“Here’s the thing about millennial-run coffee shops,” an older Gen X friend of mine said a few years back. “They make so many rules.”
Shortly, I found myself at a millennial-owned coffee shop. Sure enough, it had its own Ten Commandments on the wall.
“If you use our WiFi, you must buy something — at least one thing per hour; you may not sit at a four-person table if your party is less than three people, unless there are no smaller tables available; if you are sitting alone at two-person table, you must allow a stranger to share your table. VIOLATORS WILL BE MADE TO LEAVE. REPEAT VIOLATORS WILL BE BARRED.”
These rules are simultaneously reasonable and absurd. I would feel bad taking up a table for two and a half hours if I spent only $1.50 on a small coffee. I would correct my kids and give them a mini-lecture if two of them gratuitously took up a large table. I would welcome a stranger to sit at my two-top, were I sitting alone. I’d be peeved if someone refused to grant the same courtesy to me.
Norms of courtesy underlie all of the commandments posted on the wall. But turning norms of courtesy into hard and fast rules with specific punishments is the weird part here. Maybe I’m over-generalizing, but I see over-legislating our lives as a millennial foible.
Consider today’s “Miss Manners” column in the Washington Post.
The writer describes weird and rude behavior by a friend. The writer and his wife invited a friend and her family to stay the night in their modest home, and the friend — without really asking — invited an entire other family to also spend the night.
The writer is correct to consider this rude. He’s correct to want to make sure the friend doesn’t do this again. But check out how he describes his response.
The next time our friends wanted to visit, they again stated that their friend would be “dropping by.” This time we said no, and we were very firm. We let them know that, from now on, we were limiting the number of people staying over, and we were no longer welcoming other pets.”
That is, he made new “rules” and announced them to his friend.
Miss Manners’s reply was apt. She suggested that perhaps “the newly implemented rules, and their announcement, were ungracious.”
Miss Manners doesn’t say, “you ought to welcome all comers to your house.” Instead she says, in effect, tell your friend that if she wants to bring someone else, make a specific request, and you, the hosts, will invite them if it’s feasible.
The problem here is that “it will require the very thing you were hoping to avoid — adjudicating each request and visit separately …”
One virtue of rules is that they get you out of having to adjudicate many requests on a case-by-case basis. They keep you from playing favorites or being accused of playing favorites. But the downside of rules is tied to the upside: they are impersonal, one-size-fits-all, unbending.
Many circumstances call on us to issue hard-and-fast rules, but these days people seem to demand hard-and-fast rules when norms and case-by-case consideration are more appropriate.
Schools, perhaps worried about litigation, really ramped up “zero-tolerance” rules that allowed them to enforce norms without being accused of discrimination. This also prevented them from being reasonable, merciful, or flexible where it was obviously warranted.
The people who came up through zero-tolerance schooling are now running their own institutions. The result is a bunch of rules and signs.
