I decided decades ago that I had no obligation to either answer door knocks/doorbell rings or a ringing telephone of any kind. If I don’t want to talk to whoever’s knocking or calling, I just don’t. If someone wants to get in touch with me and I don’t respond, they can leave a note on the door or a message on my phone line. This idea that one owes an immediate response was generated in the business world and bled over into our society. It happened so fast that realizing it had happened took a while, and by then the idea had become ensconced in daily life.
That doesn’t mean we all have to abide by it. Seems to me like a lot of folks have forgotten how to say “no.”
I decided decades ago that I had no obligation to either answer door knocks/doorbell rings or a ringing telephone of any kind. If I don’t want to talk to whoever’s knocking or calling, I just don’t. If someone wants to get in touch with me and I don’t respond, they can leave a note on the door or a message on my phone line. This idea that one owes an immediate response was generated in the business world and bled over into our society. It happened so fast that realizing it had happened took a while, and by then the idea had become ensconced in daily life.
That doesn’t mean we all have to abide by it. Seems to me like a lot of folks have forgotten how to say “no.”