Why do people find simple questions offensive?
To elaborate on BigSky’s response, which hit the nail on the head (all of this assumes you were replying to me. If not, please disregard)… “You’ve made up your mind that your whims are more important than other people’s needs” I’ve made no such decision and, in fact, you really don’t know anything about what is important to me or how I treat people. I’ve simply reminded you that this is not as clear-cut as your comment would seem to imply. Also, minor quibble, we’re talking about other people’s wants here, not their needs. Nobody “needs” not to be asked how much money they make. “Because that’s what I’m reading. I’m also reading that you don’t seem to think very highly of other people.” That’s an interesting appraisal. So wildly inaccurate that I wonder how you even came up with it, but interesting nonetheless. I’m “reading” that you like to exaggerate any perceived negative quality of the people who have a different opinion from yours.
A friend of mine holds that the taboo on asking about wages helps to maintain imbalances of wealth Of course, the same argument can be made in reverse. Talking about wages makes it easier to judge people (implicitly or explicitly) according to one artificial metric: a metric that is usually determined by someone else. It’s a taboo that absolutely deserves to be broken in certain homogeneous contexts — for instance, if you suspect certain groups of people are getting stiffed in an office environment. But imagine if there were one person who ranked everyone in the world, in hot-or-not style, on a scale that person never revealed. Asking someone where they ranked on that person’s scale would enforce a pecking order even though neither would necessarily know what justified the ranking. We all want to control the information that we divulge and on which people judge us, and don’t think that it’s unfair that one factor is the amount of control we exert over those bits of information.
