I, personally, cannot imagine any question to which I would get a more valuable answer from a 28-year-old software engineer in California interested in finance, men's fashion and weightlifting than I would get from my wife, family, friends and peers -- people who know me; whose lives actually overlap with mine in some way. What is "telling it like it is" if you don't share the same context? How likely is it he can pick up on something you should really know (like: "you interrupt women more often than you do men") if all he knows about you is what you've told him?
I imagine myself paying $10 and asking "hey, what do you think of my outfit tonight?" And he would kindly inform me that my chances of scoring (or whatever they call it these days) wearing these sandals, hiking pants (pull these zippers and they become shorts!) and grey kinda stretched-out long-sleeve t-shirt are next to zero. But my Friday night activity was going out with my wife, toddler & 5-year-old to have dinner with a bunch of retired English expats in the middle of nowhere in central France. I sat next to a guy who was a large-scale industrial engineer back in the 70s -- extracting helium & natural gas in communist Poland, in Iran when the Shah fell... And my little ones had great fun racing around and then choosing the winning tickets for the lottery.
But: there are plenty of people in this world (or at least in the more Californian parts of this world) who share his particular little slice of the human experience, who are a bit less far along than he is, perhaps, in figuring out who they are and who they want to be, and who have not yet built any meaningful friendships.
(It seems like it should go without saying: if you have built a meaningful relationship with someone who cares about you and has a bit of wisdom, they will find a way to tell you the things you need to know with no brutality required. You will also do this for them.)
I imagine myself paying $10 and asking "hey, what do you think of my outfit tonight?" And he would kindly inform me that my chances of scoring (or whatever they call it these days) wearing these sandals, hiking pants (pull these zippers and they become shorts!) and grey kinda stretched-out long-sleeve t-shirt are next to zero. But my Friday night activity was going out with my wife, toddler & 5-year-old to have dinner with a bunch of retired English expats in the middle of nowhere in central France. I sat next to a guy who was a large-scale industrial engineer back in the 70s -- extracting helium & natural gas in communist Poland, in Iran when the Shah fell... And my little ones had great fun racing around and then choosing the winning tickets for the lottery.
But: there are plenty of people in this world (or at least in the more Californian parts of this world) who share his particular little slice of the human experience, who are a bit less far along than he is, perhaps, in figuring out who they are and who they want to be, and who have not yet built any meaningful friendships.
(It seems like it should go without saying: if you have built a meaningful relationship with someone who cares about you and has a bit of wisdom, they will find a way to tell you the things you need to know with no brutality required. You will also do this for them.)