If you’re in a sufficiently technical discipline, requiring any kind of higher education, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard “oh, you’re a(n) $x$? I could never do that!” or “you do $y$? I hated that in school!”—you’ve probably memorized the many little complaints that people have about your particular field (e.g. for math “I hated it when they added letters” and the like), prepared answers for potential interlocutors, and/or tried to find new methods to steer the conversation away from how much somebody hated it. Sure, this beats somebody saying that they outright hate the field—climate scientists and anyone doing anything related to vaccine development probably get this the worst—but it’s annoying, a bit of small-talk that you and I wish people would avoid.

The first thing to mention here is that, chances are, your partner in conversation is complementing you, or at least acknowledging that what you’re doing is difficult.¹ Such remarks don’t make for great complements, but most people—particularly neurotypical people—just don’t know that.² There are some tried and untrue methods for countering this, namely saying “oh it’s not that hard” or “well I hated $\text{whatever job you do}$ in school.” The former sounds condescending, even if you’re just trying to tell someone that they, too, could learn about what you’re doing, and the latter just repeats the cycle over again.

At its core, the whole meme of “I hated that in school” is the social equivalent of the sidewalk shuffle, the terrible little tango you engage in with somebody who just happens to be crossing your exact path while you’re walking. If you choose to engage with this, both you and the person you’re talking to look like idiots. Yet, it is similarly unavoidable—somebody will say something about how much they hate, say, physics, math, or biology, and somebody will come careening towards you on the street.³