t want to eat.
I have again and again referred to people who don’t throw tantrums but who politely refuse to go to restaurants they don’t like, and you’ve made it pretty clear that you think everyone else should scorn them. Again, I disagree. It isn’t my business what other people eat. If it bothers you that someone says “No thanks” when a restaurant they dislike is suggested and “Sure, I’d love to!” only when their favorite place is named then they may have narrow tastes but you’re the one with the real issues. The picky person isn’t hurting anyone else by only going out with the group when the destination is a restaurant they like and going their own way when it isn’t. There’s no need for anyone to “take one for the team” when it comes to lunch plans. It’s lunch. People who want to go to a certain restaurant can go together, and people who don’t want to go there can do something else. The world will keep on turning, trust me.
Are you from or in some culture which is extraordinarily sensitive to insult-by-not-eating?
'Cause I’m not.
When you are a guest in somebody’s house, if as part of the meal they’re serving potatoes, and you don’t like potatoes, you don’t have to take a “bit” of the potatoes. I literally can’t see a reason why you should have to, other than that your hosts are freakishly hypersensitive about you not trying the food - in which case I’d consider them terrible hosts, rather than you being a terrible guest for not going along with their picky sensitivities.
And the only concession you need to make as a member of the group is be willing to let them go without you. If your group is so hypersensitive or fractious that they can’t stand you bailing now and then for their benefit, then the group’s not worth saving. And if everyone in the group is considerate, they’re never try to compell you to eat something you don’t want to anyway.
Nonsense. My example isn’t that extreme - it exactly models the behavior of the picky eaters who try to control group behavior that you all are complaining about. If you think it doesn’t model the situation, explain WHY. From where I sit it looks like you’re rejecting the explanation solely because you don’t like the conclusions it leads to.
And I didn’t move any goalposts - all reasons why a person might not want to go to a place have identical effect. My point was that it doesn’t matter what the reason for the aversion is - the strength of the aversion is all that matters from the perspective of a utility analysis. And besides which I think if we’ve established one thing in this thread, it’s that the non-picky eaters don’t consider negative preferences towards the food to be relevent. You don’t like the food? They don’t care - you should eat it anyway. So it’s no more valid a complaint than disliking the paint.
Yes, when one picky eater’s unhappiness at going to a place is more extreme than everyone else’s accumulated happinesses at eating there, then it is (obviously and axiomatically) the case that the preference of greater magnitude is most significant in determining the outcome of greatest total utility. And if that conflicts with common sense then perhaps you need to get your common sense tuned.
It should be noted, though, that this depends on various factors - if there are lots of people in the group, then mathematically speaking their lesser feelings on the subject can add up to more than the feelings of the one strongly-caring outlier. Of course, of the other people in the group care about the outlier, then their unhappiness at seeing her unhappy will make the option unpalatable to all, when she’s around. This obviously is only relevent when the people like each other, though, which may not apply to large work lunches. Of course, unless the other people literally hate the picky person and wish to derive enjoyment from watching them suffer, the picky person should obviously be given the option to opt out rather than be dragged along to someplace they don’t like.
No, I expect them to leave Anne behind, when they decide they can’t stand to go somewhere she doesn’t hate.
I was trying to be temperate. The situation is complicated by fact that the subject of the thread is the personal and/or social failings of a class of people - if everyone is being immaculately polite and gracious to others, the situations in this thread simply cannot come up. So when assessing the causes of the problems, blame inherently gets assigned to one or more groups. (Usually not your own group, either.)
Part of the problem may be that some of us have ever seen a picky eater that whines and bawls and kicks and screams and throws fits if you try to go without them to lunch to some place they don’t want to go anyway. It’s hard for us to comprehend how you find these people; how you got yourself into this sort of situation.
Except in rare cases - a work lunch, attendance mandatory, group decides amongst themselves where to go, members of the group doesn’t like each other much - except in cases such as this the picky eater isn’t an unavoidable problem. So, rather than arguing the case of the pernicious dominating asshole who also happens to be a picky eater, we are attempting to explain how your average annoyingly picky eater can be easily made not to be a problem - like, by occasionally leaving them behind. Admittedly this presumes that we’re not talking about such monumentally powerful asshole picky eaters that they can force you not to walk away from them.
What is most stunning about this whole debate is that those that will eat anything don’t understand that there are people that are actually different than them. Let me repeat that. The ‘I’ll eat anything crowd’ dose not understand that there may possibly be people that are different than them. To hell with them is there attitude.
What’s even more stunning is that those that will eat anything, seem to think they have a more discerning palete or are on some sort of moral high ground because they like everything. It seems that you like everything except those people that might happen to disagree with you. Or folks that simply want to go their own way.
What is most stunning though, is that these folks, at least in this thread seem to WANT to force their preferences on others without giving the other folks the option to politely decline. That really really blows me away.
What is stunning about this debate is how many times people on your side of the equation keep inventing this arrant bullshit from thin air. This is nowhere near my position. My position is that adults sometimes have to eat things they don’t like. That means everybody.
And let me say this again – nobody likes everything, at least none of the people participating in this debate. There are foods I can’t stand, that smell to me like garbage. There are restaurants I don’t like. Nevertheless, I will occasionally go along with someone else’s choice for something I don’t like just to be sociable. That’s what grownups do.
I can’t remember the last time I had to eat something I disliked. There have been occasions where there was a limited selection of food and I had the choice between eating something I didn’t care for and not having anything at all, but I haven’t been required to eat something I didn’t like since I was a child. The “you’ll sit there until you eat it” treatment is, thankfully, not something anyone has tried to pull on me as an adult.
The position you’ve expressed in this thread is also rather more extreme than what you say above. It is a fact of life that we can’t always get what we want. But you’ve indicated repeatedly that you believe that just because someone works with you, they sometimes have to eat things they don’t like because you like them – and that to do otherwise is a grave social offense equivalent to them coming right out and saying “Fuck you” in the middle of the office.
My position, and I think the position of any rational person, is that one’s coworkers are entitled to make their own personal choices with regard to their lunch plans and are not in any way obligated to join you at a restaurant they dislike. It’s their time, their money, and perhaps most importantly their bodies. It doesn’t matter if you once ate at a restaurant they suggested and that you dislike, they don’t owe you some sort of lunch debt that can only be repaid by eating food they don’t enjoy. You do not have any right to expect your coworkers to follow you to whatever restaurant you choose when lunchtime rolls around. If you say “Let’s go to Restaurant X!” and they say “No thanks, I don’t really like that place” then this doesn’t mean they’re terrible people or that they hate you or that they aren’t team players, it means they don’t like Restaurant X. And if you can’t handle that, you’re the one who isn’t behaving like an adult.
Allowing ‘grownups’ to politely decline the invitation, and consider alternatives for next time so that every one can enjoy themselves is what ‘grown ups’ do.
Any reasonable social person will attend an activity that they may not enjoy to support others. That’s great. No problem.
You, on the other hand don’t even want to give a group of coworkers the ability of choosing where to go before they are they are committed and in the car. You think this makes the social interaction smoother.
You are wrong. That is not what adults do, that’s what a bully does.
You have not just missed the boat on this. You have missed the entire ocean.
It’s not a matter of what I think makes personal interactions smoother. It’s just what happens naturally when a social group becomes more and more familiar with each other. Really, you have never experienced this in your life, where the more you get to know someone, the less time is spend making explicit plans? These are simply facts of human nature. The fact that you’re calling me – someone you’ve never interacted with personally – a bully reveals that your problem is not with me, but with people acting like normal people.
The assumption is that as an adult you have learned to go along. No one is going to sit there make you do anything. But routinely refusing to go along will result in distance from the group dynamic. Arguing with me about it and calling me a bully isn’t going to change that.
Have you read your own posts in this thread? I couldn’t have come up with #306 if I’d set out to parody your position. I never would have imagined that someone else would believe that politely declining to accompany a coworker to a restaurant was equivalent to telling them “fuck you/fuck off”. I really had no idea that anyone could get that worked up about where their coworkers want to have lunch.
*I don’t believe I’ve ever gotten into a coworker’s car not knowing where we were going. I can’t recall that it’s ever even come up. If we’re going to go somewhere, we decide where we’re going before we leave the office. I don’t see any benefit to doing this a couple of minutes later once everyone is crammed into the car, or in driving around aimlessly until inspiration strikes. It’s inconsiderate and a poor use of time.
*No, the assumption is that I am an adult and can make my own decisions about my diet without my mommy standing over me. I haven’t “learned to go along” when it comes to food, and it’s surprising to me that you think mealtime is about obedience or conformity. I make my choices about food based primarily on what I like, what is healthy, and what I can reasonably afford. I’m in a much better position to weigh these factors and make a decision than anyone else is. It seems pretty messed up to me that you think desire to “go along” should be a major part of other people’s lunch choices.
*This is rather different from what you’ve been saying previously in this thread, but although this is a more moderate position I still disagree. I am capable of working with someone as part of a team without having lunch with them on a regular basis, and I would expect any other professional to be able to do the same. It can be nice to have lunch with one’s coworkers, but it isn’t always possible or practical to do so. I don’t need everyone I work with to go to lunch with me. If someone has a limited diet or limited money then I’d certainly rather they make their own plans and be happy than go where I want to go and be miserable about it.
I do not believe that my coworkers should in any way be expected or obligated to “go along” with my food choices, and it’s astonishing to me that anyone could feel otherwise. All I’d expect from other people is that they respect my right to make my own choices. I’ll do the same for them. We all have the right to make our own choices about what we eat and how we spend our money. If some of us want to go to the same restaurant then great, if not then that’s fine too. This is the kind of thing adults should be able to handle gracefully.
*You quoted me, although you removed my name, but I’m not the one who called you a bully. I’d think someone who’s so quick to accuse others of making things up would be more careful about this sort of thing.
Have you read all the posts in this thread? The tone has gone up and down and there’s even one in which I admit my arguments are becoming comically exaggerated because the other side is approaching hysteria.
Look, this has nothing to do with me. Getting so distressed about a simple social interaction seems to signal some sort of ongoing trauma over food. Clearly this isn’t a “great debate” at all but really something more akin to a medical problem that probably isn’t an appropriate topic for discussion on these boards.
*I haven’t come anywhere near hysteria here, and although I saw your post in which you said “I feel like I’m being pushed towEd [sic] stronger and stronger terms” I have not seen you retract your statement that refusing to go to lunch with someone is the same thing as saying “fuck you”. Are you saying now that you’ve posted things in this thread that are so ridiculous and extreme that you don’t even agree with them yourself? If so, why are you surprised that others also disagree with them?
*It has everything to do with you.
*Well, it’s nice to see you’re finally willing to admit that. It really isn’t normal to get so upset when someone else doesn’t want to go to the same restaurant as you.
*If you’d rather not discuss your personal issues here then I’m perfectly willing to respect that. I already suggested that you see a therapist if other people’s lunch choices bother you so much. I still think it’s a good idea. I certainly hope someone will be able to help you learn to deal with whatever problem you have that makes it so devastating for you when other people say “No thanks, I don’t really like that restaurant.” Maybe someday you’ll be able to have lunch breaks free of stress and drama, just like I do.
*No, it’s still just you. I was merely pointing out that you incorrectly and IMHO hypocritically attributed the “bully” comments to me. It was actually enipla who said you were a bully.
This thread has reached an incredible level of ridiculousness but since I’ve already contributed, I’ll make one last post and then bow out.
Basically, I’m convinced that in spite of all the heated arguments and names being thrown back and forth, we all behave exactly the same way, and are only arguing about misunderstandings of others’ posts. To clarify:
I explicitly addressed this earlier (#351) but statements like these are the main reason this debate is still going on. Nobody has said anything remotely approaching forcing people to eat what I want them to eat. I mean, if anyone had said anything like that, there would be 20 sharp replies directly quoting that statement, so PLEASE STOP saying things like this.
Those occasions are exactly what we’re talking about. You didn’t get to eat exactly what you would have preferred and you didn’t make a fuss about it. That’s all we’re expecting of normal, socially adjusted adult human beings. Notice I said nothing about you being “required” to eat anything. Notice I said nothing about you not being allowed to opt-out. All I am saying is that when you found yourself in a situation that offended your food preferences (through no fault of your own), you didn’t a) attempt to change the entire venue of the event (most likely offending a large number of people), or b) bitch about how much you hate the food (most likely irritating a large number of people) as a good member of society should do.
It is indeed an obviously true statement. But it is also a statement with no measurable connection to reality, and therefore more of a tautology than a useful description. As has been mentioned both in this thread and by the Stones, as a normal adult member of society, “you can’t always get what you want”. If a picky eater can objectively demonstrate the utility of a group would be maximized by them all going to the one restaurant he or she likes every time they go out, more power to them. But I am skeptical that is ever the case.
To summarize, I think our ONLY objection is to the people who try to get what they want when it is clear they either actually CAN’T get it, meaning they are unnecessarily bitching about how life sucks, or would decrease others enjoyment substantially if they did get it. I would hope that objecting to such behavior is relatively common among adults / dopers.