The current state of society is: “Ugh I can’t believe this cashier is talking about the weather when I’m in a hurry to get back on the internet to complain about how lonely I am and how hard it is to make friends and date.”
You’re probably joking, but know that there’s a subset of us that gets pathologically anxious and confused by small talk. Autistic people for example. Different folks, different strokes. Not everyone deals well with talking about the weather, and that’s ok. There’s billions who do deal well with it, and that’s ok too! Be a mensch and talk to them instead.
Oh I get it, I understand better than most, it’s why I make a pest of myself in these posts about the benefits of just talking to people.
It’s fine if you don’t like talking to strangers or making eye contact if you’re fine with your present social life. I am usually ragging on people about this because we’re also having some pretty serious issues with loneliness right now. And you don’t get from lonely to less-lonely by avoiding the things that make you uncomfortable.
I was non-verbal for a period as a child, deeply introverted, only recently diagnosed as on the spectrum though, particularly because when I was a child there was no real understanding of autism, so when taken to a doctor they just X-rayed my brain. I learned to adapt/mask but it took a long time for me to push through social discomfort and I also thought myself like many of the people in these posts who seem absolutely spiteful against people who try to strike up conversations with strangers. Again, it’s understandable if talking is uncomfortable for people, particularly if they are on the spectrum or have trauma, but we need to understand that social avoidance is an obstacle to overcome, not an identity to cherish.
Pushing through discomfort talking to people and actively making an effort to be open, to go ahead and babble nonsense, to stop being afraid of bothering people with my own autistic spiels or niche bullshit, I actually started to “get it” and understand how the game is played and from there only had strings of successes both personally and professionally. Meteoric at times.
It still took some effort, but took me until middle-age to unlock this skill-tree to even start trying to work on it, and I strongly feel like I could have had a much, much better life if I made that effort sooner, and if even one other person reading this sighs and says “Okay I’ll try speaking up at the next meeting” then I’ve done some good because I know their lives will improve if they stick to it.
I really think that a huge issue we’ve been having since the dawn of the internet is the perplexing effect that seems to impact a large portion of the population, where when they see someone suggest something, they take it as “being forced” and I cannot understand it. I can only assume that we grew up in very different environments and a lot of people aren’t really aware of their own agency.
Ah my bad, I thought you were complaining about people not wanting to engage in small talk, and I thought you were suggesting that people should just suck it up and talk about the weather even if they don’t want to. I’m a bad communicator, and I sometimes misread stuff like that.
my suggestion is that if you’re lacking in social contact, or even if you just want to open up more opportunities in either social life or professional, don’t “suck it up” and pretend, but learn to understand and appreciate how socializing works by engaging in it like a game, learning what’s actually happening in “small talk” and how to make people feel comfortable with you and gain emotional intelligence and empathy; qualities that most people look for in friends and romantic partners.
This is a severely neglected field of understanding for a lot of younger men right now and I don’t think we should be making whole communities that provide validation for people avoiding the discomfort and instead we should treat it like exercise and diet. We don’t exercise and diet because it feels good, we do it because the results are worthwhile. We tell people struggling with it “Just stick with it, it gets easier” and we treat that like good advice.
And again, it wouldn’t be such an issue if there wasn’t such a massive problem right now with social isolation. It’s a message of public health, not social conformity. If you’re happy as things are, nobody is forcing you to do anything, but if you battle depressive episodes or are lacking in relationships, if you don’t feel like you have people to talk to, if you’ve never had someone give you comfort and support and you would like that, well the good news is you can have that. You can have people in your actual, real life who care about you, which can then open up more opportunities. But it takes exercise.
I had a hard enough time accepting it* for myself, and I can’t expect a stranger on the internet to do so quicker than I did. I hope that some day you can reflect back on this conversation and realize you’re being a bit of a dick about this.
[*]“It” meaning the inability to shape my social life the way “normal” people do it, and simultaneously live a happy and healthy life, and that this is not something that can be medicated or exercised away
I really am glad to know that I’m coming off as a dick on this, that is my every intention, we need more people willing to break social convention and say “Hey this thing that makes you comfortable? It’s fucking your life up. Stop it.”
That’s what I’m doing, thank you for the feedback, if it’s not impacting you the way you want, I don’t really care because I do get enough positive feedback in other environments that I don’t feel I’m actually harming anyone by saying “thing you don’t like.”
We need to read more things we don’t like. We need to be challenged. We need to know we can change, we can hold others to this same standard too.
If we don’t, we’re going to lose thousands of years of progress as our species degrades further and further into isolated headspaces.
The current state of society is: “Ugh I can’t believe this cashier is talking about the weather when I’m in a hurry to get back on the internet to complain about how lonely I am and how hard it is to make friends and date.”
You’re probably joking, but know that there’s a subset of us that gets pathologically anxious and confused by small talk. Autistic people for example. Different folks, different strokes. Not everyone deals well with talking about the weather, and that’s ok. There’s billions who do deal well with it, and that’s ok too! Be a mensch and talk to them instead.
Oh I get it, I understand better than most, it’s why I make a pest of myself in these posts about the benefits of just talking to people.
It’s fine if you don’t like talking to strangers or making eye contact if you’re fine with your present social life. I am usually ragging on people about this because we’re also having some pretty serious issues with loneliness right now. And you don’t get from lonely to less-lonely by avoiding the things that make you uncomfortable.
I was non-verbal for a period as a child, deeply introverted, only recently diagnosed as on the spectrum though, particularly because when I was a child there was no real understanding of autism, so when taken to a doctor they just X-rayed my brain. I learned to adapt/mask but it took a long time for me to push through social discomfort and I also thought myself like many of the people in these posts who seem absolutely spiteful against people who try to strike up conversations with strangers. Again, it’s understandable if talking is uncomfortable for people, particularly if they are on the spectrum or have trauma, but we need to understand that social avoidance is an obstacle to overcome, not an identity to cherish.
Pushing through discomfort talking to people and actively making an effort to be open, to go ahead and babble nonsense, to stop being afraid of bothering people with my own autistic spiels or niche bullshit, I actually started to “get it” and understand how the game is played and from there only had strings of successes both personally and professionally. Meteoric at times.
It still took some effort, but took me until middle-age to unlock this skill-tree to even start trying to work on it, and I strongly feel like I could have had a much, much better life if I made that effort sooner, and if even one other person reading this sighs and says “Okay I’ll try speaking up at the next meeting” then I’ve done some good because I know their lives will improve if they stick to it.
It’s great that it worked out for you, and I’m happy for you, but we don’t need to force everyone to fit the same mould.
I really think that a huge issue we’ve been having since the dawn of the internet is the perplexing effect that seems to impact a large portion of the population, where when they see someone suggest something, they take it as “being forced” and I cannot understand it. I can only assume that we grew up in very different environments and a lot of people aren’t really aware of their own agency.
Ah my bad, I thought you were complaining about people not wanting to engage in small talk, and I thought you were suggesting that people should just suck it up and talk about the weather even if they don’t want to. I’m a bad communicator, and I sometimes misread stuff like that.
my suggestion is that if you’re lacking in social contact, or even if you just want to open up more opportunities in either social life or professional, don’t “suck it up” and pretend, but learn to understand and appreciate how socializing works by engaging in it like a game, learning what’s actually happening in “small talk” and how to make people feel comfortable with you and gain emotional intelligence and empathy; qualities that most people look for in friends and romantic partners.
This is a severely neglected field of understanding for a lot of younger men right now and I don’t think we should be making whole communities that provide validation for people avoiding the discomfort and instead we should treat it like exercise and diet. We don’t exercise and diet because it feels good, we do it because the results are worthwhile. We tell people struggling with it “Just stick with it, it gets easier” and we treat that like good advice.
And again, it wouldn’t be such an issue if there wasn’t such a massive problem right now with social isolation. It’s a message of public health, not social conformity. If you’re happy as things are, nobody is forcing you to do anything, but if you battle depressive episodes or are lacking in relationships, if you don’t feel like you have people to talk to, if you’ve never had someone give you comfort and support and you would like that, well the good news is you can have that. You can have people in your actual, real life who care about you, which can then open up more opportunities. But it takes exercise.
I had a hard enough time accepting it* for myself, and I can’t expect a stranger on the internet to do so quicker than I did. I hope that some day you can reflect back on this conversation and realize you’re being a bit of a dick about this.
[*]“It” meaning the inability to shape my social life the way “normal” people do it, and simultaneously live a happy and healthy life, and that this is not something that can be medicated or exercised away
I really am glad to know that I’m coming off as a dick on this, that is my every intention, we need more people willing to break social convention and say “Hey this thing that makes you comfortable? It’s fucking your life up. Stop it.”
That’s what I’m doing, thank you for the feedback, if it’s not impacting you the way you want, I don’t really care because I do get enough positive feedback in other environments that I don’t feel I’m actually harming anyone by saying “thing you don’t like.”
We need to read more things we don’t like. We need to be challenged. We need to know we can change, we can hold others to this same standard too.
If we don’t, we’re going to lose thousands of years of progress as our species degrades further and further into isolated headspaces.