On several occasions, friends have related unsolicited stories about their private lives. Three of them stood out in that the storytellers were proud of what they did, even though they seemed wrong.

One gentleman had a child-rearing story. His young boy wanted to go to sleep early one evening. The boy made the mistake of asking his dad to please turn down the television’s volume. The gentleman haughtily refused – it’s his house and he’ll listen as darned loudly as he wants to. Apparently the kid went upstairs to mope. There was no background given as to whether this was a frequent occurrence, or whether other little power struggles were occurring.

Another gentleman was a finance person in a company. He was aware of some major upcoming downsizing, and his coworkers were not. Apparently, one of them – a friend – was just about to buy a house, based on a false presumption of continued employment, but the first gentleman resolved to give no hint of the bad news. Thus his friend must have gotten into some trouble, and the gentleman’s corporate responsibility conscience remained clear.

Finally, another gentleman mentioned his way of dealing with sickness that travels home from his kids’ schools. He gets the first sick kid to deliberately infect the other kid by getting them to play closely together. The thought was that this would help the other kid build his/her immune system. Apparently, it was therefore frequent that the two kids were both sick as dogs. I no longer recall whether these bugs tended to spread to the adults too or not.

Question: am I mistaken in thinking that the actions being bragged about were kind of unfortunate? That perhaps they were trying to express shame by sharing?