Let's consider the Slavs strictly

Demographic problems of cities are the most exciting section of urban studies textbooks. It turns out that the population of megacities around the world is maintained at a constant level precisely thanks to migration from small settlements. This happens because in the second or third generation, city residents practically stop having children. Textbooks call fresh migrants from villages a marginal population (nothing personal, just a term) because they participate significantly less in the public life of the city: they donate blood less often or donate money to charity, do not take advantage of foreign language courses and ignore lectures at the Polytechnic Museum. Only their children are starting to do all this, but they no longer ensure the reproduction of the population.

Of course, in Moscow these processes are more pronounced than in other large cities of Russia. As a result, there is a huge market for rental housing here: when an only child has a dad, mom and two sets of grandparents, he usually has something to rent. Since there are also a lot of people who want to rent housing, both parties begin to carefully choose with whom to deal.

We, of course, are ideal tenants: a married couple from St. Petersburg, with higher education, without children and animals. All the landladies (I wonder why women always do this?) immediately take a deep liking to us. Thanks to this, we can pick and choose our options; in particular, immediately refuse all announcements with the wording “we will consider strictly the Slavs.” This monstrous phrase, a violation of the Russian language and common sense, is contained in 90% of all advertisements.

We both have editorial experience, and so this formulation is deeply disgusting. Practice shows that one should not enter into commodity-money relations with people who do not know how to formulate their thoughts to such an extent. Because in reality, of course, the owners of the apartment are completely indifferent to how much Jewish, Tatar and other blood I have. They may want the apartment not to be torn to pieces; so that they pay for it on time; so that noisy parties are not held in it; so that no more than two people live in it; Yes, even if they want the tenants to remember by heart Tatyana’s letter to Onegin. The owner has the right to make any wishes, but why can’t he formulate exactly what he needs and write in the ad?

The prevalence of this cliche speaks not so much of xenophobia as of a global reluctance to think about and formulate demands. A family of doctors, for example, from Georgia would probably please a landlady more than, say, a family of builders from Bosnia and Herzegovina, but for this you need to think about the text, and it’s difficult and unnecessary to think when you can endlessly broadcast an unsuccessful cliché from one ad to other.

If we're going to make unjustified generalizations, here's my version. The main problem of our society is that no one knows how or wants to formulate their wishes. This is why people get bullshit all the time. This is a problem not only for landladies, in whose apartments purebred Slavs make a mess, although the goal was to avoid making a mess. This is also the cause of most conflicts in family life: usually a person reports that he is not satisfied with some unclosed cap from a tube of toothpaste not when he sees it for the first time, but when he has observed it for three years old and is already ready to kill everyone for this cap. All this would be funny if the reluctance to formulate requirements did not affect work issues - but it is constantly present there too! "Let's make a program." - "Let's. Which one? - “Well, some kind.” - “Here, we did it.” - “No, this is absolutely not what was needed!” In real teams I know, creating something that is not needed later takes from 20 to 80% of the working time. This figure depends precisely on the ability of the person setting the task to formulate it correctly.

It seems that this is not taught at all in school. The only subject that comes to my mind is programming. But already in the early 2000s it was transformed into computer literacy, and, of course, this valuable subject no longer teaches how to set problems at all. MS Excel still understands us much better than real people.