I don't have much to add to this right now other than to say this is really fantastic writing. I don't normally enjoy "my journey" kind of blog posts, but this one feels full of valuable insights, and I'm grateful to the author for sharing. It's also just nice to read something written by a skilled writer.
I wish I had the drive to do as much work as the author has. Instead I will live more or less where I am now, stably in social mediocrity, perpetually somewhat impedance mismatched with the people around me.
really identify. especially with the early yearning to connect and not having the skills. Learned sooo much over the years by being brutally rejected and eventually taking stock of what happened and extracting a rule or two. but then, yeah, next phase, rules don't matter (except when they do) and change moment to moment anyway.
funny to read this here on hacker news of all places, where I let my carefully managed, almost always inhibited, childhood nerd self fly free in the comments.
OP has definitely gone beyond me in many ways, with his talk about embodiment, and being able to be so empathic that he has elicited tears of gratitude. Enviable.
I felt the same way when I was in University and High School. In fact I ended up focusing on it so much at the time that my grades really suffered, and I feel like I could have ended up at a better University and career if I had focused more on my grades and learning.
Either way, I did learn my lesson, and I'm now much more comfortable with myself and not seeking validation or connection from others so much.
> I was probably the most severely bullied kid at my school.
> I was demonstrating my erudition
Those two things might have been linked. I wasn't there, but I'm suspicious.
Fortunately the author learns better by the end of the article, but it stuck out to me because LLMs have made people suspicious of five dollar words like delve so to use the word erudition in this day and age is a choice.
Appreciate the writing and the author's fortitude in achieving their goals. While I never had friends, neither online nor in person, I cannot identify with this at all - it reads like a strange, obsessive seeking of external validation which I have never felt myself. Maybe I am just disinterested in people in general.
That's interesting. People are really different. I had my own stages to being still not socially normal person. I always wanted friends, sometimes had some, sometimes felt lonely. In case you happen to read this, did you not have friends in childhood but didn't feel bad about it?
You could either ignore this advice, or take it from me
Be too nice and people take you for a dummy
So nowadays he ain't so friendly"
- Deep Friend Frenz DOOM
i can sort of relate. ive been told by my family that i dont like people much. im also confident in conversation and social situations. i think the latter is true because i feel no pressure to perform and naturally seek novelty to entertain myself
>obsessive seeking of external validation which I have never felt myself
if you've never felt it, why are you mentioning it? why are you so focused on it?
A useful psychoanalytic rubric is "there is no negation in the unconscious mind". Negation is a conscious mind idea, the unconscious mind just thinks of things, it doesn't think of something and claim it's not thinking of it.
so, rephrasing what you wrote in the unconscious sense, "obsessive seeking of external validation which I have felt myself": yes, you have identified something, identified with something, interesting, about other people and about yourself. If you are aware that you are not seeking external validation, but also aware when other people do, you have to ask yourself...
if your complaint about this argument is along the line of "no fair, i can't escape from this!", you're getting the point.
You're probably right that him being in denial is more likely then him being super special. But I don't think this psychoanalytical reasoning is justified?
>if you've never felt it, why are you mentioning it? why are you so focused on it?
Because it's interesting / frustrating to find out that the common guidelines to living a normal life don't apply to you, and you pinpoint that fact as the reason?
I can come up with infinitely many negative statements in a discussion and it doesn't mean that opposites of them occupy my unconscious day to day.
I’m “on the spectrum,” but I had no idea, until I was in my forties. I just assumed (as did most folks), that I was “eccentric” (or “weird,” for the not inconsiderable number of people that didn’t like me).
Once I did find out, it wasn’t really a huge revelation, as I was already well on my way towards learning to compensate.
I know that the popular outlook, is that folks use “neurodivergent” diagnoses to excuse (and not address) bad social behavior, but that certainly wasn’t the case for me. It was just another data point.
If we’re jerks, then no one will cut us any slack; regardless of a diagnosis. It’s still incumbent upon us, to address the issue.
In my case, I’ve spent my entire adult life in an organization that forces us to work intimately with others, seek out and interact with many types of people, and to look at ourselves, in a harsh, realistic manner.
That naturally encouraged me to address my social issues, regardless of the causes. Eventually, it also forced me to find the cause, but by then, the cure was already under way.
I have been trying to manage other people's feelings and reactions for as long as i can remember. That's a self-soothing fantasy of sorts. With this mindset, you are naturally drawn to people who need such emotional management - a realization that you can't actually manage other people's happiness was long and painful. These days I am not sure that getting people to open up by altering your presentation is a good idea. Maybe we should learn to accept that we have no insight into another and just observe them with patient curiousity? That we are fundamentally alone and isolated and the best you can hope for is a person who's values align with yours - and so you feel safe around them?
I think you're bang on the money fwiw. But also worth mentioning that it's OK to ask rather than trying to predict and feeling that having to ask means failure
It took me decades to learn to be a socially normal-ish person. Some of us are just good at computers and not so good at people. But that was in the geekosphere - university, then a tech job. Working as a bartender/waiter is certainly jumping in at the deep end, and accelerates the process.
I really love this piece! I relate to it but it also doesn’t describe me. I’m far more intuitive than this person, though still agree that insights have driven a leveling up of how I relate to others. They were different insights, sure but the model holds.
Once my spouse and I worked for the same company and attended many of the same meetings. The opportunity to pick apart our impressions of the subtext really helped me to learn that I should listen to my gut, that everything I needed to know about how other people were feeling was already in my head and i just needed to stop doubting.
Another time I watched a rather ugly and old person have amazing romantic success with a young beautiful person. How could it be? And I realized that authentic confidence is social gold. I had to let go of my insecurities because my flaws were irrelevant in the face of authentic, confident self acceptance.
I think everyone has a different journey and different epiphanies and it is so enjoyable to hear these experiences put into words.
This sounds like a ton of work to learn and by the end it sounds more like a curse than a super power. To be so above people in terms of social intelligence must be horrible. It sounds like the Author views interactions on a completely different level.
I dont have any offensive social strategy so its hard for me to dictate making friends but passively I do quite well by just projecting an authentic version of myself.
but they are getting to the place that "normal" people end up, I think. It seems to be the case that no amount of being in your head is a substitute for just not being in your head in the first place.
Wow, I can’t get past the first couple of paragraphs.
> I’ve tried so hard to learn how to connect with people. It’s all I ever wanted, for so long.
Are there really people like this? HN is probably the wrong place to ask this question, but this is so far outside of my bubble that I just cannot relate. Some people feel like this, for real?
We are legion,I am sorry to say.
I can recognise co-sufferers, but not necessarily help them.
In older parlance, we would typically just be described as 'a bore', but there is something a lot more specific going on.
I am old now, but watching my child daughter now going through the exact same motions, including doing her damndest to impress people with her many skills, and tragic-ironically driving people away from her with that exact behaviour.
And I can't figure out how to help her figure it out. (past-50 insights don't resonate with 11year olds, unless you can relate them in youtuber-speak).
> some people communicate in order to exchange facts, and some communicate in order to find connection.
I love this quote. Excellent and very relatable piece.
Social skills can be acquired through practice. But being an introvert, I've specifically picked my profession so that I can focus on ideas over people. Tinkering and solving problems excited me, whereas staying in touch with friends, noticing social dynamics, networking, reading people, being good at remembering everyone's birthday, etc felt tiring to me and was less appealing.
I'm at a place in my career where I'm managing more and doing less. It's a weird transition because I've spend a decade acquiring technical skill, only to discover soft skills are equally if not more important (perhaps increasingly so with AGI) .
Honestly I think lesson 7 is nobody's normal. All the things the author's noted about interacting with other people - see how weird and rare it was and how long it took to recognize it? See how often it's on your plate to be the one to go zen mode to figure out how to dance with someone? The author isn't normal, they're now skilled. Before, they weren't normal, because they noticed they weren't skilled. Most people don't.
This post wasn't what I was expecting from the "socially normal" title. While there is a lot of self-reflection and growth in this piece, a lot of the points felt more like learning how to charm, manipulate, and game social interactions.
Look at the first two subheadings:
> 1: Connecting with people is about being a dazzling person
> 2: Connecting with people is about playing their game
The post felt like a rollercoaster between using tricks to charm and manipulate, and periods of genuinely trying to learn how to be friends with people.
I don't want to disparage the author as this is a personal journey piece and I appreciate them sharing it. However this did leave me slightly uneasy, almost calling back to earlier days of the internet when advice about "social skills" often meant reductively thinking about other people, assuming you can mind-read them to deconstruct their mindset (the section about identifying people who feel underpraised, insecure, nervous,) and then leverage that to charm them (referred to as "dancing to the music" in this post).
Maybe the takeaway I'd try to give is to read this as an interesting peek into someone's mind, but not necessarily great advice for anyone else's situation or a healthy way to view relationships.
The fact that it’s written as a personal journey and not as advice suggests the author was on a journey to become more genuine/accepting of who they are. It does read as someone who tried to be manipulative at the start but graduated away from that towards the end of their journey.
You can gain a lot from the article and see it as both manipulative, or as insights for working through your own social anxieties. You could bring both attitudes to the article. And one of those is obviously healthier than the other.
When I read those first two sections I didn't like the guy either, but he arrives at some much healthier takes by the end of the piece. So I think it's intentional to illustrate his growth and the fact that he's willing to put the vulnerability and the mistakes up front and own them to me suggests that he really does get the "secrets" of being socially well adjusted.
My own view is that it's about giving generously to other people without expecting anything in return. People are surprisingly reluctant to do this, but if you do, most people will like you. What are you supposed to give? Well it can be just about anything, time, attention, compliments, money, ideas, a shoulder to cry on, you name it. But probably the most powerful thing if we're talking about building social relationships is to give them your personality. Think of it like there is a big empty jar out there which represents the social environment and we're all wired to not want it to be empty, well go and fill it up with your personality, provide examples of who you are instead of standing off in a corner silently and going unnoticed. Instead of being forgotten you'll be remembered, many will like you, some will love you and some will hate you, the ones who respond most positively are the ones you make an effort to engage with in the future.
Sasha starts figuring this out when he starts working at the fancy restaurant with waiters who would do really odd stuff and it would work. The best waiters were for the most part just displaying a lot of personality. Working at restaurants might have skewed his perspective a bit because when you work as a waiter you're putting on a performance, the goal is to do a job, entertain, get compliments and get tips, beyond the food this is why people go to a nice restaurant. Being authentic and building lasting relationships is secondary to performing a commercial service at a restaurant, but not in real life (and perhaps not at the highest levels of certain commercial services for that matter, the line starts to blur). I think he's realized all this by the end of the article.
I mean technically it isn't wrong that (1) how you come across to the other person is important and (2) you need to be with the other person to connect with them.
And that is part of the problem, because the underlying reason why people connect when you do the mentioned things is that these are usually signs that you are in fact an empathic person, that can put themselves in their shoes and thus care to some degree about how things will pan out for them, meaning they may think they can open up to you, etc. This is in a stark contrast with the phrasing of "playing their game" that frames this type of behavior as a superfluous, silly endavour, when in fact it might be the polar opposite:
In a society of social apes (humans) one of the biggest danger to your and your kins life, bodily autonomy, freedom has historically always been other humans. Meaning that judging the intentions of others is not some silly game, but a survival mechanism of existential importance. And not only that, many people derive a lot of ehat makes their lifes worth living from these feelings of mutual understanding and empathy.
So to most empathic people the idea that a seemingly empathic person could feel nothing at all underneath and potentially sell them down the river is something tingling a gutural fear. Many media depiction of evil serial killers will play on that exact fear (among others).
Master conmen, manipulators, cult leaders (so generally horrible people) are all good at understanding the internal processes (thoughts and feelings) of their victims. This understanding is also essential for true empathy, the way it is applied is very different. If a hacker finds a weak point in a system they can exploit it for their own gain, or they can deal with it in a way benifiting all. The skill of understanding the internals is one thing, the skill of understanding what these internals mean and what are the right actions to derive from that knowledge is something else entirely.
That being said, I think the personal journey the author is on is certainly one that may benefit both them and the people around them. I can just imagine how hard parsing all the complexity of human behavior must be if you can't feel it yourself. This is already hard for people who can, as countless cultural artifacts from all of humanities history proof.
If you read the article, you'll see that these are not individual points, but sequential stages that the author went through while learning what it really takes to be social.
So stage 1. was his first attempt, then he decided 2. worked better .. etc. until he finally reached the one that worked best, i.e. 6.
I am going to get downvoted for this, but my experience, which recently even got confirmed by a mother of an autistic child, is that genuine empathy is rather hard to find on the spectrum.
>The post felt like a rollercoaster between using tricks to charm and manipulate, and periods of genuinely trying to learn how to be friends with people.
That's why the title is "My six stages of learning to be a socially normal person" and not "My story of being a perfectly socially normal person from the day I was born".
When you're learning social skills because you don't have them naturally, it usually starts with "reductively thinking about other people, assuming you can mind-read them to deconstruct their mindset (the section about identifying people who feel underpraised, insecure, nervous,) and then leverage that to charm them".
So I'm not sure what your point is. That this sounds calculated and mechanistic? It is. That's explicitly said there in the article. And the progression of the author's stages is towards doing less of that.
The difference between manipulation and influence is that on the first one you are the only one taking advantage of the situation, and the second one you genuinely believe the other person will end in a better place and if you are wrong no harm is done.
I guess is also about if you care about the other person or you are just pretending, unfortunately in my opinion there is no way to know, because some people are really good at pretending to care, and even supporting you with a hidden score tracking board, basically they are investing.
And then there are people that really care about you and because they know they can't do anything or don't know what to say, they won't reach to you.
I guess we are only left with our instinct and that is something that you learn to calibrate with time.
There is surely nothing wrong with being charming.
The "manipulate, and game", just per dictionary, would mean in this context something close to "control or influence unscrupulously". What social norms exactly do you see broken/bent by the OP? Because I see none.
Are you trying to influence this comment section unscrupulously?
> The other day, someone told me, “I can’t imagine you ever being awkward with people.”
I was telling my therapist of several years recently about being uncomfortable with the number of new people I've had to meet recently.
He seemed surprised that I wasn't excited by it all and said something along the lines of "You seem like a very social person, that seems out of character." It struck me… am I really that good at masking that my therapist didn't realize I am absolutely terrified in near all social situations? I have zero idea how to make small talk with people I haven't known for years.
Working from home since COVID has made my social skills so much worse because I don't get the practice.
Oh boy do I ever relate to that - “You seem like a very social person, that seems out of character” - I know that’s how I seem, but god almighty do I not feel that way.
I’ve learned that’s its best if I play the role of a social person, but it’s just playing a role.
I don’t think anyone but a handful of my closest loved ones really grasp how very close I have always been to running away to live as a hermit in a cabin in the woods.
>am I really that good at masking that my therapist didn't realize I am absolutely terrified in near all social situations?
Or is your therapist attempting to bootstrap a self-fulfilling prophecy, i.e. when you feel socially overwhelmed, you'd remember that they praised you for being social, and the warm fuzzies of being praised would make you feel less overwhelmed?
You know, as the grand maxim of software engineering goes, "whatever works" lmao
>I have zero idea how to make small talk with people I haven't known for years.
Here's a trick, it sounds stupid but it works like magic.
Just talk about mundane things that are physically present. Mention the color of the wallpaper. Mention the painting on the wall. Talk about how noisy the room is, or about the food on the plate in front of you. Literally act like you're an image classifier tasked with outputting a text summary of the scene you find yourself in...
If you're the cerebral type like I am, you'll feel afraid these topics will bore the other person. But surprisingly, they don't, if the other person is neurotypical.
I recognize all of these steps, having gone through flavours of them myself.
The root for me, was that I learned at a young age that to feel safe, I needed to cater to what others wanted for me.
Never learning to ask myself, what I wanted.
It might be the author's next step, is reconnecting with his inner-desire and finding out what he wants from the world, instead of how he wants to appear in the world.
106 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 98.9 ms ] threadfunny to read this here on hacker news of all places, where I let my carefully managed, almost always inhibited, childhood nerd self fly free in the comments.
OP has definitely gone beyond me in many ways, with his talk about embodiment, and being able to be so empathic that he has elicited tears of gratitude. Enviable.
Either way, I did learn my lesson, and I'm now much more comfortable with myself and not seeking validation or connection from others so much.
> I was demonstrating my erudition
Those two things might have been linked. I wasn't there, but I'm suspicious.
Fortunately the author learns better by the end of the article, but it stuck out to me because LLMs have made people suspicious of five dollar words like delve so to use the word erudition in this day and age is a choice.
Trees for the blunt, the g's for the front
I found a way to get piece of mind for years
And left the hell alone, turn a deaf ear to the cellular phone
Send me a letter, or better, we could see each other in real life
Just so you could feel me like a steel knife
At least so you could see the white of they eyes
Bright with surprise, once they finish spitting lies
Associates, is your boys, your girls, ______s, _____s, homies
Close, but really don't know me
Mom, dad, comrade, peeps, brothers, sisters, duns, dunnies
Some come around when they need some money
Others make us laugh like the Sunday funnies
Fam be around whether you paid or bummy
You could either ignore this advice, or take it from me
Be too nice and people take you for a dummy
So nowadays he ain't so friendly"
- Deep Friend Frenz DOOM
i can sort of relate. ive been told by my family that i dont like people much. im also confident in conversation and social situations. i think the latter is true because i feel no pressure to perform and naturally seek novelty to entertain myself
if you've never felt it, why are you mentioning it? why are you so focused on it?
A useful psychoanalytic rubric is "there is no negation in the unconscious mind". Negation is a conscious mind idea, the unconscious mind just thinks of things, it doesn't think of something and claim it's not thinking of it.
so, rephrasing what you wrote in the unconscious sense, "obsessive seeking of external validation which I have felt myself": yes, you have identified something, identified with something, interesting, about other people and about yourself. If you are aware that you are not seeking external validation, but also aware when other people do, you have to ask yourself...
if your complaint about this argument is along the line of "no fair, i can't escape from this!", you're getting the point.
>if you've never felt it, why are you mentioning it? why are you so focused on it?
Because it's interesting / frustrating to find out that the common guidelines to living a normal life don't apply to you, and you pinpoint that fact as the reason?
I can come up with infinitely many negative statements in a discussion and it doesn't mean that opposites of them occupy my unconscious day to day.
The last part resonates with me, early on I realised that listening to people was the easy ticket to connection.
But like the author, a lot of the time I was not emotionally available for that connection and I have definitely caused some pain and confusion.
Once I did find out, it wasn’t really a huge revelation, as I was already well on my way towards learning to compensate.
I know that the popular outlook, is that folks use “neurodivergent” diagnoses to excuse (and not address) bad social behavior, but that certainly wasn’t the case for me. It was just another data point.
If we’re jerks, then no one will cut us any slack; regardless of a diagnosis. It’s still incumbent upon us, to address the issue.
In my case, I’ve spent my entire adult life in an organization that forces us to work intimately with others, seek out and interact with many types of people, and to look at ourselves, in a harsh, realistic manner.
That naturally encouraged me to address my social issues, regardless of the causes. Eventually, it also forced me to find the cause, but by then, the cure was already under way.
What's that cure?
Once my spouse and I worked for the same company and attended many of the same meetings. The opportunity to pick apart our impressions of the subtext really helped me to learn that I should listen to my gut, that everything I needed to know about how other people were feeling was already in my head and i just needed to stop doubting.
Another time I watched a rather ugly and old person have amazing romantic success with a young beautiful person. How could it be? And I realized that authentic confidence is social gold. I had to let go of my insecurities because my flaws were irrelevant in the face of authentic, confident self acceptance.
I think everyone has a different journey and different epiphanies and it is so enjoyable to hear these experiences put into words.
> I was one social notch above children who were so pitiable it would be rude to mock them.
I dont have any offensive social strategy so its hard for me to dictate making friends but passively I do quite well by just projecting an authentic version of myself.
but they are getting to the place that "normal" people end up, I think. It seems to be the case that no amount of being in your head is a substitute for just not being in your head in the first place.
https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/behold-my-ted-talk
The topic is agency. Which is a word I hear often used by rarely defined or described in detail.
She talks about agency as being the key to going from drug addict to CEO of a successful organization, and the specific habits that process involved.
> I’ve tried so hard to learn how to connect with people. It’s all I ever wanted, for so long.
Are there really people like this? HN is probably the wrong place to ask this question, but this is so far outside of my bubble that I just cannot relate. Some people feel like this, for real?
I love this quote. Excellent and very relatable piece.
Social skills can be acquired through practice. But being an introvert, I've specifically picked my profession so that I can focus on ideas over people. Tinkering and solving problems excited me, whereas staying in touch with friends, noticing social dynamics, networking, reading people, being good at remembering everyone's birthday, etc felt tiring to me and was less appealing.
I'm at a place in my career where I'm managing more and doing less. It's a weird transition because I've spend a decade acquiring technical skill, only to discover soft skills are equally if not more important (perhaps increasingly so with AGI) .
But I also have Williams Syndrome, which gave me empathy and a fondness for people and their stories.
So while I was bullied mercilessly I also had friends. Deep, lifelong friends I still have today.
Look at the first two subheadings:
> 1: Connecting with people is about being a dazzling person
> 2: Connecting with people is about playing their game
The post felt like a rollercoaster between using tricks to charm and manipulate, and periods of genuinely trying to learn how to be friends with people.
I don't want to disparage the author as this is a personal journey piece and I appreciate them sharing it. However this did leave me slightly uneasy, almost calling back to earlier days of the internet when advice about "social skills" often meant reductively thinking about other people, assuming you can mind-read them to deconstruct their mindset (the section about identifying people who feel underpraised, insecure, nervous,) and then leverage that to charm them (referred to as "dancing to the music" in this post).
Maybe the takeaway I'd try to give is to read this as an interesting peek into someone's mind, but not necessarily great advice for anyone else's situation or a healthy way to view relationships.
You can gain a lot from the article and see it as both manipulative, or as insights for working through your own social anxieties. You could bring both attitudes to the article. And one of those is obviously healthier than the other.
My own view is that it's about giving generously to other people without expecting anything in return. People are surprisingly reluctant to do this, but if you do, most people will like you. What are you supposed to give? Well it can be just about anything, time, attention, compliments, money, ideas, a shoulder to cry on, you name it. But probably the most powerful thing if we're talking about building social relationships is to give them your personality. Think of it like there is a big empty jar out there which represents the social environment and we're all wired to not want it to be empty, well go and fill it up with your personality, provide examples of who you are instead of standing off in a corner silently and going unnoticed. Instead of being forgotten you'll be remembered, many will like you, some will love you and some will hate you, the ones who respond most positively are the ones you make an effort to engage with in the future.
Sasha starts figuring this out when he starts working at the fancy restaurant with waiters who would do really odd stuff and it would work. The best waiters were for the most part just displaying a lot of personality. Working at restaurants might have skewed his perspective a bit because when you work as a waiter you're putting on a performance, the goal is to do a job, entertain, get compliments and get tips, beyond the food this is why people go to a nice restaurant. Being authentic and building lasting relationships is secondary to performing a commercial service at a restaurant, but not in real life (and perhaps not at the highest levels of certain commercial services for that matter, the line starts to blur). I think he's realized all this by the end of the article.
And that is part of the problem, because the underlying reason why people connect when you do the mentioned things is that these are usually signs that you are in fact an empathic person, that can put themselves in their shoes and thus care to some degree about how things will pan out for them, meaning they may think they can open up to you, etc. This is in a stark contrast with the phrasing of "playing their game" that frames this type of behavior as a superfluous, silly endavour, when in fact it might be the polar opposite:
In a society of social apes (humans) one of the biggest danger to your and your kins life, bodily autonomy, freedom has historically always been other humans. Meaning that judging the intentions of others is not some silly game, but a survival mechanism of existential importance. And not only that, many people derive a lot of ehat makes their lifes worth living from these feelings of mutual understanding and empathy.
So to most empathic people the idea that a seemingly empathic person could feel nothing at all underneath and potentially sell them down the river is something tingling a gutural fear. Many media depiction of evil serial killers will play on that exact fear (among others).
Master conmen, manipulators, cult leaders (so generally horrible people) are all good at understanding the internal processes (thoughts and feelings) of their victims. This understanding is also essential for true empathy, the way it is applied is very different. If a hacker finds a weak point in a system they can exploit it for their own gain, or they can deal with it in a way benifiting all. The skill of understanding the internals is one thing, the skill of understanding what these internals mean and what are the right actions to derive from that knowledge is something else entirely.
That being said, I think the personal journey the author is on is certainly one that may benefit both them and the people around them. I can just imagine how hard parsing all the complexity of human behavior must be if you can't feel it yourself. This is already hard for people who can, as countless cultural artifacts from all of humanities history proof.
That's why the title is "My six stages of learning to be a socially normal person" and not "My story of being a perfectly socially normal person from the day I was born".
When you're learning social skills because you don't have them naturally, it usually starts with "reductively thinking about other people, assuming you can mind-read them to deconstruct their mindset (the section about identifying people who feel underpraised, insecure, nervous,) and then leverage that to charm them".
So I'm not sure what your point is. That this sounds calculated and mechanistic? It is. That's explicitly said there in the article. And the progression of the author's stages is towards doing less of that.
I guess is also about if you care about the other person or you are just pretending, unfortunately in my opinion there is no way to know, because some people are really good at pretending to care, and even supporting you with a hidden score tracking board, basically they are investing.
And then there are people that really care about you and because they know they can't do anything or don't know what to say, they won't reach to you.
I guess we are only left with our instinct and that is something that you learn to calibrate with time.
There is surely nothing wrong with being charming.
The "manipulate, and game", just per dictionary, would mean in this context something close to "control or influence unscrupulously". What social norms exactly do you see broken/bent by the OP? Because I see none.
Are you trying to influence this comment section unscrupulously?
Which the author says are stages he grew out of. He's not saying that those things are what connecting with people is actually about.
I was telling my therapist of several years recently about being uncomfortable with the number of new people I've had to meet recently.
He seemed surprised that I wasn't excited by it all and said something along the lines of "You seem like a very social person, that seems out of character." It struck me… am I really that good at masking that my therapist didn't realize I am absolutely terrified in near all social situations? I have zero idea how to make small talk with people I haven't known for years.
Working from home since COVID has made my social skills so much worse because I don't get the practice.
I’ve learned that’s its best if I play the role of a social person, but it’s just playing a role.
I don’t think anyone but a handful of my closest loved ones really grasp how very close I have always been to running away to live as a hermit in a cabin in the woods.
Or is your therapist attempting to bootstrap a self-fulfilling prophecy, i.e. when you feel socially overwhelmed, you'd remember that they praised you for being social, and the warm fuzzies of being praised would make you feel less overwhelmed?
You know, as the grand maxim of software engineering goes, "whatever works" lmao
Here's a trick, it sounds stupid but it works like magic.
Just talk about mundane things that are physically present. Mention the color of the wallpaper. Mention the painting on the wall. Talk about how noisy the room is, or about the food on the plate in front of you. Literally act like you're an image classifier tasked with outputting a text summary of the scene you find yourself in...
If you're the cerebral type like I am, you'll feel afraid these topics will bore the other person. But surprisingly, they don't, if the other person is neurotypical.
Non-weird people are really weird.
"I'm Autistic and this is how I learned to mask"