When friends don’t listen, should we dump them?

Should you dump friends who don’t seem to care as much about you as you care about them?

A reader we’re calling Amity indicates that she has many close friends, some of whom she’s had for years. Even when friends move away, Amity makes a point to stay in touch with about a half dozen of her friends once a week with at least a text and often with a longer phone conversation. Amity writes that she regularly asks about her friends’ lives.

Recently, however, Amity has noticed that few of her friends ask about her, or even when they do, the conversation almost always turns back to talk of whatever the friend happens to be going through at that moment. Amity admits that she isn’t typically as forthcoming about her personal life as her friends are, but she does like to feel as if her friends care as much about her as she does about them.

The perception that the balance of concern might be off hit Amity particular after she confided in a few friends about a health scare she had experienced. While she is fine now, she was taken aback that whenever she brought up her illness with friends, the focus of the conversation generally shifted from her to whatever her friends happened to be going through at the moment. Some friends did and continue to ask her how she is at the beginning of a conversation, but here too she feels like they don’t focus as much on her as she would have on them.

Amity is concerned that her friends don’t care about her or that perhaps she has the wrong friends. Isn’t it wrong, she wonders, for them not to spend as much time talking about me as I do talking about them?

Since I don’t know Amity’s friends, I can’t speak to their appropriateness as friends. But I suspect that many of them are just as good a friend to Amity as they ever were. What’s likely changed, however, are Amity’s needs and her desire to break from the pattern of behavior she established with her friends long ago.

While true friends should indeed care about one another, there is no spreadsheet on which to tally who spends the most time caring about the other. Talking about someone in a conversation is just one way to indicate concern.

By Amity’s own admission, she hasn’t been as forthcoming about her personal life as her friends have been. While she may want to be more forthcoming now, her friends may not know this and instead default to the pattern they’ve established over the years.

It may feel a bit uncomfortable and out of character, but if Amity needs more listening time from her friends, the right thing is for her to tell them that. Granted, some friends are so in sync with one another that they know when a friend needs something, but many are not gifted at reading minds, particularly if the conversation is via spare and relatively emotionless text messages.

If some of her friends don’t respond to her request, then Amity may indeed want to address whether it’s time to let a friendship wane. But perhaps giving them a chance to step up and listen is something a true friend might do.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

When shouldn’t a friend honor a request for confidence?

Is it wrong to ignore a friend’s request to keep a confidence if you believe doing so might result in that friend being in danger?

For the past several years, a reader we’re calling Tom has noticed that an elderly friend who lives several states away has been having trouble remembering things. The friend will often call several times a day, forgetting that he had called earlier and often not remembering why he called.

Tom has been concerned but he has rested a bit easier knowing that his friend has family living nearby, a couple of whom seem to check in with him regularly. Occasionally, one family member in particular will give Tom a call to let him know how his friend is doing.

Recently, however, Tom got several calls within a couple of hours from his friend who seemed to be in a more agitated state than usual. The friend told Tom that he was having trouble logging into his email and that he was unable to reach anyone in his family who lived nearby. When Tom pressed his friend on how long it had been since he spoke with family members, his friend was unsure. The friend was convinced, however, that the family members had stopped talking to him or taking his calls and he suspected that they cut off his email as well.

Tom was unsure what to do. This was not the first time his friend seemed confused and forgetful. But this time the friend specifically asked Tom not to call his family since he was convinced they were cutting him off.

While Tom was pretty sure his friend’s family was not cutting him off and that there was a logical explanation, he wrestled with whether he should honor his friend’s request to not call his family or if he should go ahead and do so to ask them if all was OK.

If Tom planned to call the friend’s family in spite of his requests not to, the right thing would be to tell his friend that he was planning to do so. He could explain that he was concerned and was not willing to risk something going truly wrong at his friend’s house without his family knowing. Or if Tom did not believe his friend was at risk, he could do what he typically did in such cases and wait a few hours and then check back in with his friend.

Tom ultimately chose to do the latter and within an hour his friend called him back to tell him that the family member who usually checked in on him had just called to let him know that she’d been tied up tending to a friend who had a medical emergency. All was fine, Tom’s friend told him, and then he began to regale him with old stories from their youth as if nothing was wrong.

Tom honored his friend’s request not to get in touch with his family and all turned out OK-ish, but in cases such as this, Tom would do well to enlist the help of those in closer proximity to his friend if he believes his friend is in danger. Even if the friend is unlikely to remember Tom telling him he planned to call his family, Tom would still be doing the right thing by letting his friend know his intentions.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Before spreading stories, check the source

Is it OK to repeat someone else’s story if you’re not sure it’s true?

There’s an old story about Ernest Hemingway accepting a bet that he couldn’t write a short story in six words. The story goes that Hemingway responded by writing: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” It had all that was necessary for a moving tale suggesting loss and grief. It’s been held up as an example of Hemingway’s writing prowess even with a paucity of words.

The problem is that it’s highly unlikely Hemingway ever accepted such a bet or originated the words, a version of which appeared in 1906, when Hemingway was 7 years old. Nevertheless, it makes for a good story and still gets wrongly attributed.

I was reminded of the baby shoes story when I was contemplating writing a column about a story that I recollect my best friend telling me in the early 1990s, when he was furniture shopping for his studio apartment in Manhattan. As I recalled it, Jim told me that he purchased a small cabinet that he carried several blocks from the store to his apartment. When he got the cabinet into place and opened one of the drawers, he told me that it was full of stuffed animals. What I couldn’t remember was what Jim decided to do with the animals that were erroneously included with his purchase.

I can’t double-check with Hemingway to see if he made up the story about writing about baby shoes since he died in 1961. But I could check in with Jim, who is alive and well and now living outside Los Angeles.

I called Jim to ask him two questions. The first was whether the story actually happened or if it was a yarn he spun as he was settling into life in Manhattan. If it did indeed happen, I wanted to know what he did with the stuffed animals. That second answer could lead to a column about what to do when you find yourself being given more than you paid for.

Jim couldn’t recollect telling me the story. He did, however, remember all of the furniture he bought and carried home to his studio apartment, assuring me that the apartment wasn’t big enough to hold much. “I’m pretty sure that never happened,” he told me of the stuffed animals. We then figured it made for a good story about his adventure and he made it up.

That the story stuck with me is anecdotal proof that an incidental comment we make to someone might have more sticking power than we intend. Both Jim and I had experienced such yarn-spinning with old high school friends. We were both present when a mutual friend recalled something that happened to them in high school that actually had happened to one of us. This mutual friend presumably forgot that we were all there and knew the truth.

I could have written a column based on Jim’s anecdote. But checking with those who tell us stuff before we spread that stuff to others is the right thing to do. So too is returning stuff we didn’t pay for.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

It’s OK to say, 'I don’t know'

Is it wrong to pretend to understand something when you clearly don’t?

Many of the graduate students I’ve worked with over the past several years have arrived with significant professional experience in areas where often I have next to none. They signed up for the courses I taught because I happened to teach something in which they had no or limited experience.

Somewhere in the early days of the course, I typically remind the students of the fact that they know more than I do about what they’ve done prior to coming to school. But I go on to tell them that I am sort of like Liam Neeson’s character, Bryan Mills, in the movie "Taken," in that like him I have “a very particular sets of skills” that I have “acquired over a very long career.” The students sometimes will laugh (humor can be hard in any classroom), but they seem to get the point that I am trying to make: I know what I know, and I will not pretend to know things I don’t know.

When I am working with students who want to write articles for a general audience, I remind them that their audiences will often not know as much as they do about what they are writing. They must be able to write in a way to make things understandable enough to make their message clear.

Here, I remind them of a colleague I once hired to work as a content editor at a software startup. She once told me that she had no problem getting information from the software engineers by reminding me (and often them) that if the engineers couldn’t explain something to her, it was likely they didn’t understand it themselves.

Most of us find ourselves in situations from time to time where we simply don’t know something or understand something that someone is trying to tell us. If we don’t know the person well, the temptation might be to feign comprehension rather than to admit we haven’t a clue what they’re talking about. There are any number of reasons for having such a reaction. We might fear being judged as ignorant for not knowing something. Or our insecurities might kick in, making us want to appear more knowledgeable than we are.

There is, however, little upside to pretending to know something we don’t. By failing to acknowledge our ignorance, we risk never understanding whatever it was we pretended to know. We also risk sending a message that we’re capable of doing something when we have yet to understand what that something is. While an instructive YouTube video might help us in some cases to cover should we ever be asked to actually do that something, that’s not a reliable method toward understanding something.

The more honest and useful response is to acknowledge our ignorance. That doesn’t make us lesser or stupid or a failure. It simply acknowledges that we have the integrity to acknowledge when we don’t know stuff and the desire to want to learn more.

Telling someone we don’t know is not only the right thing to do, it gives that person the chance to share knowledge. If they can’t, then it’s likely they too don’t know.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Should we tell friends when we see old social media posts?

If you stumble upon an old social media post made by someone you know and it might prove embarrassing or harmful, should you alert them to your discovery?

Frequently over the past 20 years, when I’ve come across a Facebook post made by someone I know that might wreak havoc on their job search as they are about to enter the market, I’ve let them know.

Perhaps it was a relative who was a rising college senior who once thought it amusing to post a photo of herself chugging back alcohol at a party, but forgot the photo was there or didn’t give it much thought. My email might remind them that potential employers can scour the internet for anything about a prospective employee that might give them pause. Did they really want the chugging photo to be among the first things potential employers found when they did a search?

On other occasions, a friend might have thought it cool to post a profile photo of them pointing a handgun at the camera after having just taken a shooting lesson. When that same person was quite vocal about gun control on their social media feed, I might email to ask if they thought some viewers might not find the humor in their pose.

In such cases, the recipient of my emails could decide to keep the photos up. My goal wasn’t to police anyone’s activity on social media. They were just meant as a heads up in case they had forgotten they made the post.

When we post something on social media, we often post and forget about it. But what we post stays there, often for years and remains available for anyone who wants to find it.

I raise this issue now because over the past several months, I’ve had more queries from readers, former associates, family members or former students about how concerned they are about past posts somehow coming back to haunt them. There appears to be a warranted anxiety given some high-profile cases of graduate students in the United States on an international visa being targeted because of posts in their social media feeds or an op-ed they might have co-written for their campus newspaper. International students may be most vulnerable to repercussions. Nevertheless, the breadth of heightened anxiety seems wide.

The responsibility for what gets posted lies with the person who posted it. But if we come across something posted by someone we know that seems particularly incendiary, I believe the right thing is to alert that person.

When we see something, it’s not meddling to alert a friend. If someone reminds us what’s out there, the appropriate response is to thank them and to decide whether the post accomplishes what we intended or whether it’s time to take it down.

As long as we are not trying to harm someone, each of us should be free to post comments or to write pieces on issues about which we are passionate. But too many of us have been cavalier about what we post without being thoughtful or remembering that the Internet has a long memory.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.