"It could have been the case that the words are decoration and only the intent of the speaker matters, or that your own definition of your interests was to some degree silently encoded in the phrase, either of which would have addressed my objection. Instead, apparently the burden of interpretation falls to me. What guarantees do you have that my assessment of your interests is going to be anything like what you expect? I'm not necessarily thinking about myself in particular, here - my genius is decidedly not of the interpersonal variety, but I get by - but if you'd thrown that instruction set at someone who happened to have a conflicting cultural background, or a patronizing authoritarian streak, or who was just very very bad at guessing what other people want, it could've ended poorly for you."