I’ve been trying to think about why this meme bothers me and I think it’s a confluence of a couple things:

—The flattening of codes of manners, which in a pluralistic democracy ought to be diverse and to jostle each other constantly. Manners codes exist for particular people and therefore they can’t be flattened into a kind of universal human UI, nice as that’d be in some ways.

—That it’s coercive but won’t own up: “normalize not doing X“ is a coward’s way of saying “no one ever do X again”

—the failure to realize that everybody doesn’t want what you want.

—(for example, I like it when, if I’m suffering, you try to offer some evidence that I’m not undergoing a unique and freakishly singular experience. If you instead say “I’m sorry that happened to you” as these types prefer, that’s fine too! But no reason for it to be the only way

— The failure, which I see a lot on social media, to understand: a) that manners codes do differ; b) that there isn’t a universal one yet; c) that people who don’t do what you prefer are not willfully evading the single code we all agreed on; so d) you needn’t pathologize them!

—(for another example where the previous tweet plays out, consider the discourse around apologies—who a wrongdoer owes them to, when, what they must contain, whether they need to be a Public Statement etc

(there are templates for apologizing on the internet now, and if I ever got an apology from someone modeled one of them, my first thought would be “this is the phoniest thing I’ve ever heard. can I please have a weepy and partially defensive message that a person wrote instead”)