[mayhemducks]

Oooh this is good! So - I agree with part of this.

When a conversational partner chooses to communicate a certain way because of how they want to be perceived, they are living out their values. And I admire that, and I think it is an important component of a healthy organization.

But, if you would, allow me to describe the distress I feel when I have to take in "extra words". Because I personally do not feel it as extremely minor.

My mind operates almost exclusively on language, mostly in text form. I do not absorb input in paragraphs with overarching or underlying emotional content. I don't even absorb it in sentences. I process language word by word - and when reading code it's character by character. Each chunk I take as input explodes into hundreds of possibilities of meaning that each must be thought about in turn, and then dismissed as probably not what the person meant. Some of these are quite funny, and if you are one of the dozen or so people close to me, I might even share them out loud hoping for a laugh. In a real-time conversation, this has to happen in milliseconds. It never turns off - the language parser/analyzer occupies a large chunk of my brain's processing continuously, even when I wish it didn't. If I am under some stress - even normal everyday work stress, and I feel like I need to force myself to process even more words, when they are not hyper-relevant to the stressful situation at-hand, I often find that I have not enough capacity left for managing my emotional state. Fear, uncertainty, risk evaluation all get heightened. Fight-or-flight can kick in too. What if the time I just spent socializing with this person and managing their emotional needs too puts the project over-budget? What if I loose my place on this team because of that? Depending on lots of things, this can either spiral into questioning my very existence and place in the universe, or it can fizzle out and you'd never even notice it.

So just be careful when you evaluate how distressing something is to another person. Unless you know them quite well, you might not have the clearest picture.

[jpdb]

Given that you literally started your response with a pleasant agreement and affirmation on my point makes feel like you are arguing this in bad faith, but if statements like, "how was your weekend" included in an ask cause you distress then you are so maladapt to society to the point that you should have close to zero expectations for others to accommodate your needs in public spaces such as a work environment. You almost exclusively have the responsibility to regulate your emotions or not expose yourself to situations where people might include a hollow inquiry into your weekend in their written communications.

Asking people not to include minor pleasantries in their written communication isn't a "reasonable" request for anything larger than a small group of people.

[mayhemducks]

Indeed. I am quite maladapted to society. That's my point - thanks for making it more obvious!