How Are You?

Okay, there's this post going around about Sheryl Sandberg declaring the informal greeting of 'How are you?' as an insensitive question. She then tells everyone what to do instead. The post starts out:

Most of us ask one go-to question when we exchange pleasantries with friends, coworkers, and peers:

"How are you?"

The question may seem harmless, but it tends to lead to one socially acceptable answer:

"I'm fine."

The problem is that "I'm fine" often is not the truth. And if you ask this question of someone who is dealing with a lot in their personal life, it may come across as insensitive.

And that last paragraph describes the actual problem. The problem is not that people are asking, "How are you?" The problem is that Sandberg is incapable of telling the truth when asked the question. She isn't the only person who defaults to "I'm fine" or "I'm good" or the grammatically incorrect, "I'm well." The default answer of "I'm fine" is fine because normally the people asking, "How are you?" don't really care how you are. They are giving a greeting, and expecting "I'm fine" as the greeting's response. Her whole argument is saying, "Hi!" as a response to "Hello" is socially insensitive. It's not, it's a socially-learned call and response behaviour.

There are people who ask, "How are you?" and they want to know how you are doing. Those are the people you respond with how you are actually doing, the ones who you have earned your trust, the ones you can be vulnerable with and know they are interested in your answer. Everyone else gets the "I'm fine" response and that's fine.

So, Sandberg was in a bad place because her husband died. She was hurting. That's normal and a socially acceptable response. Telling the world the socially acceptable response of "I'm fine" to a generic greeting is insensitive is a stupid, overly-pc response to the world from the lens of her hurt.

Am I victim-blaming by suggesting Sandberg suck it up and STFU already about this? I don't think so, given she's the one telling other women to suck it up and STFU about injustices in tech world. She should grow a pair, as she told the rest of us to do.