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Intentionally making close friends

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Re: Intentionally making close friends

#251

Post by throw903290 »

spyckie2 wrote: post #227
tinglymintyfrsh wrote: post #89

Disclaimer: no unsolicited advice please. I'm old(er) mid-40's, single, no kids, and never married. I don't have much family or close friends. Hookup culture is de rigueur but it doesn't interest me. Where I'm at, there isn't a context to meet people and most random people in public around keep to themselves and treat me like I'm invisible. I do volunteering but that also doesn't go anywhere. If you have to constantl…

Some people are too, too risk averse. They subconsciously avoid, not just pain, but the possibility of discomfort. It's not just one or two actions - it's their filter that they see the world through. Pain avoidance is often disguised as disinterest, but really it's just a cost function to minimize the possibility of feeling embarrassment, awkwardness, discomfort, heated discussion, or emotional distress. Sometimes t…

You obviously care about your friend, but I do not think you really understand his position.

For some people company is "nice to have", something like owning a sports car. Maintaining friendship costs energy and has real risks (being used, emotional blackmail...). And benefits for short, obese, bald guy are really not that great.

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#252

Post by afr0ck »

valarauko wrote: post #135
afr0ck wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It breaks my heart to see Western people living such lives. I love the West for so many reasons, but the social construction is a complete broken mess. Family and community is completely destroyed. People live and work only for themselves. The amount of loneliness and isolation is just mind blowing and unbearable. IMO, it's a selfish lifestyle. People who manage to make great success (due to a combination of lack, in…

What are you contrasting the "West" with? As a person who lived most of his life in an Asian country with a very strong familial and social construct, I can say that there were no shortage of lonely, broken people there - we as a society just did a better job of hiding it. Perhaps the sense of failure and isolation may have slightly different causes, but that is not to say that Western society is somehow uniquely bro…

I would never say it's uniquely broken. Loneliness and isolation probably exist in every corner of the world. The thing is that the West gets almost everything done right IMHO. It's an amazing place to be. However, the connection and social part of it is not going anywhere. Families are one of the best constructs to build life-long fullfilling relationships, but everyone is giving up on them now. People are not getting married and are not having children, and if they do, it likely ends up in a divorce. As OP said, it's all hookup culture now. How many people will end up single and lonely after a certain age? Lots and lots and lots ... It's a serious epedimic.

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#253

Post by bowsamic »

nier wrote: post #69
Xcelerate wrote: post #11

I fortunately have close friends, but not through any of my own doing. Over the years, there were a lot of friendly extroverts that encouraged me to hang out and join them for burger night, or they’d message me when they were in town. Everyone I dated took the initiative to ask me out, including my wife. I always feel awkward when I reach out to people, as though I’m bothering them somehow, so I tend to avoid doing s…

NPC as in non-playable character? One of the first search results reads: «[…] slang used by millenials to denote people who act as if they are being told by someone to act in a specific manner, although that may not be the case. Using this abbreviation, the commentator or the creator is poking fun at the other person for acting in a certain manner.»

Another meaning that has started to become prevalent is the conspiracy theory that some people don't experience qualia and have no internal "souls", i.e. they don't actually exist they are just robots. See twitter every time someone points out that some people don't have an internal voice or can't see images in their mind. There will be a chorus of people who are genuinely horrified and claim that this means that the person is not a real human but actually a robot. It sounds dramatic and I think people might even downvote me for this comment, but I've seen it quite a lot and increasingly often

NPC has, for some, become a term to completely dehumanise, in an almost moral panic kind of way. In a way that's like "what if the people I know are actually NPCs?"

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#254

Post by bowsamic »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #203
throwaway_4ever wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whichever meaning, NPC is a recent insidious method of dehumanizing people that ranks right up there with labels like "pigs," "rats," and "cockroaches." This tactic is essentially a first prerequisite for mass violence. It's sure to increase incidences of mentally ill shooters viewing everyone around them as bots in a video game. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26330024209169... https://www.npr.org/2011…

I was extremely disheartened to hear my son describe someone as an NPC the other day. It really only functions to belittle and negatively categorize people. Worse still is that if someone truly does lack cognitive ability such that they do “follow the script”, the last thing they need is someone perhaps only marginally more intelligent to identify and discriminate their deficits. It’s just a miserable lens to view ot…

It is really popular, and when I point out the problems with it, they say I'm overreacting and that they obviously don't mean it in a dehumanising way, but then lo and behold immediately after someone will come and say they actually do believe that some people are robots or somehow less human than others, confirming my suspicion that this is a genuine problem

It's also one of the things, along with other things, that signals to me that intelligence and specifically mental health ableism are going to be the huge dividing problem coming up. Specifically, do we know how to function as a society without being able to discriminate based on mental qualities?

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#255

Post by bowsamic »

vlunkr wrote: post #145
throwaway_4ever wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whichever meaning, NPC is a recent insidious method of dehumanizing people that ranks right up there with labels like "pigs," "rats," and "cockroaches." This tactic is essentially a first prerequisite for mass violence. It's sure to increase incidences of mentally ill shooters viewing everyone around them as bots in a video game. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26330024209169... https://www.npr.org/2011…

My first instinct was to say this seems like an overreaction to a joke, but this is a meme that originated from 4chan and the worst parts of reddit, so you might not be far off, given the track records for violence there.

Whenever I say it's a problem people are there to say I'm overreacting, but literally every time someone pops up out of the woodwork and confirms that they genuinely believe that some people are really NPCs, i.e. that they have no "soul" or self and are internally autonomous, like a computer.

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#256

Post by ngold »

andreyk wrote: post #61

Very brief summary: a personal anecdote about forming good friends followed up by advice for how to have better conversions (vulnerability, curiosity) and how to meet more people who will become friends (meet people but filter out most of them, take initiative with following up), and lastly how to deepen friendships. As someone who has a fair number of close friends, I think this is a good post with lots of solid adv…

pro tip. Don't be a flake like me.

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#257

Post by afr0ck »

matai_kolila wrote: post #160
afr0ck wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It breaks my heart to see Western people living such lives. I love the West for so many reasons, but the social construction is a complete broken mess. Family and community is completely destroyed. People live and work only for themselves. The amount of loneliness and isolation is just mind blowing and unbearable. IMO, it's a selfish lifestyle. People who manage to make great success (due to a combination of lack, in…

Eh, I don't think family ties are "completely destroyed" in the West, we're just not as into our family as some "Eastern" cultures (I'm thinking of India in particular) can be. Remember, a lot of the "West" (at least my exposure to it, the USA) is a conglomeration of other cultures; we have many Eastern cultures here as well! Many of my friends have large families that they're much more entangled with than I'd opt in…

I am from North Africa, from a socio-economic background that's somehow the middle ground between the West and the East. I do agree with the concept of freedom of choice. I always thought about it in such terms. In the West, you have total freedom in whether to keep close to family or not, but it comes with the risk of isolation and loneliness. On the other hand, in the East, lonliness and isolation is pretty much gauranteed to never happen and there is always a large social network to fallback to when life gets hard, for emotional and material support. However, you need to first be loyal to the community and never leave them or disappoint them to be granted such a privelege, which contradicts the freedom of choice. IMHO, the West is better if you manage to succeed and build you own fullfilling social network, but if you fail, you're doomed to love a miserable lonely life. The East is a good default option for most people but it holds back people a bit.

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#258

Post by ngold »

andreyk wrote: post #61

Very brief summary: a personal anecdote about forming good friends followed up by advice for how to have better conversions (vulnerability, curiosity) and how to meet more people who will become friends (meet people but filter out most of them, take initiative with following up), and lastly how to deepen friendships. As someone who has a fair number of close friends, I think this is a good post with lots of solid adv…

don't be a bummer

Re: Intentionally making close friends

#260

Post by agumonkey »

bgroat wrote: post #13
Xcelerate wrote: post #11

I fortunately have close friends, but not through any of my own doing. Over the years, there were a lot of friendly extroverts that encouraged me to hang out and join them for burger night, or they’d message me when they were in town. Everyone I dated took the initiative to ask me out, including my wife. I always feel awkward when I reach out to people, as though I’m bothering them somehow, so I tend to avoid doing s…

I am one of these friendly extroverts. Something that's hard for me to explain is that "making friends is so hard it's easy" What I mean by that is, social anxiety is so high, population-level self-absorption is so high, people are so lonely... that for the most part if you just approach someone and behave as if you're friends... they'll go for it. There's so much DEMAND for friends, that people will gobble up your s…

It's not only social anxiety that forbids people. It's also failed relationships that bruise your desire to try again. In my case I failed people enough time not to want to bother someone else :)
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