I decided to be nicer to people in order to make more friends. I realized that most of them are boring and shallow and talking to them is waste of time and energy.
Basic Social Skills Guide
191–200 of 283 posts
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fundamentally disagree with this, and especially people who need the website should not follow your advice. Sometimes in life you just have to do stuff, even if you hate it. These things also have a tendency to become easier the more you do it, so advising people to just not do it seems horrible advice. Not showing up to a funeral of someone you were close to just because of your own discomfort is plain weird.
Not really. I've been to many funerals and I dont want to go to many more. You gotta learn that self preservation is more important sometimes.
Correct.
Sometimes.
Not for funerals of people you knew well.
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide
#193> Watch TV with the sound low and study the body language of the actors until you can recognize comfort and discomfort.
Bad advice. Actors don't mimic reality. Actors mimic what viewers expect to see in actors. This means that the body language you see in actors and the language you see in real life are different.
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide
#194Mask every day. Life goal: Be 100% artificial person. All openings and responses must be calculated and faked. Your inner self is faulty and not appropriate at any situation. Once you train and work hard enough to suppress it at all times forever, you may be accepted and allowed to participate.
> All openings and responses must be calculated and faked
Thinking about the things you say isn't faking it - it's just using your brain and being considerate.
If you just blurt out anything with no filter, that doesn't make you authentic, it usually makes you an asshole.
Not all thoughts are productive, many are bad and many are stupid. You should delete those or revise them. Not only when talking to other people, but even to yourself.
I can tell myself that I'm dumb or I'm fat or whatever, but that isn't true and just because I thought it doesn't mean I have to internalize it. No, I filter those thoughts, I tell myself "that's not true". Over time, I think them less.
Your own brain is not reliable. It does not operate on truth, or what is or is not productive. So tune it. Not for the sake of others, but for yourself too.
Being an asshole to others is bad, but being an asshole to yourself is arguably worse. The goal is to, overtime, build better thought procedses and mental models. Not to fake it.
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide
#195I've found that no mater what country I've been to, or what social classes the people belong to, three topics have a 95% success rate when it comes to social relations with guys: sports, cars, fishing/hunting. And to some degree handywork. It is a bit unfortunate, as I'm not at all interested in talking about those things - but they are such staple topics, that you can come off as a sort of outcast if you can't keep…
In my country (western Europe) talking about hunting/fishing would put get you side looks and take you for a very rural or conservative weirdo. Sports and cars is more common with the older generation, but anyone below 35 will probably be uninterested, unless your circle is finance or blue collar work.
Is this a function of Western Europe, or an urban area? There’s quite a bit of hunting and fishing in rural Western Europe…
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do people talk about in your country?
I guess the general stuff is movies, Netflix shows, music, your last short weekend trip, and pretty much everyone has their own personal non work thing, usually attached to a club or group (hiking, photography, whatever). I guess in that last category sports are commonplace, but it’s more “I’m training for a marathon next month” or “you should come bouldering sometime” rather than following professional sports on tv.
This sounds like it’s particular to your friend group rather than some coarse regional geography. If you toss a rock in Western Europe, you’ve got a better chance of hitting a football fan than someone who wants to go bouldering or train for a marathon.
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide
#197Mask every day. Life goal: Be 100% artificial person. All openings and responses must be calculated and faked. Your inner self is faulty and not appropriate at any situation. Once you train and work hard enough to suppress it at all times forever, you may be accepted and allowed to participate.
> All openings and responses must be calculated and faked Thinking about the things you say isn't faking it - it's just using your brain and being considerate. If you just blurt out anything with no filter, that doesn't make you authentic, it usually makes you an asshole. Not all thoughts are productive, many are bad and many are stupid. You should delete those or revise them. Not only when talking to other people, b…
> Thinking about the things you say isn't faking it - it's just using your brain and being considerate.
I guess what gets me with this stuff is that there are multiple things going on that are getting conflated. Considering your words is pretty straightforwardly good, it's learning to not say things you yourself wouldn't have wanted to say.
But then this stuff tends to show up in the context of work, or business, and it starts turning into selling. You are the seller, the other people are buyers. Buyers have no expectations on them, they react as they react and they want what they want. The seller must contort themselves to please the buyer and then close a sale to get one over the buyer. And this is where it gets corrosive for me. It feels like there's no common ground being built, the relationship is adversarial in both directions, and both sides are a bad model for a person to be. People are being split into feckless buyers who express immediate wants and judgments with no thought or development, and conniving sellers whose main order of business is to get themselves in front of the buyer and get noticed, no matter what the real value of what they are offering is. People might make money if they internalize this system and get good at it, but are they going to make lasting friends?
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, you've had a very different experience, and apparently met very different people (or at least saw different sides of them). I have never discussed those things with my friends or acquaintances anywhere in the world, across many countries... I don't know anything (or care about) any of them, so I suppose I self-select out of those groups. The people I end up bonding with (all over the world) are usually because o…
Hunting/fishing are one type of "outdoor stuff".
Indeed
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a popular approach these days, but you’re absolutely right. This is an example where setting healthy boundaries has veered into hiding away from life and avoiding hard, messy human things.
I had my fair share of hard messy human things and I distance from that. Self preservation is more important than some official gathering.
You can live your life however you like, but dealing with hard messy human things is part of being a functioning adult in society. At some point if you can't grow up and learn to control your expression of emotion then it really limits your options. This is something you might want to work on, perhaps with professional help.
Re: Basic Social Skills Guide
#200I've worked with lots of folks on the spectrum and to be honest it's more fun dealing with them as team members rather than "normies". One guy particularly stands out, he joined the team and started off on a solo run with a couple of projects a few others were involved in. A few weeks later I asked him if he'd setup any meetings with the team to get context and, you know, say hello and his response was "why should I…
it really bothers me when people try to assert people aren't actually neurodivergent/disabled because they dislike the person, and seem to want to further justify their dislike on a personal level instead of having compassion for the fact that they're actually disabled. i think people feel the need to assert this because they know they'd be an asshole to dislike someone for refusing to stand up and walk if they were wheelchair bound, so it's easier to pretend they don't actually need the wheelchair and are faking it.
the other point to this being frustrating is you're asserting she wasn't neurodivergent and then go on to describe some hallmark characteristics of neurodivergence. emotional regulation is one of the biggest challenges for people with ADHD and autism, and emotional outbursts and control of mood/emotions are exactly why neurodivergence is so incredibly difficult for so many people.