Aint It Awful

[Moved from GamesPeoplePlay.]

A human interaction pattern.

Why Don't You, Yes But

A trivial but commonplace example of a "game" is lamenting that you have some problem, and then every time someone offers you a reasonable solution, you tell a reason why it won't work. "Why don't you try X?" "Yes, but I can't do X, because of Y." And on it goes, for many rounds, until everyone gives up.

At the social level, the person PlayingToLose? is a reasonable adult, soliciting advice about how to solve a tangible problem. At the psychological level, he's a child trying to get other people to act as parents so he won't have to take responsibility for himself.

A person who really wanted to solve the problem would use their ingenuity to get it solved one way or another. A person playing Why Don't You, Yes But is actually exploiting the problem, in a perverse way. He's enlisting other people's help rationalizing a position of "There's nothing I can do", for whatever social benefits this brings.