this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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"How are you," is one of those loaded questions I never know how to answer.
Is it part of a greeting? Do you genuinely want to know? Do I lie and keep the peace, or do I open up and bring you down?
Anyway, I'm doing fine, how are you?
"I'm alive" is an appropriately ambiguous answer, imo.
Living the dream
Translation: existential woe, thx for asking
Same old, same old
Translation: still stuck in some horrible cycle
How's it going?
It's going.
Translation: I'm like 3 bad days away from totally losing it.
The longer the ooooh at the front the less time you got
Another day in paradise.
Translation: Fuck this world and everything in it.
How's it going?
Good, good, how about you?
Translation: Let's not talk about my shitty life.
It’s a greeting, and an invitation to open up if you like.
I’m autistic and I get this. You can learn this stuff. Just respect we’ve got a culture here. Obviously “How are you?” is a symbolic hello.
It's like a health check. When you hit /api/health/ it probably doesn't report all the details like number of users created today, count of files in the S3 bucket, whatever. It checks that shit's basically working, it heard your request, and now everything is 200 OK.
(No, you can't return a 204 no content in this metaphor because that's not what the client is expecting. If they don't get a 200 back, they're going to think something is wrong and investigate.)
I'm just assuming some of you are like backend developers and this metaphor will make sense to you.
How do I return a 403 to the person asking
I prefer the 418 response
"I am not allowed to tell you"
Maybe they're shy and don't complete the sentence. They wanna know "How are you so handsome?", but don't dare to ask such personal questions.
That sounds like an accusation against either your intelligence, or your standing in life.
the answer is always "fine" and possibly a "how are you?".
"How are you?", is basically an open question of "what have I done lately? where am I headed?" It's an invitation to politely level some burden at least, but this also includes taking in some burden of the friend.