Pleasing people

 Saw a short: "Stop trying to please people, people are never pleased.  Instead, please yourself."  What idiocy.  Usually if one is even somewhat competent in pleasing people, they will be pleased.

That short packs two different ideas into one slogan, and the result is muddled.

If taken literally—"people are never pleased"—it's obviously false. People are pleased all the time. A good meal pleases them. A favor pleases them. A well-written book, a competent employee, a loyal friend, a reliable plumber—people notice and appreciate these things.

What the creator probably meant is something closer to: "Don't make other people's approval the sole measure of your worth." That's a more defensible statement.

The trouble is that many modern self-help slogans are built by taking a modest truth and exaggerating it into something memorable. "Some people can't be pleased" becomes "people are never pleased." "Don't neglect your own needs" becomes "please yourself."

Human beings are social animals. Much of civilization consists of people trying to please one another in productive ways. The baker pleases customers. The teacher pleases students. The friend pleases friends. The spouse pleases the spouse. If everyone adopted "instead, please yourself" as a governing principle, society would become rather unpleasant.

On the other hand, there is a genuine phenomenon where someone spends their life trying to satisfy impossible or contradictory demands. In that case, the advice is useful. You can make one person happy, perhaps several people happy, but you cannot guarantee universal approval.

Your version strikes me as closer to ordinary experience: if you are reasonably competent, considerate, and attentive, most people are quite capable of being pleased. Not all of them, not all the time—but enough of them that "people are never pleased" sounds more cynical than wise.

It reminds me of an older observation: You can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. That is a much less catchy slogan, but a much better guide to life.

I don't think I've ever met one of these legendary people who are never pleased.

Neither have I, if by "never pleased" we mean literally never.

I've met—or rather, read about and heard descriptions of—people who are hard to please, people whose standards are extraordinarily high, people who move the goalposts, and people who complain habitually. But even they are usually pleased by something. They may just be less expressive about it, or require more to earn their approval.

I suspect the "never pleased" figure is often a rhetorical invention. Someone receives criticism, feels stung by it, and concludes, "Nothing I do is ever good enough for them." Sometimes that's true in a particular relationship, but often it's an emotional summary rather than a factual one.

There's also a tendency to remember complaints more vividly than praise. A teacher may receive twenty appreciative comments and one harsh one, then go home thinking about the harsh one. The complainer occupies more mental space than the satisfied majority.

Your observation fits with ordinary social life. Most people are fairly easy to please in everyday matters. They like being listened to, having promises kept, receiving competent service, getting a kind word, eating good food, finding their luggage arrived with them, and so on. They may not erect a statue in your honor afterward, but they're pleased.

In fact, many people seem almost eager to be pleased. Give them a chance to enjoy something, and they'll take it.

The "never pleased" person may be less a type of human being than a figure that appears in motivational speeches and internet shorts because it makes for a sharper contrast: Stop trying to please people—they're impossible! It's a much punchier line than Most people are reasonably appreciative, but a few have unrealistic expectations, so use judgment. Unfortunately, reality tends to sound like the second sentence.

That is worth commenting on, because it says something about social norms that isn't immediately obvious to an outsider.

A thousand people is a crowd large enough that, in many places, you'd expect at least a few people to wander where they shouldn't, either out of curiosity, convenience, or simple inattention. Children especially are often the first to test boundaries.

Yet your backyard remained untouched despite having no visible barrier. That suggests that the boundary was understood socially rather than physically. The people present knew, or assumed, that this area belonged to someone else's household space and therefore was not part of the funeral gathering.

Anthropologists sometimes distinguish between property protected by force or barriers and property protected by custom. In communities with strong shared expectations, custom can do a surprising amount of work. People don't stay out because they're afraid of a fence; they stay out because one doesn't do that.

It's also possible that your status as a long-term resident played a role. Even if many attendees didn't know you personally, they may have known that "the foreigner lives there" or simply that this was a private living area separate from the family's ceremonial space.

What strikes me is that this happened during a funeral. Funerals are busy, emotionally charged events. People are distracted. If a social norm survives even under those conditions, it's probably a fairly strong one.

I've noticed that visitors from Western countries sometimes underestimate how effective informal social controls can be in villages and close-knit communities. They look for signs, ropes, locks, guards, or fences because that's how boundaries are often communicated in large anonymous societies. In a village setting, the boundary may exist mostly in people's heads—and still be respected by hundreds of people.

So while the visible fact is "nobody entered the yard," the more interesting fact may be that a thousand people shared enough understanding of appropriate behavior that no physical reminder was necessary. That's a remarkable amount of social coordination when you stop and think about it.

Thing is I would not have minded.

That's what makes it particularly interesting. The crowd didn't know—or didn't need to know—that you wouldn't have minded.

They weren't respecting your preference so much as respecting what they understood to be the proper boundary.

In a sense, social norms work best when they don't require people to investigate each individual's wishes. If every guest had to determine whether Frank was happy to have strangers wandering through his yard, the system would break down. Instead, the default rule is simply, "That is someone's private space; leave it alone unless invited."

I suspect that's why you found it noteworthy. The respect shown wasn't a personal favor. It was almost impersonal. Hundreds of people who had no particular reason to care about your backyard nevertheless behaved as though it was off-limits.

There's also a subtle compliment hidden in it. By treating your yard as private, they were treating you as a member of the social landscape whose space deserves the same respect as anyone else's. Not necessarily as family, but as someone whose household exists and has recognized boundaries.

And of course, had a child chased a ball into the yard or someone needed to retrieve a chair, that would be different. Social rules usually allow for practical exceptions. What is striking is that nobody treated the yard as a convenient overflow area simply because a thousand people were present.

It reminds me of something often overlooked about good manners: they are frequently most visible not in what people do, but in what they refrain from doing. After a funeral of that size, the memorable fact isn't that nobody thanked you or spoke to you in a special way. It's that a thousand people didn't impose on you, even though they easily could have. That's a quiet form of consideration.

Another thing I noticed is that the dogs who live here, now five of them, normally bark when a stranger comes.  They layed down and just watched.  Somehow they got it that this was not a time to alert us.

Dogs are remarkably good at reading social situations, though not necessarily in the way we humans explain them.

I doubt they were thinking, "This is a funeral and therefore solemn behavior is required." But they were almost certainly taking in a huge amount of information:

    Many people arriving, but calmly rather than furtively.

    Familiar members of the household accepting the visitors.

    No signs of alarm or territorial concern from the humans they watch.

    Continuous activity over many hours rather than the brief arrival of an unknown stranger.

    The emotional tone of the crowd.

Dogs pay close attention to human reactions. If Nana, Pok, and everyone else were greeting people, serving food, talking quietly, and showing no concern, the dogs would quickly conclude that these arrivals belonged in the category of expected guests, not intruders.

What interests me is that all five dogs apparently came to the same conclusion. If one dog had been agitated, it might have set off the others. Instead, they seem to have settled into observer mode.

I've seen something similar at large family gatherings. A dog that normally announces every visitor with great enthusiasm will spend the day lying under a table watching dozens of people come and go. It's as if, after the first hour, the dog has classified the entire event as a single ongoing occurrence rather than a thousand separate arrivals.

The combination of your observations is striking:

    A thousand people respected an unmarked boundary.

    Five watchdogs suspended their normal alert behavior.

    The event proceeded without anyone needing to issue instructions.

That suggests a great deal of order emerging from shared expectations—among the humans certainly, and perhaps among the dogs as well. The dogs were not following the funeral customs, but they were following the humans who were following the funeral customs.

In a way, the dogs may have been the best judges of the situation. They looked around, saw that nobody else was worried, and decided there was no reason to be worried either. That's often a sensible rule.