Yeh that definitely sucks they’ve rigged it up in a way that’s unusual for this type of work and also forces you in to this situation. Redirecting is good and probably your best option, canny and sensitive people will notice you doing this and take it for the hint that it is but dense or uncaring people will probably carry on steering things in to places you don’t want to go. If you’re forced to eat with them then yes redirecting the conversation will work up to a point but it is a subtle skill to do so non-obviously. It’s hard to advise specifically what to say like a script, though I would say if you just totally ignore the question altogether and switch topic very bluntly it’s going to come across strange and prompt confusion and questioning. You’ll need to somehow maintain the initial thread of their topic as lip service and then turn off down an unrelated avenue fairly smoothly. It’s what politicians do professionally. Reading the other responses to your post I think they’ve got some really good ideas on how to deal with this if you really get forced in to conversing against your will. It’s a subtle art of contributing basically nothing and rephrasing their same question back to them. I think another commenter suggested something along the lines of “I don’t know much about that what about you?” and similarly bland and useless resonses. This is friendly enough not to piss anyone off and lame enough to be totally uninteresting which hopefully invites little follow up. If they continue on their original track, you can combine this with seguing to another topic.

I didn’t suggest this to you initially because it doesn’t sound like your natural style and I think advice is best if it allows the recipient to handle things mostly in their own way while helping to avoid pitfalls in doing so. I guess you’ll have to navigate this daily frustration in a way a little outside of your comfort zone by carefully appearing to engage whilst really not and hopefully they’ll find you so boring they don’t bother anymore. Hopefully you don’t mind this giving the impression that you’re a boring person to the remaining 50% of your peers that don’t bother you so much but sometimes it’s a necessary evil.

You’ll likely run in to a little bit of trouble because you’re having to make explicit what would have been better for them to have inferred and when it’s made explicit like that, it will come across as very weird to people and they’ll probably have some trouble not taking it personally (even if they shouldn’t).

Some understanding of the general tenor of how this group talks would make for better ways to communicate what you want to say but as general advice, your proposed ways of addressing this seem like they’re on the right track in spirit but you’re phrasing them in ways that imply a note of contempt.

This is probably because you really do harbour some contempt for these guys given the way you described them, like calling them childish for example. If you actually want to express some of that animosity then your suggestions are probably fine but if you’re concerned about the “right” way to set these boundaries you might want to try and keep it neutral. This is also good if you don’t want to earn their contempt either which is probably advisable even if you don’t like them very much since you have to work with them and if they feel offended and hold a grudge it could risk spilling over in to the actual work.

I like your idea of saying outright that you’re not a talkative person, hopefully they’ll feel a little guilty about having forced you in to having to say that and will not try to drag you in to the conversation so much from then on. The additional bits around that concept don’t seem advisable, you don’t have to chastise them for not realising you don’t want to talk, that’s likely to be unproductive, the point is you don’t want to talk. Similarly the “and I hope you respect that” addition is good for being firm but also comes across a little aggressive, best deployed only if you’ve already made your wishes explicit and they’re clearly not respecting that.

Eating elsewhere, if that’s an option is great, it you can already opt for that do it, you can avoid even having to bring anything up and the physical separation makes questioning you about it really inconvenient. If they ask you about it later that’s when you can say you need time to unwind and that’s also by far the most socially acceptable and understandable reason that people are less likely to take personally. I don’t know if you resent the idea that your reasons have to be socially acceptable to these guys or should have to be massaged to avoid them taking things personally, but ask yourself this: do you want to teach them a lesson and demonstrate your contempt for them, or do you want to just be left alone to work and to continue to work effectively with them? Pragmatism over principle would make sense here.

If it gets to the point where you have to actually say to another adult, in a work environment, “leave me alone” then odds are it probably won’t even work and your coworkers are complete idiots that need to be fired. However if that’s really the case, saying that, even if it doesn’t work is probably good since at that point things are probably going to escalate and at least no one can say you did or said anything inappropriate.

In short, take the easiest route if possible and just eat somewhere else at lunch and redirect the conversation back to work if they keep talking to you during work. If you end up somehow having absolutely no other remaining options but to explicitly tell them you don’t want to talk be careful to communicate in a way so you only express this simple desire and don’t imply some sort of judgement or contempt towards them. Try to be nice about it.

I guess it doesn’t help you to say it now, but this was a terrible way to deal with a slight nuisance from what has to be a small group of stupid people. This has the potential to cause far greater intrusion and judgement from your coworkers than your lack of marriage and kids ever would have done, and this especially with a crowd that love gossip. You’ve potentially handed them the juiciest gossip they’ll likely ever get and given how dull the workplace can be, they’ll be milking it for years if they find out.

I think you’re pretty much in it for the long haul now, which will take work to maintain, and also depending on how long you work at this place with these guys, you better hope your unusually youthful appearance stays at a consistent 18 years behind your real age and doesn’t hit a sudden inflection point where it suddenly all catches up because that’ll be tough to account for.

But… who ever says that? I’ve never heard of this idea presented as evidence for why we should eat meat.

So, if I’m to take their message as intended, in addition to avoiding sports and education, I ought to avoid religion too? Are there more pages to this saying something along the lines of “… Except my favourite religion?” Otherwise, I mean, I’m confused what they want me to do here?

This action was so fucked up and beyond my list of shitty things that the US might do that it honestly didn’t occur to me and so when reading the headline I found it confusingly phrased but thought maybe it somehow meant there was some hint of support for the ICC’s decision and warrants which would have been amazing. Imagine the rollercoaster for me when they actually managed to surprise me with a decision and stance worse than I could have imagined.

Yikes wtf? That’s a terrible idea, recipes for fan forced already compensate the temperature so everyone will be getting it wrong. That’s crazy.

Sounds like you unintentionally fit the brief anyway.

Yeh Graphene is the plan long term but I have to stick with stock for the time being.

It’s just like that. Actually it’s an interesting point about wanting to try it again and get it right. I think that’s a layer that probably explains some of the feeling like I miss something that actually wasn’t great to experience.

It sounds like it but, in general I prefer to have 1 maybe 2 home screen pages of stuff I know I’ll use all the time right away and anything else I’d rather just search.

I suppose if you have only enough apps to fill maybe a single home screen page then by that standard I’d have a lot as between my less frequently used apps and all of Google’s pre-installed ones that’s probably a few pages, but generally I try to be sparing with them.

That does it. Thanks mate.

Planning to switch to Graphene OS for several reasons, but I have a reason why it will be better for me not to do that until a bit later so until then I’m just trying to be comfortable with stock.

I opened up my post again the next day and immediately thought of that. Don’t know why I didn’t when I wrote the title haha

This puts it well.

The experience of nostalgia I understand is bittersweet and often melancholy. I guess what I’m finding strange is that normally one experiences nostalgia for something they’d actually like to be able to return to, and that usually means something that they actually liked, a previous happiness. Weirdly I seem to be pining for a particular way I felt that actually, sucked at the time. It’s weird. I know what you mean about it being best not to dwell but it’s such a powerful draw, it’s like I’m swimming around the edges of a vortex.

I think my surprise here is that given the program’s reputation, and your experience with it, it seems there was quite some gulf between theoretical intent and practice. Educating children about drugs, probably seems relatively uncontroversial to most, I think you could get a lot of people with otherwise pretty different views on drugs to get behind the idea. The way the D.A.R.E. program went about it and the content of the program and the accuracy of the education they attempted to deliver seem from a distance to have been very questionable. This is why it’s so perplexing to me why you hold such a surprising level of respect for D.A.R.E., I mean sure the intent could have been education, but it doesn’t sound very much like the intent and the reality had a lot of overlap. I’m careful with my wording here because where I grew up we didn’t have ‘D.A.R.E.’ specifically so I can only form judgment based on what one hears and reads about the program.

Given your experience and the way they made you feel from the practitioners’ sheer ignorant and biased approach I would have thought you’d definitely be the first to call the program “dumb” as the very least of the criticisms to be levelled at it.

It’s not reviewed and may have harmful content, so please read the harmful content on an app instead?

The guy clearly isn’t familiar with a lot of image formats and is trying to find out about them by asking, a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and in a special community called no stupid questions, no less.

You don’t need to call anyone a gullible fool and furthermore you’ve not actually helped to answer the question “what is webp”, at all. What are you trying to achieve with this pointless aggression? If you wanted one less “gullible fool” you’d have to answer the question and educate, at best you’ve sown confusion.