Oct 17, 2026
“What is your biggest weakness?”
That’s the bullshit corporate interview question which when asked, forces me to lie in great detail.
I’m a bad liar and I have to vent somewhere so I’ll do it here.
It’s the inability to take criticism.
Criticism is a rather vague term so I’ll start by defining it. Criticising someone is the act of pointing out their flaws. This often entails the presupposition that I am correct and that they are wrong. Therefore, criticism assumes that I have the authoritative position within that situational domain.
For example, if you were to tell another person that they were being impolite to their parents, you would be assuming that your moral framework between a child-parent relationship is superior to theirs. This is why in Korean culture it is especially frowned upon to criticize your elders. To elaborate, it is not allowed within Korean customs to tell your elders that that’s not how one should conduct oneself at the dinner table, but if the roles were reversed, everything would be normal. This is because it is socially established that the elder’s moral hierarchy has authority over the younger one. If I were to criticise how my grandparents ate food at the dinner table, I would be assuming that I know more than them about how people should behave when eating.
That’s how I looked at criticism when it came to interpersonal relationships. If someone were to correct me on how I treated others, then they would be asserting authority over my hierarchy of moral values and assume that they were superior to me in some ways, which I took great offense to. The fact that I took offense to people thinking they were superior to me in some ways didn’t mean that I thought I was superior to everyone in all ways. It was because I wanted friendships to be a non-hierarchical relationship where no one had moral authority over one another.
In fact, most of my conflicts in my interpersonal relationships in university were caused by this core belief that I held.
When a friend would tell me that I should swear less, I would be offended.
When a friend told me that the way I eat food is disgusting, I would be offended.
When a friend told me that I was rude to the receptionist, I would be offended.
Well I found out pretty recently that that is a retarded way of looking at criticism. Although it is certainly the case that criticism often presupposes a superiority in their moral framework, there often rests a heart-warming memo underneath.
In August this year, I was in the car with my mom and she kept shouting slurs at me. I told her that this is not how she should talk to me, and she responded by saying “너 지금 나 가르쳐?” which translates to “You Dare teach me something?” which sparked an epiphany within me.
In many instances, people criticise others because they wish that the other person were to amend their conducts, solely because they think that the amendment will lead to a healthier relationship. The latter part of the last sentence is key – they aspire to a healthier relationship. If someone criticises you, oftentimes they are signaling to you that this relationship is valuable, and they wish you changed small aspects of you so that the relationship doesn’t perish. That is the hidden memo underneath criticism – a sprinkle of heart-shaped confettis.
Lastly, criticism doesn’t require the toxic ingredient of authority. Criticism is often a mere reflection of their desire for you to change irrelevant to whether they think that they are objectively right or wrong. To use a concrete example, when someone points out a “flaw” within you and says something like “you shouldn’t talk to me like that”, they aren’t expressing a moral judgment that the way you are speaking is objectively wrong. They are telling you that they find it distasteful for you to speak like that to them so that you are aware of how you made them feel, whilst secondarily hoping that an amendment in your behavior is made so that they don’t feel uncomfortable
____________________________________________________________
Jesus, that was a long write. I was going to re-draft this because I don’t like how the last 2 paragraphs flow but I’ll just stop writing cuz I’m too tired.
I just re-read everything from top to bottom and this writing sucks. Apologies for making you guys read slop like this.
I recently read a little bit on Greek philosophy and how people thought that morality is deeply tied to knowledge and wisdom rather than inherent malicious evil. This article was supposed to convey the message of why I subscribe to that view.