A worry is not an argument

A daughter in Muscat tells her father she wants to leave her job at a bank and open a small interior design studio. He has reasons against it, and he sets them out over dinner.

The market is crowded, he says. She checks, and it is not; the studios he has in mind closed years ago. Fine, he says, but designers do not earn well. She shows him what her friends charge. Then it is the hours, then the clients, then the economy, and each reason shifts a little as he says it, so that by dessert "risky" means something quite different from what it meant at the start.

None of it holds. None of it is really the point.

An argument has a shape. It rests on things that are true. It follows from them in the world as it is now, not the world of twenty years ago. Its words mean the same thing at the end as at the beginning. With those in place, two people can disagree well and both leave with a clearer picture.

What her father has is not an argument. It is fear. He is frightened she will give up the safe salary he worked hard to help her reach, and no figure she produces will settle that.

The fear is real, and it deserves to be heard. It also works far better said plainly. "I am scared for you" opens a conversation she can answer. A line of reasons that keeps moving only gives her something to beat.

A great deal of what passes for debate, at home and at work, is a feeling wearing the clothes of logic.

Better to say the feeling out loud than to borrow the costume.