And, for some reason, people become seemingly completely unwilling to learn-by-example any new-to-them soft skills, once they reach adulthood.
Or perhaps "lifelong learning of soft skills" is itself a soft skill that people aren't being taught.
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Anecdote: I was diagnosed/treated for ADHD as an adult, whereupon the "social soft skills" part of my brain suddenly started working like it never did through my childhood.
I went from thinking I was on the autistic spectrum, to noticing all sorts of new patterns while observing social interactions. I quickly realized that my capacity for social-skill learning had never been missing; but rather, the learning itself had just sort of been "paused", for lack of "voltage" in the right brain areas.
I did / am still doing a lot of delayed soft-skill learning as an adult. And it's really starkly obvious how much other people with me in the same situations, aren't deriving the same learning I do from those situations — even when those people are sorely lacking in the relevant social skill, but aren't otherwise socially unskilled. It seems like they just aren't bothering to look at the situation under the right "lens" to see the pattern, even though it's a "lens" they clearly possess.
Canadians are very nice, but their famous agreeableness (and passive-agressiveness) often prevents me from realizing when I've committed a transgression, and makes it so much harder to integrate into the culture.
Negative feedback is very useful and I would be grateful to get it instead of receiving a veiled response.
> if there are never any negative indicators that you are the problem, rather than everyone else… there is a mathematically insignificant chance you will ever realize something might be wrong
A lot of my self-improvement has come not because of explicit negative feedback, but through paying attention to people and reflecting on who I want to be in the world. That's not to say that any approach is generally superior. People have all sorts of ways of dealing with the world.