So glad to see such constructive and supportive reception of your stellar initiative. Half expected people to flame this kind of genuine reaching out for connection we can all (I hope) identify with, as somehow selfish. It is not, and this is a wonderful act of persona growth and humanity that should be more normalised. Well done.
Talking to strangers at the gym
511–520 of 810 posts
Re: Talking to strangers at the gym
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not saying this is you, but i've also ran into a lot of those people, almost always men, often in their late 30s or 40s, going around talking to everyone cracking jokes and thinking they're the live of the party, while everyone else is just silently annoyed by them.
> while everyone else is just silently annoyed by them And you know what everyone else is feeling how?
Appreciate this question. For a moment I was almost infected by the commenters miserly attitude
Re: Talking to strangers at the gym
#513One of the things I like about this is that OP is giving people genuine compliments without any particular agenda. It reminds me of one of my favorite parts of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, where he tells a story about complimenting someone, and a student asks what he was hoping to gain from offering the compliment. Carnegie is incensed: > I was waiting in line to register a letter in the…
Excellent passage.
As a society, we have a certain tendency to feel sorry for ourselves. If we have “social anxiety”, we like to give it a quasi-medical diagnosis. We rarely suspect that we may actually have something bad in our intentions. Many forms of anxiety are actually rooted in impure motives, especially when there is another part of us that conflicts with that motive. The conflict may result from a shred of conscience that enters into a tug-of-war with our impure motives. It could be rooted in a cognitive denial of those motives, as denial of truth can manifest in subconscious turbulence and nervous expressions of emotional energy. Perhaps we want to indulge those impure motives, but lack the chutzpah to do so, creating internal tension (the chutzpah would produce its own psychic anguish). Perhaps we’re selfish, but fail to recognize it. These sorts of things cause turmoil in the soul that can create anxiety.
Think of the “nice guy”. “Nice Guys” are some of the biggest assholes around. They’re two-faced schemers. A “Nice Guy’s niceness” is instrumental; he will be “nice” to a woman he finds attractive, because he has already imagined in his head that this will ingratiate him with her. He has already created a ledger in his mind: “if I am nice to this woman, then she is in my debt and now owes me the desired approval in return”. But the moment this woman fails to conform to the expectations of this “Nice Guy” is the moment his comes for his pound of flesh. You see the mask drop and his nastiness surface. The anxiety is rooted, among other things, in a failure to recognize the humanity and rights of this woman. For him, her meaning and her being are totally exhausted by his sexual desire, perhaps because he sees his own meaning exhausted by her approval, hence the apparent magnitude and terrific importance of her judgement. He wants to dominate by force or by manipulation rather than allow a woman to choose to surrender voluntarily, because she has determined this is good.
Magnanimity is one of the high virtues of classical virtue ethics - a sort of crowning culmination of them - and one of the features of magnanimous people is that they are at ease around others. It is well worth returning to this virtue ethics, because it does enlighten us about the nature of moral excellence.
Love is willing the genuine good of the other, unselfishly. There is no fear in someone of perfect love.
Re: Talking to strangers at the gym
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is why you should only give warranted compliments. You're right, telling someone bald that they have a great head of hair is not going to work well. Fortunately, virtually everyone has something you can compliment them about. Even if they're a surly old frumpy shopkeeper, maybe they keep their store super clean and organized. Maybe you're impressed by their loyalty to serving the community for so many decades.…
I guess I should edit it to just compliments are my biggest red flag, and it's born out of experience. These people are looking for something either now or in the future, and this bullshit false niceness is simply their way of cultivating a network of people that they can use.
I'm sorry that's been your experience. I don't know where you live; and I know this can be a cultural thing.
But in America at least, it's not usually bullshit or false. It's not a means to an end. I will compliment servers and cashiers and receptionist just because it makes everyone friendlier and we all enjoy our brief interaction more than we would otherwise. It would be nonsensical to say I was using them. For what?
I am aware that there are cultures out there where nobody does this and it is viewed highly with suspicion. It just makes me very happy I don't live in one of those places.
Re: Talking to strangers at the gym
#515If you want to talk to men at the gym it's easy and no need for awkward scripts. Just ask for a spot. Most guys will feel honoured to be asked as you're showing trust in them. They'll spot you and then just talk about lifting. I met loads of guys this way. Don't talk to girls you're attracted to, though. They can tell. If they want you to talk to them they'll give you signs. But that's a whole other thing. The bullet…
> Don't talk to girls you're attracted to, though. They can tell. If they want you to talk to them they'll give you signs. But that's a whole other thing.
What if you never receive any "signs", as far as you can tell? Should you never talk to girls?
Re: Talking to strangers at the gym
#516My advice is to go to nature and leave the built environment. You are anxious because you are living in an artificial environment which is not doing you any favors. When you arrive in a calmer place you will find different people and greater peace. Moving leaves, the sound of wind and birds, sunshine on your skin, fresh air, the smell of the earth after rain, distant views: these are things that make us feel happy and safe due to evolutionary affinity. You don't get them on a concrete cliff in an apartment or lifting in a room with commuter phone zombies and 'roid droids.
Re: Talking to strangers at the gym
#517> “do your hobby with other people, frequently”. I think it's decent advice, but from my experience, it can take years to make friends that way. I practiced various sports my whole life in the context of sport clubs (martial arts, climbing, snowboarding, swimming...). The way it worked for me is that after months, sometimes years of chitchatting with same people over and over, I barely made any good friends from that…
Often i sit around a coffee shop where i work frequently as a remote employee, and I think to myself, "there could be another person here that i have the capacity to be really good friends with but i will probably never know it." And I think about how that's probably true of other people in that coffee shop. The engineer in me wants to believe some technological solution to finding and connecting with potentially gre…
> there could be another person here that i have the capacity to be really good friends with but i will probably never know it.
I often have the same thoughts. There are many lonely people eager to make friends.
I used to live in NYC where I didn't know anyone. And I remember one evening at the coffee shop in Barnes and Noble, there were only two other people there, and we started to chat. Even though we had very different backgrounds, we started to hang out and became good friends (but lost contact since then unfortunately).
Sometimes it doesn't take much, just exchanging a few words. Forcing oneself to be a bit more social, without expecting anything, is probably a good habit.
Re: Talking to strangers at the gym
#518Last year I was living in a hostel (basically a very cheap hotel) for a few months. About a month in I realized I'd probably be stuck there for a while and started to make myself at home.
I started buying dishes for the shared kitchen. People kept "borrowing" them, so new guests would come, cook something, and have no fork. So I made sure there were always dishes.
The kitchen was a dreadful place. Deathly quiet. This strange tension in the air. Everyone was avoiding eye contact. There was a kind of toxic miasma about the place, and the unspoken agreement was to leave it undisturbed.
I, the heretic: I would greet people! I would greet people who were in the same space as me.
I am told this was considered normal, by our ancestors. In my case, it was partly "it's morally wrong not to greet them", and partly social anxiety around strangers. (In both cases, my autism ;)
So I solved that problem by just saying hello to everyone. I made the tension go away by saying hello.
Two weeks later I had like twelve friends. They started talking to each other, and a whole community formed in the kitchen. It was great.
I thought that was pretty cool. It also got me thinking about how, if I had been able to find a studio apartment or something, I might have ended up with zero friends instead.
In the context of the loneliness epidemic, I have to wonder if the shared kitchen is one answer. More precisely: the absence of a private one. (It sounds harsh, but the alternative... we are currently living through.)
I love this clip from the 90's TV show Northern Exposure on the same subject:
Re: Talking to strangers at the gym
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I avoided this book for a long time. for some reason I got it in my head that it's a sort of red pilled book that teaches you how to manipulate people. FWIW this book came out in the 1930s, long before "red pilling" was a thing. I've read it before and it's not about manipulating people unless you consider being a genuinely sincere person to be manipulative in some way. It's a good book, if a little outdated, and,…
My read on the book was "humans are really good at telling if you genuinely care about them or not and will respond well to that, so you should genuinely care about the people around you, and good things will result from that overall, especially if you're not super mercenary about it." Bill & Ted said it most pithily: be excellent to each other.
That's pretty close to "be like Keanu Reeves"!
Re: Talking to strangers at the gym
#520I feel, like a lot of 21st century life is trying to do things artificially. Going to the gym, talking to strangers at the gym, ... these are both artifical replacements for human activity that is missing. You go to the gym because your daily routine isn't active enough. You try to form friendships with strangers because your daily routine lacks real and fulfilling interactions with other people. Also it's kind of od…
Yeah I think this is everywhere in society now. For example, you used to have to ask others for directions, which naturally leads in to conversation about where your going.
Now you look like a bit odd if you ask for directions since everyone has a smart phone now. So you have to go create artificial scenarios to socialize.