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"That's Why You Don't Have Any Friends."

joethepeacock.blogspot.co.uk

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Re: "That's Why You Don't Have Any Friends."

#191

Post by gaius »

dools wrote: post #175

Good story. As a side note: why do men have to be so mind numbingly boring? I had the misfortune of hanging out with a bunch of guys I didn't really know recently and the talk was similar to that described here (sports, women, avoidance of anything actually interesting like religion or politics). It was so boring I just left and went back to work. As a gender, I think men have a lot to answer for in terms of conversa…

You're probably missing all the implied and non-verbal stuff. It was probably really a conversation about philosophy couched in allegories and metaphors.

Re: "That's Why You Don't Have Any Friends."

#192

Post by zashapiro »

I really love this story. It's so incredibly hard to see the forest for the trees when you're that age.

I love PG's notion that some kids are playing the popularity game and others are playing an entirely different game, because they're being individuals and are learning or pursuing something they want, regardless of popularity.

Re: "That's Why You Don't Have Any Friends."

#193

Post by base698 »

ef4 wrote: post #92
jenius wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I understand your point of view based on this one observation, I think this is a terrible idea if you look at the big picture. Whether they get bullied or not, high school is an extremely important time for kids to gain social skills and learn how to deal with people. Dealing with people is one of the most important skills you can have, period. And that often means dealing with people that are being dicks, and…

The thing is: school is nothing like the real world. It teaches you how to deal with school. School is a very weird, twisted little society where none of the work has any real point, there's no source of purpose other than pure social approval, and everybody is either the same age or an authority figure. The strategies you use for dealing with difficult people in the real world are completely different from what you…

"School is a very weird, twisted little society where none of the work has any real point"

Of course it has a point: learning. Whether it is successful in that end is up for debate :)

Re: "That's Why You Don't Have Any Friends."

#194

Post by foobaar »

iamsoreal wrote: post #137

This is a nice story but it makes everything seem too easy and I say this as someone who had a similar experience at secondary school. Even though it has been 7 years since it was over, I still relive it. I was rarely bullied but I was almost completely ostracised for two years of my life. Before these years I had only a few friends and acquaintances. It's difficult to pinpoint any particular reason, but it was proba…

I had to register just to point out how dead-on accurate you are.

I was never bullied either because I became an expert at never being noticed. Camouflage is a fine defense mechanism if you're an octopus, but a human can't live that way indefinitely at the cost of his own individualism. Sooner or later you'll want to be noticed by potential friends and by the opposite sex. That "hide in the shadows" mentality which kept you alive through high school will start to work against you and the world will seem much smaller, colder and meaningless.

Any success you have in life gets attributed to dumb luck. The mind kills any thoughts of pride in your work. You see no point in meeting new people because "they won't like me anyway" or "I just won't know what to say," which does nothing but fulfill your self-inflicted prophecy. You feel nothing but the lows in life; if you're like me, you may have used drugs to simulate the highs. Thoughts of martyrdom become common after a couple of years because if your life is going to be meaningless then at least your death shouldn't be. This kind of thought process takes years to form and unfortunately just as long to destroy.

And after you succeed, you're still left with lingering thoughts about how many years you've wasted and how you'll never get them back. That particular demon is a serious little fucker because it's rooted in truth. If you've made it this far, though, then you've already faced worse.

I eventually saw the problem and rooted it out, but many people never will. Hopefully this kind of discourse gets through to a few of them.

Re: "That's Why You Don't Have Any Friends."

#195

Post by huherto »

I am very late to this discussion, but I wanted to share my thoughts. I didn't like too much the advice of the article. I would have taken the opportunity to tell the kid about diversity, to appreciate the diversity of other people and specially his own. Observe that every body has strengths and weakness, that no one is perfect. Also, It can't be that everybody is an asshole. But even if they are, it is not his fault.

Re: "That's Why You Don't Have Any Friends."

#196

Post by xixi77 »

Aloisius wrote: post #153
abraxasz wrote: post #60

I like the article, a lot. But I have some reserve with the advice given. In my experience, many people would actually be glad to hangout with someone weird if he gives them some time to get used to it, and take it easy on the weirdness at first. I consider myself weird (my weirdness is that I mostly don't give a shit about conventional thinking and politically correct things. I just love a good argument, to the poin…

Being combative, antagonistic and argumentative doesn't make you weird. It makes you a bully.

I've met quite a few people who enjoy arguing about something far more than discussing favorite sports teams, or comparative benefits of different restaurant chains (eww!!), or the color of someone's socks (no, I'm not inventing this), or whatever their kids are doing in school. Of course you would want to stay away from idiots, but say OWS vs. libertarianism, or whether AAPL is a good investment, or pretty much anything else, is so much more fun to discuss with someone who disagrees.

Life would have been more interesting had this attitude been more common (interesting for people like us of course, for some others, probably supremely annoying).

Re: "That's Why You Don't Have Any Friends."

#197

Post by xixi77 »

lutorm wrote: post #100
roguecoder wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't necessarily help. I speak from experience: I was homeschooled and it was terrible. I didn't learn the 101 little tricks to make interacting with frustrating people that little bit easier, I didn't learn to empathize with people less smart than me and I didn't develop the social intelligence that I believe is vital for long-term success. Any time I had to interact with anyone I felt terrible and awkward and…

I was not home schooled (I'm not sure such a thing exists in Sweden) but before I started school, my grandparents took care of me while my parents went to work, so I didn't go to daycare or anything like that. Even these days into middle age I'm clearly more "socially challenged" than most people. I remember school being quite a shock to me, and I do think that it would have been useful to be exposed to more kids at…

There is definitely a pattern in these answers -- we see people who think they missed socialization because they were homeschooled, or didn't go to preschool like you, or those who didn't miss any of that and still didn't learn the "101 things".

My experience is somewhat similar to yours, but I think that this is an issue where some people are able just naturally learn how to recognize the social cues -- and do not have trouble at any point, and those who have no that ability or have it at a very low level -- and just "do not get it" until told explicitly. It does seem to be an in-born ability - the reason I got pulled out of the pre-school was partly because I couldn't get along with anyone there and hated every moment of it. I doubt any more of that exposure would have made anything better.

Re: "That's Why You Don't Have Any Friends."

#198

Post by xixi77 »

ef4 wrote: post #92
jenius wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I understand your point of view based on this one observation, I think this is a terrible idea if you look at the big picture. Whether they get bullied or not, high school is an extremely important time for kids to gain social skills and learn how to deal with people. Dealing with people is one of the most important skills you can have, period. And that often means dealing with people that are being dicks, and…

The thing is: school is nothing like the real world. It teaches you how to deal with school. School is a very weird, twisted little society where none of the work has any real point, there's no source of purpose other than pure social approval, and everybody is either the same age or an authority figure. The strategies you use for dealing with difficult people in the real world are completely different from what you…

This is so very true.

Re: "That's Why You Don't Have Any Friends."

#199

Post by danneu »

ScottBurson wrote: post #85
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #68

I'm about as asocial and celebratory of diversity as they come, and I love this essay, especially the conversational style. But I'd be careful not to take this argument too far into sophistry. In school people clan and desperately look for some identity to copy. This leads to all the terrible social behavior you see in most secondary and high school in the U.S. Somebody calling you "weird" can really be a badge of ho…

Yes, except that teenagers don't know who they are yet. They have to experiment, trying out various identities and behaviors until they figure out what fits them and what doesn't. So defining themselves in terms of others, whether by similarity or by difference, is to some degree inevitable. They do need to be encouraged to grow out of it, though, so your point is very valid.

Looking back on my highschool years and previous, my parents tried to encourage me to grow out of all sorts of phases.

They'd barrage me with empty platitudes like "just be yourself" when my primary frustration in life was that I didn't know who I was, or that being myself so far clearly led to nothing but social dejection. "Just be yourself" became an epithet that mocked me all day from the walls of halls and classrooms, often found block-lettered across posters of celebrities and eagles soaring over canyons.

It did nothing but make me feel like my parents were disconnected from my struggles, unhelpful in the same way "just go up and ask her out" fails to encapsulate dating. Convincing me that it really was that easy, sound advice for everyone in the world but me.

You grow out of phases by coming to terms with them yourself. It's how you evolve.

Re: "That's Why You Don't Have Any Friends."

#200

Post by xixi77 »

magv wrote: post #19

Is this a US thing? In Ukraine, no-one is weird. No-one is a geek, or a nerd -- there aren't even equivalent words in our language. Nobody thinks less of you if you're smart, shy, or talk about transistors on occasion. There are no "popular kids", and even the scariest kid in school is not a bully. So, again, what is wrong with US schools?

there may be no similar words, and indeed the social structure is different, so transistors would not get you into immediate trouble; but, my guess is that you have been rather lucky -- either due going to somewhat unusual schools, or due to not noticing what was happening around you.
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