The benefits of staying off social media

No point triggering for the sake of it.

You need to bring the socially anxious person in a very easy enviornment.

A scenario in which they can easily "win" the social setting.

Like a pre-season friendly game against a minor league team. You put 30 runs on them, and of course you'll start the season full of swagger.

It's called the "winner effect"

Social anxiety is essentially triggered by not being in control of social outcomes.

Repeated winning outcomes do lower the need to be in control and thus should reduce anxiety

I grew up in NYC and have lived in a variety of places around the US.

To a certain extent, your observation about NYC is valid. But only to a point.

In NYC, if you're walking down the (very crowded) streets or on the subway, since there's so little personal space, it's considered rude to just stop and start talking to someone.

That said, if there's a reason to interact, most NYers are polite, pleasant, kind and helpful.

What's more, if you're in a situation that calls for it, you can have wonderful conversations with New Yorkers. I do it all the time. I just try not to invade the limited personal space of other people.

It's not that "small talk" doesn't exist in NYC, it's just that where and when such conversations happen differs from other places.

I've lived a a bunch of different places around the US, and there are significant differences as to the etiquette surrounding interactions with strangers.

It is a bit of culture shock though. I went to college in the midwest (Cleveland) and for the first month or so was quite taken aback by all the strangers who'd say hello as I walked by. I got used to it after a while.

I think it's more about introverts vs. extroverts.

As an extrovert, I'll pretty much talk to anyone, anytime. In fact, I pretty much never shut up.

OTOH, a goodly number of those who spend a lot of time online are introverted or just misanthropic.

As such, if you ask a lot of folks who are online, you're more likely to get responses like "Why would you want to talk to someone else?" because the folks who actually like interacting with other humans in person are doing that instead.

That's more anecdotal experience and reasoning to consider.

Edit: As tomjen3 pointed out[0], it's not just introverts and misanthropes who are uncomfortable talking to people IRL. Folks with social anxiety disorder and other issues are also in the mix too. Thanks for bringing that up, tomjen3!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29151887

Someone asks me something at a bar? I’m a total chatterbox, but I can’t recall a time where I ever started the conversation. The problem is, people don’t usually start conversations with me. I’m 6’4, huge, and a dude. I’ve non-ironically thought about getting a shirt made saying "ask me anything" and wearing it in a public setting.

One of the most fun things I can recall doing in recent memory was going on a pub crawl in Japan in spring 2019 (feels like a lifetime ago). I was vacationing alone after a business trip, and I just decided to sign up for a foreigner-aimed outing. An "all pretenses dropped, you’re coming here to meet and chat with other people" kind of trip. I had an absolute blast. The mix of people was like 60% foreigners and 40% locals. Didn’t really meet anyone I continued further communication with after the event, but it’s a fond memory. Didn’t manage to work up the courage to do a US based one when I got home, and the pandemic started 8 months later.

It really boils down to in my mind, where do I meet people around my age? All my current friends are people I knew in college and we all do a nearly-every-night discord meetup where we talk about life and play games. It certainly doesn’t provide the same happy brain chemicals that doing literally the same thing but in person did when we were all in college, buts it’s kept me sane for the last 5 years.

College was such a different social experience. I wasn’t top of my class grades wise, but I always got top marks in computer science and computer engineering courses. I also had a healthy amount of personal projects on the side. I ended up with this reputation on campus for being able to help with any of the computing classes, and I was always a firm believer in ‘master through teaching". I considered helping other people as part of my own learning process. For anyone who seriously wanted help, you could always reach out to me. I even gave supplemental talks for particularly rough classes during our ACM weekly "coffee and code" meetings.

Needless to say, this made me fairly popular on campus. I knew a lot of people and counted many of them as friends. The group was fairly diverse, both ethnically/culturally and by gender. We ate dinner together, met up and played games, built things, etc. it was a fantastic time of life. But there was one underlying thread - I had never actually initiated a random conversation. Every person I count as a friend today had either looked over my shoulder and was curious about what I was working on, was someone who asked for help in a class, was introduced by a mutual friend, etc.

That period ended 5 and a half years ago when I graduated and started working for a tech company you’ve definitely heard of. Things have been rough since then. I moved to SoCal because of the office I was working in. Only two of the people I knew from college went to SoCal, some moved out of state, the others moved to the Bay Area. I’m about to lose the people in SoCal, as they’re moving out of state to further their careers elsewhere. Now I'm weighing whether or not I should quit a job I actually like in exchange for moving closer to the people I know and a job that's an unknown.

That just doesn't happen in New York. Maybe that's due to space constraints, but it's not like I'm blocking the flow of traffic more or less when I talk to someone on a bus.

I like New York a lot, but this sort of small talk with strangers is absolutely something I miss.