this is from a “manipulation advice” video and it’s just so fucking funny to me. why didn’t I think of responding to insults like this
I can’t remember where I got the information now, but apparently if you stare silently for at least 4 seconds it triggers a feeling of rejection which I don’t have to tell you is uncomfortable and makes most people backpedal pretty quickly and awkwardly.
Immediately going concerned/extremely polite always throws people off their game, it’s beautiful.
The Quiet Stare Of Disappointment is also super effective, indeed .
My sister and I were walking across a car park.
Random bloke: Maybe if you walked more you wouldn’t be so fat
My sister stops dead, stares him in the eye and goes: Is everything alright at home?
I’ve never seen a man’s face turn to horror so fast
We just walked to her car and drove off
The silent stare is so effective. I learned about it in social psychology in undergrad, and have often used it to great effect. Probably the best example is when I went to sign the papers on the car I was buying—I had already worked out a price and my trade-in with the salesmen the day before—and they decided they were going to take $1000 off the value of my trade-in. (I want to emphasize that I was buying a 10+ year old car; I ended up paying $8k total.)
“No,” I said. “That doesn’t work for me. If you’re unwilling to honor the deal we made, I’m not buying a car from you.”
Well, they talk for a living. So they talked. Here I am, a young woman on my own, and these two men at the dealership are giving me all the reasons they couldn’t possibly honor the deal we made yesterday.
So I sat. I didn’t say a word. I just stared at them.
They kept talking, trying to get a reaction out of me. After about 10 seconds, they abandoned all pretense of logical arguments and started hammering pathos. They weren’t even buying my old car from me for the dealership; it was a personal favor for which they were using their own hard-earned money to help this poor guy at church who just got out of rehab and his house burned down and his children exploded and his dog left him for another man, etc etc
I didn’t say a word. I just stared at them.
They began falling apart. They continued trying to hustle me, but their confidence left them. I think they might have been sweating.
Within five minutes they caved and signed the papers for our original deal.
I have been told for years I am intimidating, and by people who had never even seen me angry. Just in general, intimidating. This absolutely baffled me until a friend one day pointed at me and said — “This! Right now! You’re being intimidating!”
Friends, I was staring silently at someone while inwardly flailing desperately to come up with a response to something they’d said that wasn’t overly rude but also was holding my ground. In my mind, I was being hellishly awkward. I couldn’t summon any charm, I couldn’t figure out a sentence to string together. Silence spooled out horrifyingly between us as I got farther and farther away from being articulate and became more and more flustered by this failure to respond. From the outside, I guess, I just looked like a stone cold bitch waiting for them to get their shit together, lol.
I still don’t think I’m intimidating but you know I’ll take it.
you have to go outside or you will forget what women look like and before you go “this is about nerds and anime women I don’t need this information” you do okay because this is about filters, AI, algorithms, Instagram, tiktoks, shorts, etc you are being given a barrage of the most statistically pleasing facial structures through a machine built to learn and return the optimal image to keep you engaged longer some women do in fact look like the goddess Aphrodite but the machine is giving you 10,000 of them in short order you were not meant to see that many you were meant to go to the walmart to get a 10 pack of hanes underwear and see a slightly tired mom with an absolute shelf for a butt and thank the heavens you were born in just the right time to live to witness her
Can we take second to appreciate how visually beautiful the world of ATLA is? It’s so vibrant and full of life, I always wished it was real and I could live in it
Horizon Zero Dawn was like “the apocalypse happened because we let an extremely stupid man have a trillion dollars and his own military-industrial complex” and Elon Musk saw that and thought “inspiring. I bet I could be that stupid man”
This may sound preachy, but if you’re in your teens or 20s please take care to develop the habit of speaking positively about people behind their backs. Gossip is unavoidable, and yes it does allow people to bond, and yes some people deserve to be shit talked. But I think being negative about things is literally just nature, whereas trying to be positive about things and people is a quality you have to be very intentional about . If this does not apply to you, good for you. But for most people I think it does. Im not lauding toxic positivity so much as saying that if there’s space to speak positively about someone behind their back, it’s better to take that route.
I’m not a “will help, no questions asked” kind of friend. Because I will ask questions. I’m just not gonna question your answers. Like yeah if we’re friends I can help you get rid of a body, no problem, but I still want to know who it was and what happened. Not because I don’t trust that you’d kill someone who didn’t need killing or would help someone you shouldn’t be helping - we wouldn’t be friends in the first place if I didn’t know you well enough to trust your judgement. I’m just curious as hell and I want to know things.
i bring a sort of “we shouldn’t be telling anyone to kill themselves no matter how much we dislike them” energy to the social media that the self righteous haters don’t really like
