I have made a lot of money in my life because people don’t want to look things up. They just don’t do it. They love not doing it. If I could abridge human society with a single action it’s not looking it up.

I can email a client a report, no more than 6 sentences in 3 paragraphs with a bold “please forward this to the auditor” at the end and they won’t do it. It’s in between them and making money, by the way. It’ll still take 3 weeks to send over.

Earlier this year I was inviting people to something. They’d ask “oh, when is it?” and I’d send them an image of the original invitation which had a location and time on it. I followed up and they still ask “oh, when is it?” or “where is it?” Sure, it had the name of the place instead of a street address, but you can simply type it into a gps and find it which is what I did for them.

This is a 1 step process based off of an original document that was designed to be understood and they still needed help.

You can’t motivate them with money to stop doing it. You cannot make information easy enough to access. They simply need to ask you the same way they need food and water.

>“How can you possibly Google ‘when does [insert town name] pharmacy close’ wrong?”

TBF with the state of Google it’s pretty easy to get bad results.

Annoying, sure. But also not really surprising. At this point I’d probably trust the word of a random stranger on the street over whatever slop the Goog is churning out.

The trick is to give them wrong info. They’ll eventually stop asking. They’ll also think you’re a complete dumbass, but I find the hit in reputation a very small price to pay for not being bothered by inane questions.

Sometimes, when it’s part of a leisurely interaction with someone close to you, asking someone to explain something (even if it’s simple) can be a way of saying “I trust you and like your take on things” and signalling that they prefer to interact with you.

But if it’s calling you up at random times for something that replaces eberyday functionality, that is codependent and burdensome.

older sibling did it to me a lot. i started responding with shortened letmegooglethatforyou links. she eventually stopped.

Yes, because it’s me. I’m the brother.

I do it to my wife a lot. I’d rather ask someone I trust rather than run the question through a search engine. It’s a response to the enshitification of search engines and just the Internet in general.

Something like local pharmacy hours I’d look up if she didn’t know.

make shit up like an LLM that doesn’t know. “the [insert a similar town name in a neighboring state] pharmacy closes at 9:45 PM”

if asking you is faster, just make it not faster?

Victims of rabies are said to fear water, but in actuality it’s due to the pain of swallowing. Water makes them think of taking a drink, and it hurts.

Likewise it took me a while before I realized I stopped reading because my eye prescription needed updating.

I think some people hate using search engines but are not conscious of it. It’s too overwhelming and doubt-inducing. If you tend to overthink, then a search engine is a nightmare. But that gets reduced down to “it’s faster to ask you” because how do you really explain the truth of the matter? I say this as someone who is also asked a lot of questions like this, but I’m fine with it.

I just say idk and let myself be known as the guy who only has highly specific knowledge that you didn’t need or ask for

I like people asking me easy questions like that.