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I'm writing this off the cuff after sitting through a particularly tedious lunch conversation and having the feeling that there's a culture war angle here.
The conversation was basically dominated by two people excitedly trading drawn out and inane stories from their personal lives while the rest of the group occasionally tried making little interjections. If one person told a story the other related to, the other person had to quickly follow with their almost exact same story from their own life, start to finish with the same inane outcome, instead of saying something like "that happened to me too" and letting someone else talk.
I think there's a missing personality trait that I thought was conscientiousness, but it turns out that means something different (being organized and careful). The trait I am thinking of is more like "conscious awareness of reality," which is like, can you tell how your behavior is interacting with the people around you, do you work with theories of mind, are you able to weigh your thoughts and feelings and choose what to say next, etc.
Maybe this all boils down to rising autism numbers but I feel like this is something that is supposed to be learned, and I would hope that if you haven't learned this by the time you are an adult there is something wrong with you. Instead it seems to be almost the default human condition to anxiously spit up each little itemized story you've accumulated that is interesting only to you, or seal-clap when others do so, when instead you could be doing something interesting like asking open ended questions to the group because I feel like I encounter this constantly.
My gut feeling on this is that it's not just a kind of autism style drug or biological induced disease, it's more a symptom of cultural decay, and seems more like we have bad values -> we get worse people type of movement over time. And I feel like it could be a generally self-reinforcing thing where people are getting less "nutrition" from their conversations with others, therefore they spend more time alone, conversational skills decay, etc.
So this is a bit of a rant but maybe someone here has thoughts to debate or add onto this?
I don't think you're looking for a personality trait. It sounds like you're talking about social skills and mindfulness.
There could also be some political strategy involved from the bores who drone on and on: they shut out anything they don't want to hear, or anyone they don't want to hear from. Making certain flowers wilt.
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It’s called being unable to read the room, though I suspect that description isn’t clinical enough for the average Motte user. It’s a trait I’ve noticed, ironically, to be more common in the most extroverted and socially open people in life, as opposed to the introverted autists who will more quickly stop talking if they notice a lack of general enthusiasm in their contributions to the conversation.
Less politely, some people are just noisy attention whores. These people, unfortunately, are rewarded for their behavior, be it extra attention from women or getting “noticed” at work more often, leading to promotions. Which is why they rarely stop or learn to reel it in.
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Some people just love making conversation, regardless of content, seemingly similar to how others love to walk aimlessly, or lift heavy things just to put them down again, or read stories that aren't even true, or create virtual work and take great pleasure in pretending to complete it, or have sex with no intention of ever making offspring.
In other words: Sometimes the activity is the purpose and depending on your wiring, you just might not get it.
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I'll try a charitable steel man of the other side. Note, first, that I totally get what you're saying and 100% agree.
But, we also have to remember that the Motte is a community of Turbo Autists who like weird shit and want to talk about things. That's fucking fucked up, man.
But, anyways. The steelman that I can think of is something like the following; Small talk, which is most of conversation, isn't about the transmission of information at all. We already know this. But it is also not about the direct fellow feeling and a sense of connection. It is about the indirect conveyance that both parties "get" the other party and so can establish rapport, comfort, then trust and only after all of this will both parties maybe mutually agree to get into "deeper" conversations.
It's signalling all the way down, sure, but, recognizing this, it let's you be a better conversationalist.
Let's use an example. At one of my regular bars there's a woman, Lauren (not her real name). Lauren will give you a blow by blow of her day every time she sees you. She went to the store, gee prices are high!, in the parking lot, on the way out, a guy was driving aggressively and nearly slammed right into me! God, idiots in cars, right?!. I'll stop recounting the details here as I am sure this is already giving many people PTSD flashbacks to inescapable hour long conversations like this.
I don't care about Lauren's day. But I do care about Lauren. Through multiple interactions, I've come to find that Lauren is what I would call a basically good person (BGP). She hasn't ever thought deeply about a values system, metaphysics, or a general philosophy of life. But she takes care of her aging mother and is nice to people in that normie kind of way. Lauren's never going to be a close friend, but I wish her well.
So I make small talk with her. It's easy because I'm not really trying. When Lauren says, "Idiots in cars, right?!" I don't have to think of a Motte level reply. I say, "They seem to be everywhere" or "Imagine if everyone had to take driving tests once a year!" or, simply, "Oh, I know what you mean." (interestingly, a lot of the comments in this thread began with some version of that last one. Hmm).
And these little comments make Lauren "feel heard" as the kids say. Really, it means that Lauren feels like I care about her to some extent. Because I do. And I demonstrate that by following her flow of the conversation. If I didn't care about Lauren, I'd do something like adjust my fedora and state, "Akshually, the rate of accidents has been declining at 3.5% for two years now and ..." Which would demonstrate that I'm valuing pedantic "accuracy" above the early stages of casual, reciprocal comfort in a social setting. Or, I'd start replying with monosyllables and would reduce eye contact, and would shift my body position away from her, which would indicate I don't care about her at all.
But it's so hard to listen to! The inanity of it! Yes, I agree. So don't listen. Stop putting yourself through that. It's amazing how much people cue one another for reaction points. Big hang gestures and facial gestures, emphatic rises in volume, pregnant pauses and so forth. A lot of it is non-verbal, you just have to kind of watch their expression. And then there are, of course, the literal verbal cues; "Know what I am saying?", "Right?!" (appended anywhere), "Can you believe it?", "And I was like whhaaatt" and all of the unlimited rest of them. These are the weird conversational detritus that people accumulate over the years. They're space fillers, to be sure, but they're prompts; "This is the part, now, where I want you to emote with me so I can gauge if you "get" me." It is quite literally the same as waiting for the big green arrow to show up and click on it to acknowledge that the green arrow has shown up.
A quick side note: In one of my capital-N noticings, I've seen that one of the hallmarks of urban African-American language patterns is the near constant injection of "Know what I mean?" or, more colloquially, "Know what I'm saying" at the end of sentences. To me, this reflects a profound sense of interpersonal insecurity that can only be remedied by constantly checking in with the other person to re-confirm their general empathy.
Returning to the main topic, the failure mode of small talk isn't that it's uninteresting and boring. That's a feature, not a big. It's low effort for a reason, so that people can spend more time evaluating one another and signalling their reciprocal positive intent. When we get into those warm, sticky "deep conversations" (that definitely aren't mental masturbation) they flow so easily because we're actually 100% into them because it's safe to do so. We've already checked all of the comfort and safety boxes with the interlocutor so we don't have to spend that cognitive overload evaluating them. The structure of some of the best conversations I've had have been nothing more than these exact kind of dueling monologues you described. They just happened to occur with people I really trusted on topics that we shared a common interest in because we had discovered the shared interest via small talk.
So, all of this Steel manning is to say that I don't think what you saw is necessarily indicative of the Collapse Of Western Culture. I think it's people in a technology laden world doing their best to do what they've always done in conversation; fellow feeling, establish rapport, building relationships. That it is grating on you (and, frankly, most of us on the Motte) is to make a category error; you're looking for a conversation when, in fact, you're in the middle of a verbal game of Emote-With-Me.
Great post, I just want to add that this is usually a consequence of growing up in a close proximity to violence - if a poorly told joke can get you killed, you telegraph everything.
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I hear what you're saying, and yes I recognize irony in saying that given the capital-N noticing in the following paragraph. My Lauren is named Katie but it is the same vibe, the same relationship, and I do really wish her well.
As a contrast I would like to tell a story about someone I used to know, Alex (also not their real name). Alex was a good respectable kid, from a good respectable family, attending a very respectable school. We had a lot in common, similar interests, similar hobbies, we were both aspiring writers, and we were both studying the law. Naturally we became friends.
The story starts with Alex's childhood friend Ben (again not his real name) Like Alex, Ben was a good respectable kid, from a good respectable family, attending a very respectable school, and looking forward to a good respectable career. Both Alex and Ben were very active on sites like 4-chan, one of my first encounters with Ben was a discussion with him and Alex of a then ongoing psy-op to convince people that the "ok sign" was a white-nationalist dog whistle. The two of them thought it was hilarious that they had helped get some truck-driver fired over it. My response was to tell both of them that I thought it was kind of fucked-up that someone's livelihood was being disrupted because some college kids in another state thought it would be fun to do a bit of trolling. "Lighten up and grow a sense of humor" Ben told me. It was through this interaction and others like it that that I came to understand that Ben had a very "flexible" approach to morality, and as funny, charming, and well-read as he might be, he was also callous and cruel. He was not, as you put it, "a basically good person (BGP)".
Sometime after we had all graduated, Alex asked me if I would act as a reference for Ben. I declined In part because I did not think that Ben was a BGP and in part because I had plans to run for office was increasingly conscious of who I wanted my name to be associated with. I could tell that my refusal hurt Alex's feelings but they did not press the issue. Sometime later it came to pass that Ben was in some serious legal trouble. What had started a low-key investigation into allegations of professional misconduct had uncovered evidence of far more serious crimes.
Naturally this was a topic that Alex and I talked about, and something that Alex kept coming back to was how "unfortunate" it was that Ben had lost his job and was likely going to go to prison. This was a thread that I just could not help but tug at, leading to the following paraphrased conversation.
This took me aback. Someone who I quite liked, for whom I had a lot of respect seemed to be making a fully general argument against having any legal code at all.
I tried to argue that we can not have a safe high-trust society where rapists murders and thieves are free to rape murder and steal without consequence. For Alex's part, they argued from first principles. Harm and suffering were axiomatically bad. Ergo inflicting harm and suffering on another was always wrong regardless of the circumstances. I would ask things like "How is saying nobody should ever be punished for a specific crime, any different from saying that crime should be legal?". "Don't you have any sympathy for the accused?" and "Are you arguing that harm and suffering are good?" Alex would respond. And so we went in circles, and as we did the conversation became more vitriolic. It ended with Alex accusing me of being hateful, vindictive, and wanting to hurt Ben out of jealousy, and with me calling Alex "an enabler" and "a fucking sociopath". The next day I found that Alex had blocked my number, and had blocked me on social media.
This happened a while ago but I have been thinking about it lately because I feel like my falling out with Alex illustrates a quintessential failure mode of the sort of polite liberalism espoused by commentators like David Roberts, Bill Kristol, and Scott Alexander. And I feel like I've been seeing the results this failure mode more and more of late across multiple stages and venues in my professional, personal, political, and online life.
Scott Alexander was wrong. The natural end state of liberal discourse is not "seven zillion Witches and three Principled Libertarians" it is "seven zillion Witches and zero Principled Libertarians" because all the libertarians have been shouted down, driven off, or banned, for refusing to compromise on one point or another.
I see all these people lamenting increasing polarization, lack of trust, and proliferation of "Stand Your Ground Laws", and the question I really want to ask all of them is; To what degree have you been the Jack Kerouac to someone else's Dean Moriarty?
I'm confused by this; are you in the role of polite libertarian here, or is Alex? Facially, this sounds like a bog-standard case of pampered sociopath twentysomethings happily bullying a weaker person for laughs, but feeling shocked and offended when any unpleasant consequences come for a Real Person of their class and social circle. Tale as old as time, surely? As Mel Brooks said: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."
The only slight wrinkle here is that Alex had the cognitive capacity to build a bullshit ad-hoc argument around his visceral indignation at a system that would impose any suffering on him or his friends. But as you point out, the argument makes no sense, and presumably Alex himself would drop it immediately if someone ever committed a crime against him. What is the connection to Stand Your Ground laws?
Not a libertarian, more a principled anti-accelerationist and lets-stay-cilvilized-itarian,
I don't think the argument was post hoc, Alex seemed to be quite invested in it, and in hindsight a sincere belief to that effect would seem to explain some of their more idiosyncratic takes.
As for Stand Your Ground laws, the connection is in how "polite liberals" talk about them. There seems to be this presumption that a civilized person must always defer to the uncivilized. They ask questions like would you really shoot a man for attacking you on the street or trying to break into your house? as if it's some sort of got-cha and then are scandalized responds in the affirmative.
It's almost as if they don't see violent schizophrenics attacking people on the train, or rioters burning a neighborhood, as a problem to be solved because that's just what those sorts of people do. See Mayor Rawling-Blake's infamous line about giving people room. As Heath Ledger's Joker would say. "it's all part of the plan" and people will go along with a plan even when it's horrible because it makes them feel in control. I think this certain people seem to have such a visceral reaction to Stand Your Ground Laws and figures like Kyle Rittenhouse, while simultaneously extending infinite charity to figures like Decarlos Brown.
Doesn't this make some sense as a countersignaling performance of elite strength and nonchalance (what used to be called sprezzatura)? Realistically, the average PMC person faces little direct risk from random crime or violence, and less risk the wealthier/ better-connected they are. Simultaneously, the average middle-class person has lots to potentially gain from appearing impressively high-status, secure and confident to their PMC peers, including by showing that they don't need to fear the underclass, don't worry about job competition from foreign workers, etc.
Kyle Rittenhouse feels more cringe than anything else, and for middle-class status purposes it's often worse to be cringe than to be wrong.
Edit: to the original question about Alex, I think Chesterton points out that sometimes when people preach toleration and mercy, they actually just don't disapprove of the action in question. It's a shame you're no longer friends, because I'd be curious to learn whether they would endorse punishment for actions that are unsympathetically gauche rather than just immoral in a plebe way. (I'm not sure what would feel genuinely "gauche" for a well-pedigreed law student who's also a former edgelord/troll, but perhaps you can imagine something? Perhaps if a white, female fellow-student from Alabama, failing some key classes, were caught trying to bargain for grades by faking a rape accusation against a well-regarded male African-American professor - would Alex argue that she should not be expelled? That the professor shouldn't be able sue her for damages?)
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The correct answer to that question is "no, I wouldn't shoot a man for attacking you or breaking into your house; we don't owe you masculinity".
Feels? No, is. Those supporting rioters burning neighborhoods do that specifically because those rioters will never get close to theirs, and as such permitting and encouraging rioters is how they exercise control over everyone else. They're shock troopers, backed up by the rest of the army that is the judiciary, to perpetrate random violence on the rest of the citizenry because it's funny.
Just because the cruel king is now "a significant portion of the citizenry in general" and not "one man or a few men" as it was in times of old doesn't make them less of a cruel king, and even a king like that has supporters simply by virtue of being the king.
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Scott said that the natural end-state of free-speech alternatives to captured discourse venues was "approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches". He didn't say that this was the natural end-state of those captured discourse venues themselves, and almost certainly doesn't believe it.
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The whole story is very odd, but this stood out. How did they contribute to it exactly? Was there a 4chan campaign to email the guy's employer that I haven't heard about? Because if not I find it bizarre they'd even see themselves as contributing to the guy's firing.
You're both wrong. There is no natural state of liberal discourse, and liberalism's obsession with pretending that it's merely riding natural tides rather then shaping them, is exactly why it's taking such a beating of late.
Ben claimed to have gone to the employer's website and filed a complaint form about their "racist" driver, it was going that extra step that formed my opinion of him as "not a BGP".
Christ, what a wanker.
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The road to hell is paved with
good intentionsBasically Good Persons who, not having thought about their values, are easily led to commit atrocities when their neighbours all tell them that that is what a Good Person does.(In the 1980s, some Concerned Citizens¹ lobbied heavily to include in children's television series the message that The Complainer Is Always Wrong, and that one ought to unquestioningly follow one's peers. Had I been in those meetings, I would have wanted to take out a copy of Eichmann in Jerusalem and ask "are you sure you want to stand on that principle?")
¹“He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where 'traditional values' meant 'hang someone'." -- Sir Terry Pratchett, The Truth
(GNU Pterry)
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I appreciate the steelman and I definitely am not a normie and never have been one, and a lot of this I did learn. That said I actually find 1:1 conversations much more manageable with these types because it's so much easier to steer the conversation, and even if it's just you asking questions, you have a lot of power to break the script (if they aren't totally steamrolling you) and have some interesting sparks of life come out of the chat, even if I still would tend to avoid these people when possible because I still don't enjoy the life-script readouts.
In the case I posted though I feel like it's an actual degenerate situation because it's two overly excited people dominating a conversation in a group of 10 or so others, actively cutting them off when trying to pipe in with their own observations, because they just have to get their whole scripts out in turn, and I feel like in that case it is kind of like a child barreling through an antique shop or something, it's like there is no concern shown for one's environment and feels like a kind of rudeness of ignorance that puts me in a bad mood. In those cases you basically need enough social cache to really butt in and change the course of things.
And where I feel especially non-normie is I am the only person I know who ever actually does that, and most others basically do the seal-clap thing of just continuing to try to pipe in additions or laughing politely. Which is to say even in this case most people seem satisfied (or just stay silent miserably) and I wish there was more collective awareness that we could actually include everyone and allow the conversation flow naturally if more people took initiative in directing the flow forcefully.
And I think this points to a kind of false dichotomy which is kind of like the teenage angst of "no one will have deep conversations with me" vs. accept small talk as is. And I think the tertiary option is to actually ubermench things to go the way you want, but you need to have the social cache to do that or else you basically just get looked at funny, and it's very rare for anyone else to put their neck out there so you're on your own.
A-ha! My mistake for missing this angle. I was posting very early this morning due to some insomnia so my mind wasn't very sharp.
In the case you outlined, about these two monopolizing discourse within a group, my perspective would be to 100% not try to change the dynamic no matter what kind of social cache you have. Then, avoid hanging out with these people to the extent possible. If it's a work situation, I can understand that's difficult, but I feel it's the only option.
Let me re-use my "Lauren" example. Fudging her exact age a little to protect privacy, let's say Lauren is about 42 years old. She is divorced. She is on every dating app and none of her dates - ever - goes well. Or maybe the first one goes alright but by date three there are "red flags" everywhere. Would you be shocked - shocked - to learn that my opinion is that Lauren is the problem in these romantic trails to nowhere? Lauren has poor social skills and does not pick up on the clues people have been sending her for, probably, about 30 years. While this may make my tiny heart hurt a little, I am also experienced enough to know that trying to coach a full grown adult through basic social skills is the losingest of all propositions. If they haven't adjusted by now it can be a sign of actual autism or other such disorders but, far, far more likely it is a deep character flaw. Often times it is inherited. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Lauren's mother was very similar and that, perhaps, her father (who I don't hear about) was out of the picture early.
Don't delude yourself into ubermensching. The other eight people in the group aren't going to thank you for your deft navigation of the conversation. They'll feel relieved in the moment and then forget all about it the second the conservation breaks up and the group members go about their day. If you're in a work situation and have to maintain some rapport and not be the weird guy who eats alone in the corner, I'd recommend turning into the "drive-by joke" guy. You see the conversation monopolizers doing their thing and the seal-clappers enduring it. Don't fully join the conversation. Instead, choose a moment to drop in - interrupting is fine - with a little humor. I don't know, something like, "I see Congress is in session. Very good." You'll figure it out. Then, you're still demonstrating that fellow-feeling my original comment touched on but without committing to this zero-win-probability endeavor.
Yeah it's funny, I am very much on the same page, and especially at work sticking your dumb neck out is almost always foolish, and only something I do when I feel like being foolish.
That said, I have very much noticed and appreciated from others what you could call "Chad" conversation moves, and to me, seeing and recognizing those can feel like this moment of profound understanding where it feels good being alive etc. It's like reading certain authors where just like every sentence is perfect, and just appreciating the command of language and context. I think a well lived life includes appreciating ubermensch moments as well as having some good ones of your own.
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You need better middlers.
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Yes, this is a common conversational failure mode. I have repeatedly requested that some work meetings that inevitably end up that way feature a talking stick. The people who do most of the talking did not see a problem and declined. They may have thought I was joking, but I was not joking. I used to work somewhere that actually used a talking stick, and liked it a lot.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure there are characters like that in Dickens at least, probably Austen, so if it's cultural it's been infecting England for hundreds of years. Was there anyone like that in Tolstoy? It seems like there would be.
The cultural technology that combats it not extending social invitations to the bores, but all social invitations have depleted, so it's a much weaker signal than it used to be.
Yeah Austen absolutely loved annoying characters like this, perhaps most famously Miss Bates.
Aside: Barbara Pym wrote whole novels about characters like this in the mid-20th century. In Jane and Prudence she actually names one of the protagonists Prudence Bates, who very early on notes that she has spent her life fearing that people will think of Austen's Miss Bates when they meet her.
This has nothing to do with the main post, except to say that Pym's oeuvre consisted in large part of skewering the behavior OP observes. It's great entertainment, and often contains a wistful note of more perceptive characters lamenting that they are stuck in these situations.
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I think you're overestimating the quality of pre-internet conversation.
I feel like the people blaming TikTok or whatever for boring conversations need to sit down and read some Jane Austen or something. People have been complaining about this kind of conversational boor for literal centuries, probably millennia. I think about this often in terms of RETVRN arguments, that every American novel written between The Great Gatsby and Infinite Jest is essentially about the emptiness, anomie, dissatisfactory nature, and soullessness of all the stuff that we're trying to bring back.
If anything, loudly sharing boring personal anecdotes is the opposite of the typical internet-brained problem, which is not saying anything ever.
At first I couldn't tell whether OP was complaining about the quality of conversation dropping or how the internet ruined his own ability to engage in normal human interaction. People telling boring personal anecdotes is hardly a new phenomenon. And the timing of this alleged bad conversation (lunch on a Tuesday) suggests a work context, which means that yes, you're going to have to talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to in your personal life. Part of having social skills is being able to have these kinds of conversations. One of the things that the RETVRN people need to realize is that, if we went back to the 50s in terms of social etiquette, we'd be having a lot more of these inane conversations, not less.
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Social commentators often deplore how people are isolated or choosing to be alone, but declining social skills, not smartphones, may be to blame. Conversations are two-way, so if some percentage of the general population is severely deficient in this regard, the probability of a bad conversation converges to near 100% after only a handful of exchanges, so it's not worth socializing at all, as the downside is not worth it. Videos frequently go viral of aggressive, confrontational behavior. People are just meaner in general and I don't think it can be explained by confirmation bias of viral videos, technology, or autism.
One thing that’s always struck me in my own life has been the contrast between where I grew up and the Bay Area in California.
At least when I was growing up and through young adulthood my local community was very collectivistic. We all knew each other. Attitudes toward one another were very different than how they are here in the Bay. Very few people who weren’t adults did anything without supervision or at least a stamp of approval by some authority figure. You always deferred to those older than you if the matter rang of something potentially serious and you were generally obedient to what you were told out of respect. One of the phrases I remember hearing as a kid that you never wanted to hear from anyone was “… put your house in order, or, we’re going to do it for you…,” and that usually preceded something that was about to go down. The oldest person in the group you always followed and did what they told you when you guys were out. In private you do what your parents tell you. As guys we were taught to love the women close to us and girls were taught to respect the choices and decisions of the men in their lives and do what the men tell you. It wasn’t all rank and file thinking and it didn’t always take but it was a general rule people in the community had an implicit understanding of. Boys still fought with each other here and there. Girls didn’t like being told to go home or do X by their younger brother but they knew they were just looking out for them. Babysitters still did immature and playful things they didn’t tell the local kids parents about that the kids loved. Timmy’s supposed to be in bed by 8:30pm. We stayed up past midnight and made forts in the living room. Timmy’s not supposed to watch that scary movie he desperately wants to see. We watched the scary movie Timmy wasn’t supposed to see. Don’t let Timmy have more than a few sodas. Timmy and I drank the whole box and had to buy more to replace the noticeably missing one in the fridge. But we were generally responsible and we policed each others behavior in the group. There was none of this “you can’t tell me what to do!,” horseshit. You’d end up with some very red ass cheeks if you said something like that. Mothers and grandmothers still washing their sons mouths out with soap is something I can remember. It happened to me when I was very young. We could be very immature and rowdy at times but we knew certain red lines socially you just ‘didn’t’ cross. And there was a loose hierarchy of sorts to things.
There was a general sense of the separation of people by gender. If you were out and about with your friends and someone’s sister or a local girl in your neighborhood happened to join your party, you immediately went to the phone and called their brother/cousin/father/male guardian and told them where you were, that they were with you and you’re hanging out and looking out for them; and you always asked if they had a curfew. You don’t leave suspicion or a lingering sense that you’re messing with someone’s daughter/girlfriend/sister/wife. It wasn’t just the right thing to do but it also cultivated respect from the men in their family. They looked at you as someone they could trust. That’s also something that’s very well known in gang culture which I was also affected by. If one of your boys had to go down ‘that’ side of town, you called up “guy” over there (what they now call “shot callers”) and make sure it’s safe first. Then you go.
When it came to dating people generally met 1 of 3 different ways. Either through peer group, e.g., your brother has a girlfriend who has a friend who has a sister. Or your friend knows so-and-so across the street who knows so-and-so from down the hall at school. They’re going to the movies soon, ask her if she could come along if she has interest in hanging out. Most of the time that type of approach worked. Sometimes it didn’t work out and you didn’t vibe well and they parted amicably. The 2nd way was through church. It was a way for the community to come together of people who otherwise didn’t know each other and have an opportunity to meet and learn about one another. That covered the vast majority of cases. And if they didn’t happen, you usually met later in life through work. But dating by Brownian motion simply wasn’t a thing. It was heavily regulated by religion and peer group. Women weren’t supposed to be too forward with their attitudes and that’s why messages were usually exchanged through a friend as an intermediary. And boys were under constant threat as a way to keep their hormones in check that they not act like a showboating asshole and you always treat them nice and respectfully and get to know their family or there will be hell to pay. With girls you use the carrots, with boys you use the sticks. Harsh discipline happened more often that I thought took place at that time as a young kid, but there were far fewer beatings that took place out of vengeance or retribution because of it.
When it came to jobs networking was always a massive thing and often the best way in. One thing I distinctly remember was if one of your family members or friends put his reputation on the line or vouched for you, there was a ritual that almost ‘all’ of us went through. You were brought into a room and were seriously threatened to overperform and work like ‘hell’ and you ‘never’ make your family or friends look bad. I can remember that happening to me when I first began serious work and I can remember doing it to a couple of others as well several years later. Reputation was a ‘big’ deal. One maxim I remember being taught by an older peer was “if you like your job, you aren’t doing it right then.” I can also remember him telling me “… you’ve heard the phrase “learn the tricks of the trade?” No. Learn the trade…” I can remember getting in trouble working with my father and him telling me, “… do things the correct way, or not at all…” On days I’m not working particularly well and am having a difficult time finding my focus, I can physically hear them in my ear as if they’re standing right next to me. It sometimes even causes me to turn my head and I forget they aren’t there. Work is easy and doing ‘good’ work is hard. Excellence and a sense of accomplishment is its own reward when standing before your results. We were all taught from a very young age to work and work ‘hard’. ‘Very’ hard. I can recall a few instances where beatings actually happened over letting people down.
There were days I can remember we’d get off from school, casually walk through the door of our friend’s house, walk to the refrigerator and drink out of the milk container and talk to their mother sitting on the couch. You do that shit here you’d get knocked out or have the cops called on you. We were like a large extended family though. To this day even 20 years later, I can walk down the street of certain neighborhoods in some cities and when people see me outside they instantly recognize me and know who I am despite being gone for years. Not here though. I’ve had the cops called me on while sitting in my car, less than 30 seconds away from my house because the dipshit neighbor from across the street doesn’t know this face has been living here within eyesight of him for a decade now.
Eating separately inside a house was something I remember we never did. We all sat together as a family in the dining room and ate and enjoyed each other’s company. Too many people today live together as strangers and I hate that intensely. If I had children of my own I wouldn’t allow that in my house.
I had an Assyrian friend growing up with an ailing mother at the time. My friends and I used to go grocery shopping for her as a group so she didn’t have to. We’d come back with all the receipts and money and she’d invite us to stay and she’d make dinner for us all. She was a wonderful woman. We called her Mama Khalood.
If you ever had a disagreement with a friend or spouse about something or they did something you didn’t like in a public venue or social setting, you ‘never’ rebuked them in front of everybody, interrupted them or otherwise embarrassed them. You always addressed it in private, behind closed doors and matters were usually peacefully resolved.
In interpersonal relationships, one thing I was always taught is you never go to bed angry or upset with your girlfriend or wife. You listen to and never talk over them. You begin each and every morning with a deep hug and support each other through their hardships. You ‘never’ yell or raise your voice to them. Ever. And you ‘never’ call them disparaging names, e.g., bitch, whore, dumb ass, slut, etc. It doesn’t matter if you believe it. You ‘never’ call them that. You take note of the things they’re interested in. Literally. ‘Take notes’. Some of my close friends actually have a private notebook of their wives habits and interests that they began when they were still dating. Likes and dislikes. Places they’ve always wanted to go, etc. They surprise them all the time with things during the holidays and to this day have great and stable marriages among those of us who found a spouse.
When the school year was in session, my older sibling would often stay over at their friend’s house for 1, 2, sometimes 3 days that I can remember. They wouldn’t come home. They’d stay there, do homework together, talk, have fun, go do random stuff in the city and hang with the other kids. My mother knew where they were. I wouldn’t see them for a few days, staying at home myself. But they’d spend the night there and then faithfully walk to school with them the following morning, from their house. That stuff wasn’t uncommon.
In the Bay Area, people are much more hyper individualized and mean spirited than I’m used to. There’s very little in the way of manners or social cohesion. People sometimes think I’m rude in my outward behavior, but what people here don’t realize is more than half the things they do every day I find incredibly rude. On a national level that culture is all but dead but it still exists in pockets elsewhere. People sometimes think I’m odd because of those tendencies that were inculcated in me. Why I go out of my way to help others at work for instance. It’s what I was taught. It’s a collectivist attitude. You care for and support your group and your own people. But it’s a very foreign concept in the Bay Area. But if they’d had the experiences I’ve had and were from the little neck of the woods I came from they’d quickly realize that at least out there, ‘they’re’ the ones that aren’t normal. Not me.
Could you provide some examples?
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One random speculation — ever since lockdown I’ve found it harder to filter out ambient conversational noise. I think it’s because my conversations went from 90:10 in-person:remote pre-pandemic to 10:90 during the pandemic and 30:70 now. I’ve lost my noise filtering edge.
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Conversation is a skill and it requires a great deal of practice. I don't think most people ever get good at it. Top 10 percentile get good at it in their twenties. Top 25 percentile get good in their mind 30s. Most of the rest never get good.
I'd say my own performance is spotty at best.
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Jungian typology splits conscientiousness and agreeableness into a few different dimensions in order to provide a finer-grained analysis of situations like the one you described. In Jungian terms, the disposition to rapidly respond to emotional cues and fluctuations in group mood would fall under the heading of “extroverted feeling”.
People who are low in extroverted feeling might still come off as quite friendly and gregarious (i.e. high agreeableness on most measures), but they’ll tend to have a lower “refresh rate” when polling the external environment for emotional and social cues (particularly when it comes to discerning a group average), and they’ll assign lower salience to this information, which is one way you can end up with two people excitedly exchanging stories while being oblivious to, or unmoved by, the disinterest of everyone else. See also Michael Pierce’s ENFP example.
This is all part of normal human variation and should emphatically not be confused with autism or other deficiencies in socialization.
Nope! Nothing wrong with them (usually). It’s mind-bending how different we all are from each other. Things that seem basic and obvious to you are things that other people have never even thought about, and vice versa.
Nope; not necessarily. We’re supposed to be shockingly different from each other, and we’re supposed to cause friction with each other; that’s nature working as intended. It takes all kinds to make up the world.
Maybe on a species level but certainly not a civilizational level. It’s far easier for human beings to move in and between social spaces lacking
diversityfriction. It’s simply an unpleasant fact. Too much homogeneity leads to a monoculture. Too much diversity can’t foster cooperation between individuals.More options
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Thanks, that should definitely help me track more down on this. I'm not sure that it all rounds down the way you describe, my priors are that culture will have a strong effect on the bell curves and I imagine significantly change a population over time.
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yes but how else do you expect midwits to fulfill their need for a label for people that do this
Yes, but friction and difference causes perceived risk that the hippy TV programs never taught their parents to properly deal with, so in turn they couldn't teach their kids to deal with that in a healthy way. So it goes.
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Man do I hear you,
brothersistersibling. This describes such a depressingly large portion of my daily small talk, online and offline, that I will display a stunning lack of awareness and reply with my own vent along largely the same lines, to draw the same inane outcome.This shit is so endemic that it must be some sort of fully general brainrot, possibly internet-induced. If I wanted to simply dump my shit I can talk to chatbots; we talk to other humans for that inexplicable feeling of namaste, "the light in me sees the light in you", a certain ineffable assurance that you are communicating with a conscious being - and in seeing your reflection in their eyes, become assured of your existence in the world. I increasingly feel like the demiurge has recently pushed a patch that fixes this bug and absolves humans of this need, and my software version is too old and retarded to be compatible. This tendency is everywhere, no matter where I turn I cannot unsee it.
PMs with friends? I am a person very ill fit for the modern internet - one that feels like reacting to everything you are sent is just common modesty. Namaste, etc. ...I started to see downsides to my approach in about the 100th tiktok/insta clip that my friend finds funny and sends me with no caption and no real relation to us per se. Memes of the olden era at least had a certain relatability(?) to them - haha literally me/us, haha funny word, haha [TOPICAL BLUNDER OF OUTGROUP] - whereas now it's mostly ragebait, some other sort of e-celeb slop, or barely comprehensible Jenga towers of irony best encapsulated by a median Max0r video.
Worse still, when I try to resist yearning for the slop and share (what looks to me) like topical, relevant things, half of the time I don't get a reaction at all. The slight sliver of sovl I try to dredge up goes literally ignored. Hans, are we the sloppers? I know one man's sovl is another man's slop but come the fuck on, not even a telegram react? Bruh.
Discord chats? Take the above and remove what little educational/relational value was left.
Email chains? Same shit mostly, except the tendency to answer a story with a story also very quickly bloats the response body until it takes over a day to cover everythint and reply at all, unless I take it upon myself to mercilessly prune chunks of it (and in doing so deprive the other person of acknowledgement).
Imageboards? You'd be lucky to get one actual thoughtful reply instead of some local samefagging retard who has made his life's calling to shit up this specific board/thread/general. (This is at least not new.)
Twitter? Thank fucking God I am not on Twitter, my heart goes out to everyone who is.
Youtube comments? If it's
eceleb slopcreator content, expect many """thoughtful""" Reddit-tier barely-related personal story from the poster's tumultuous life, something like "thanks for covering Doom 2, my sadly late grandfather would've loved this review so much when back in the day he was a real fan and <...>".Fuck, even literal music videos will inevitably have at least one highly-updooted traumadumping comment which barely pretends to be on topic. And don't even get me started on the comments to those comments, I think literally zero information exchange takes place there, its trauma dumping all the way down. Uplifting/powerful music? Stories of how it helps the poster overcome adversity. Sad music? Thrice as many stories about some immediate family member's death. Literally just a fucking cover of a song from a videogame? Scroll down and witness
Week long, man. I dread to imagine.
This shit is a plague, and it's absolutely tearing through the proverbial commons. My current spicy theory of why this is so rampant is because, after a decade of culture war and arbitrary censure of ever more innocuous viewpoints, the unwashed masses have finally internalized a lesson: faves may be problematic, today's Breathtaking Wholesome Person is tomorrow's Literally Nazi, the tides of kulturkampf are stupidly capricious - but amidst the tumult of it all, the Lived Experience is sacred. And so it is mounted as a preemptive shield, the last line of defense; your reaction or input on [anything] cannot be found problematic if you throw your entire self on top of it to shield it. This has been the case before with the rise of defensive "As a [PROGRESSIVE IDENTITY], my thoughts are..."-posting on Reddit and its ilk, and now this has finally trickled down to the masses, as meme economics say it must. We live in a fucking society. At least I still have this place.
exhales
...uh,
burgers?sorry, this tangent got away from me, I know it's overly cynical, its been a long time Nooticed and coalesced spontaneously while my melatonin is kicking in to help me sleep through my depressive episode. Get through this, suckers.To conclude, I agree. I am trying to resist this tendency myself and still include question marks and pronouns other than "I" in the things I write, even if I do not get this courtesy in turn, but I too am starting to feel outgunned. This seems to me like a true tragedy of the commons, and I have no idea how to even try fixing it.
God I know this feeling and it resonates so hard. I used to tell one of my cousin’s I occasionally talk to, one primary difference between us and Gen Z is we grew up with the Internet, they grew up on the Internet. I get sent Instagram reels All. The. Time. And it’s the most unbelievably, mindless, boring ass shit you could possibly watch. It’s the human stimulative equivalent of a lab rat getting a hit of cocaine. Because of that, I never watch anything social media related people send to me.
Very few people understand my sense of humor and even of those that do, fewer still are sympathetic to it. I have a very insulting, smart ass, matter of fact tone of engagement that I have to be careful with in ordinary conversation because it turns a lot of people off.
What little engagement I have on the Internet eventually has people thinking I’m an Internet troll because I deliver my intellectual counterpunches with a note of sarcasm; that leads people to believe I’m replying just to get a rise out of others. I’m not. Your position looks ridiculous because it ‘is’ ridiculous. Irony and sarcasm is a huge part of the way I live my life. I have the faculty of humor. I’m not going to repress that. That’s the twist. Back then we didn’t call that being a “troll,” which is a vastly overused term. A “troll” is someone who’s being edgy solely for the sake of getting a rise out of you. People used to describe people like me more accurately as a “flamer,” not a troll. I’m not a troll my dear. I’m an asshole.
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Can you explain what youtube comments should look like? As you yourself noted, your comment was basically just a giant “me too man” parallel venting, following the OP, but what’s wrong with that? You commiserated with him and expanded upon it with your own thoughts. To me it seemed a fine comment, and if you and @somethingsomething had this exchange in person it would seem to me you two were having a good conversation. Perhaps I’m outing myself as an NPC or socially inept but this all seems fine and normal
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Yeah the erasure of social technology like etiquette, standard topics of conversation, calling cards, etc. is a huge issue in dating discourse and socializing more general.
Also, women going into the workforce instead of spending more time upholding the social fabric is another factor.
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I think something as fundamental and rich as social interaction needs to be treated as sacred. There are very clearly people in the world who, for any number of reasons aren't interested in or cannot interact socially in a skillful way. Some of the reasons you've touched on and ones that I've thought about are:
I definitely think that our world is supporting in-person social interaction less and less as the years go on. I mentioned "rich" earlier because I believe that physically being around people has way more nuance and minutiae than it's virtual counterpart, which I'm sure isn't even controversial. Body language, tone of voice, the physical space, the collective energy. So we must support positive Social Environments (which is a TALL task).
But I think an even taller task is dealing with trauma and awareness. You mentioned people talking over on another, only relating to themselves, something I experience everyday and it drives me mad. To me that means they aren't at all genuinely interested in the other person. They are only interested in surviving the social interaction by trying to relate things to themselves rather than expound upon what the other person has to say, which is what's important and fun for that person. Now of course, this could be a function of the other person being unpleasant to interact with. Maybe they are a selfish and shallow socializer, so why would we be interested in them? I think this touches on your point about "nutrition". Social health is a matrix that everyone participates in and if you find yourself shouldering more of the load you'll adapt to the people around you by either becoming them or hiding from them.
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Normies would rather be loud and boring than silent and boring.
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