Current Events > Why do people get pissed when you uselessly mention someone's age?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Like, if you talk about some investment banker and mention that he's black, or if you tank about some guy on welfare and you mention that he's jewish.

I mean, it's true that it's useless information. It's not relevant to the story being told.

But what does it really matter?

I mean, useless information is useless, true, but it adds depth to the story. I mean, people like to picture a scenario so it's fun to have as many details as possible.

Like, if you want to tell a good story about a murder mystery, technically it doesn't matter one bit if the action takes place in the arizona desert or in the tundra in nunavut. But it's nice to mention it anyway even if it's useless information.

I remember in law school we had an exercise and we had to draft some legal proceedings based on the scrip of a conversation with a fake client. And they'd give some information like, on a morning in december he walked in a supermarket and slipped on the ice, etc. So you would draft the proceedings, and if you mention that it was morning you would automatically lose marks because it was not relevant that it was morning.

But when you tell story in real life, it's not like drafting a legal document where you get screamed at if there's even a slightly irrelevant piece of information being mentioned. You need to some flesh to the story to make it entertaining, which obviously is going to include useless information.

That's all there is to it, useless information is not meant to be offensive.
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