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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?
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 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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