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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3371 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 14, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How unreasonable is it to prioritize work over interpersonal connections? I truly enjoy my work and find it so much more gratifying than anything else I have ever done in my life, but there seems to be some sort of prevailing consensus that you are only human if you relate to others? Has anyone else led a somewhat more solitary existence and prioritized only themselves over connections with others (outside of the connections you make at work anyway in a team, although those connections are more transactional in nature)?

Reasonable seems like an odd phrasing.

Can you live your life that way and survive? Yes, obviously.

Will you miss out on many things? Yes, obviously.

I think the big question to ask yourself is are you comfortable with coming back to interpersonal relationships in ten years and being in a profoundly weird position of trying to play catch-up?

High achieving gunners often experience this after college, they focused on academics throughout high school and College, and now they've achieved their early professional goals and it is time for romance, but they missed the developmental steps along the way, so they're stumbling through first dates and first kisses at 24, and lack the training and reference that their peers have around these things.

are you comfortable with coming back to interpersonal relationships in ten years and being in a profoundly weird position of trying to play catch-up?

I have seen people much older than me catch up, but I do feel that even if they’re successful it is a somewhat odd position. My only cope is maybe when you’re older you’re wiser and more patient and can handle human relationships better - without the self flagellation that comes with being young.

so they're stumbling through first dates and first kisses at 24, and lack the training and reference that their peers have around these things.

Ouch!

How long ago did you decide this and how has this experience been going for you?

How confident are you that this work will actually stay so gratifying for the next x0 years of your life? What if the industry gets automated/offshored? Company goes bankrupt or does layoffs? You get a crappy manager? Develop physical or mental health problems? Or everything else goes fine but you simply don't like it so much anymore at some point?

Not very confident; not very confident that I’d meet people who gratify me similarly either. All this discussion around it is quite interesting, life is hard.

I'd strongly advice against any kind of one-track lifestyle. No matter what you do, things can always go bad in a way that is not really your fault. It's good to have fallbacks, ideally uncorrelated ones, that you can be happy about. If you have a reasonably fun job that pays reasonably well (but is not amazing by either measure), have a partner, have friends, have family you're on good terms with, have kids, own a house that you deliberately made your own, and maybe some other things like hobbies or volunteer work or local community stuff, then it's pretty hard for your life to get completely ruined in a modern western society.

Work in particular is imo one of the easiest and most tempting one-tracks to get into, and thus the one you should be most careful about. This has a bunch of reasons, in no particular order:

-I'm hardly a communist, but they are correct that bosses are very eager to get you into this. It's just not about capitalism, it's simply very beneficial for anyone in a hierarchy above you if you have nothing else on your plate. It's extremely easy to talk a young unattached girl into unpaid overwork for a job she loves.

-Because of the way aging works, a lot of the other things will only get harder as you get older: Well-adjusted people will already be paired of and have kids, and they will already have enough friends so that even if they like you, they'll probably put no work in to turn this into a friendship, for example.

-This only applies to you if you have a "fun" career: Work is fundamentally the stuff that needs to be done, but which is not fun enough for people to do for free. It's also normal to get paid badly at the start of your career. And there is this pervasive idea that you need to "find the right work" that "fulfills" you. This leads to an interesting dysfunction in modern times: Extreme competition around fun jobs that people are actually willing to do for free. I've seen more than one person get completely burned out on something where they think they just need to "focus more on their career", except everyone is doing this so you can't get ahead; The fundamental problem is that supply outstrips demand so much that only a tiny sliver of ultra-competent can earn anything at all.

-Work has a tendency to become drudgery over time, moreso if you have nothing else. There are unfortunately large differences between "sounds good", "is fun (at first)" and "stays tolerable over long time spans". Worse, most people only find out once it happens to them.

-Contrariwise, especially on a partner & kids I've seen a noticeable tendency where people think that they don't need or even want it when they are young, but they nevertheless become unhappy and regretful once they're too old and it's too late.

-The great majority of work is ephemeral, even the work you think isn't. At some point you'll realize that you left almost nothing behind for the future. Are you ready for this?

-Finally, to hark back to the general criticism of one-track lifestyles, work is especially susceptible to outside influence. You boss leaves and the new boss sucks. Or the entire field isn't doing so well so you're getting chopped. Or politics does something stupid that impacts your company negative. Or some of your favorite coworkers leave and the atmosphere turns bad. Or the world changes in an unpredictable way that makes your job far less fun (to understand what I mean, see the complaints from programmers who like programming itself but hate supervising and double-checking AIs who do the actual coding).

Really great points, thank you for providing forward looking insights into this.

Maybe because I’ve spent 20+ years trying to make friends (ever since I was a conscious child, for example), but they haven’t lasted (no fault of theirs, maybe some of mine), and of course relationships are almost a joke in how little they mean since one day someone can wake up and just decide they don’t find you worth their time anymore, I feel like I have some experience with being alone.

The intellectual stimulation at work is so intense that it leaves almost no space for worrying about anything interpersonal. So was graduate school, but you’re right that the landscape of work is ever changing and it’s quite likely that in 5 years I might get replaced by some AI.

You’ve given me a lot to think about, I appreciate that.

Autists hyper focusing on work they enjoy is how we get extreme specialists that sometimes make contributions to the pool of human knowledge. In that sense, I encourage it from a utilitarian perspective.

I was always too far-sighted to have ever risked having lost the plot when it came to getting too caught up in work. Some people think I’m this “workaholic” type guy, but the reality of things couldn’t be further from the truth. Unless my friends or family are prompted to organize something and they ask me to play a part in putting it together, I would much rather spend my time doing something else. Unless you’re say a Hasidic Jew who believes as part of the foundation for his religious vocation that it’s his job to seek God in everything he does (including work and labor more generally), I’ve always looked at the older cohort who retires and then makes frequent appearances or returns to work as having nothing better to do outside of his job. If that were me, you would never see me again and I would never return. I’m too engrossed in my own pursuits and interests and family life to find enjoyment in that.

People also tend not to appreciate what’s good in their life and what they have until they’ve lost it. Fortunately that was never me.

Not appreciating the good things in one's life is probably a common mistake, and a mistake that I've made many times. Sometimes it's useful to reflect on the bad points in one's life to regain perspective on the things that are actually going very well by relative comparison.

The first polycarbonate to survive anodization and rival the tensile strength of magnesium will be invented by a lonely heart

Very likely. To paraphrase the immortal Zapp Brannigan, "Some of you autists may die alone, but that's a price I'm willing to pay."

Might be confusing it for some of his other bangers.

“It was simply a matter of outsmarting them. You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.”

"When I'm in command, every mission is a suicide mission."

I stand corrected!

That's Lord Farquaad.

I heard that in Lieutenant's Kif's voice.

relationships are almost a joke in how little they mean since one day someone can wake up and just decide they don’t find you worth their time anymore

What does it mean when somebody claims to be female, but describes an archetypal, rite-of-passage experience of men?

It may be too hot a take for this board, but I would say it means women aren’t actually foreign agitators with incomprehensible experiences.

There are, of course, other possibilities.

And maybe the Moon is actually made of cheese. I would still consider other possibilities before concluding that the moon rock sex scandal was a cover-up for a rat infestation.

Only interpersonal romantic relationships, friendships aren’t like that. They’re a slow drift towards irrelevancy but you can recover them.

I'm OBVIOUSLY referring to the romantic relationship moment of having the female half inevitably proclaim "I'm not haaaappy" with little to no prior indication, which is recognizable to any man with experience.

Consider the most obsequious, autistic man you know and then imagine him as a woman. ANNOYING!

Any unattractive or ordinary-looking person could have such a realization after being dumped by an attractive person, regardless of gender.

Great post, thank you.

I wholeheartedly recommend that you do as I did, and gradually isolate yourself from interacting with absolutely everybody, except for the cases where one of you or both are acting in a professional capacity. (For context: I am recommending it because I'm a misogynist.)

It is possible to make such a recommendation without being a misogynist.

I admire the strong boldness or complete ignorance to make a statement like that; my only addendum being it isn’t exactly wrong to ‘conclude’ that, if your life experience has led you down the path of understanding and realization that “lack of success doesn’t prove lack of effort,” when it comes to the romance game. If you come up empty or find yourself at a dead end you can have it anyway you want: with the self-pity; or without it.

if your life experience has led you down the path of understanding and realization that “lack of success doesn’t prove lack of effort,” when it comes to the romance game

Friendship, romance—same thing (1 2).

I don’t know about that one. I have friends who have married their wife and others who married their female best friend they’d known all their lives. The former has seemed to prove more successful than the latter.

How long have you been a misogynist?

You're describing the life of a graduate student, which is fine for a time, but at some point most people will want something that's easier to obtain with a social network to draw on e.g. a job referral, meeting a potential spouse, a couch to crash on, someone to help you move, someone to ramble about philosophy to at a bar late at night, and so on. Perhaps your job is stable and you enjoy it enough that you don't need any of those things, in which case I envy you, but some part of my soul recoils at the thought of living like Nikola Tesla, great inventor or no.

Well I wish the existence was more Tesla-esque in terms of intellectual output. You’re right that there’s some erosion of the soul when it is just devoted to the altar of inputs and outputs. My only salvation is that this feels easier than the socialization aspect of being human for now. I might be asking a completely different question in a year about all this though.

This is one of those times where the easier path is most likely the worse path in the long term. Force yourself to socialize the way you should force yourself to physically exercise, if you are not already exercising through your work or hobbies.

Imagine yourself the parent of an antisocial child refusing to talk with their peers. They might turn out the type of person who values solitude, but the odds are the child has normal social needs and some forced socialization is healthy for the child even if they are unwilling to do it. If you let the child's antisocial behavior become a habit, it will only be harder to break the habit later and you do the child harm. As an adult, if your parents didn't correct your bad habits, you will need the force of will to establish good habits yourself, for your own health and happiness.

You have to be very careful in how you balance bringing this to a resolution. Far too many parents don’t understand the personality and temperament of their own children, and the worst ones always commit the same cardinal mistake: they end up parenting the child they were growing up, and not the one they have. As a parent, you may think just because your child has similarities to you that means they are you. A zebra and a horse both have 4 legs and a tail, but a zebra is not a horse.

People’s constant attempts to encourage pushing me in various directions when I was younger only ever achieved nothing but intensifying my resistance and dislike for everything they were trying to impress upon me. It wasn’t until they finally just gave up (not through any moral epiphanies, just age and being fatigued by time) they just found themselves without the strength to continue to try and cram their garbage down my throat; that I actually had the breathing room to explore these things on my own terms and time, and finally got around to finding interest in enjoyment in what they wanted to expose me to.

At some point work may not be so exciting anymore and you may have like 50+ years of your life to putter around. Basically where I am as I don't have any real friends currently after I kind of stopped talking to everyone.

Why did you stop talking to them?

I was in a very low mental place, but was doing a lot better materially than them so I felt unworthy to ask for help, and otherwise didn't feel like I could be my real self around them. It was kind of a silent cry for help, but you need fairly pushy friends for going unresponsive to be productive in that way, otherwise they'll be fine just moving on.

didn't feel like I could be my real self around them

You can’t really, not many (or anyone?) can handle the true nature of human wanting or whatever. Hope you’re doing better mentally now?

I think there are degrees but yeah that's essentially true. I'm in a better place now, definitely.

It's reasonable if it's a stable, long term preference. If it's only an intermittent preference, and especially if you might want a family, your late 20s and early 30s is exactly the wrong time to remain socially secluded.

Man I wish having friends ever led to a date.

It’s led to many dates for me, including my current partner. (Introduced by a formerly romantically interested friend.)

Do your friends know that you are single and looking? Have you put in the legwork to make yourself attractive and not unattractive?

When I had friends I was attractive enough and made it clear I was painfully single. Still had to fight tooth and nail for every date I've gotten unfortunately.

Sorry to hear that, I'm sure a lot of it comes down to luck and specific circumstances as well.

I don't have a ton of romantic experience, but such as it is, it's been the same sources as friends. I do realize that this has the failure mode of ambiguously date like friendships, but I've never tried anything else, and so have no experience with relationships that are romantic from the start.

At some point companionship would be helpful but I am opposed to children, even though they’re lovely, because of other personal reasons.

How were your early 30s in terms of socialization? I don’t dislike the idea of it, but the effort vs returns can vary significantly

How were your early 30s in terms of socialization? I don’t dislike the idea of it, but the effort vs returns can vary significantly

I moved states, got married, had a baby, and moved again during Covid, so my social life outside my husband and family was pretty thin.

In my late 20s, my social connections were through church, liberal arts college, and volunteer work, and that was lovely. We were putting on supras (formal toasting dinner parties), bonfires, game and beer nights, holiday festivities, meditation meet ups and other pleasant events.

Personally, I would have gotten burnt out working all the time and not prioritizing community get togethers, but I'm a woman, low in conscientiousness, and doing the kind of work where more work doesn't result in increased opportunities, so ymmv.

Your 20s sound so idyllic, thank you for describing them and your life now too, it all sounds lovely. I sort of imagined myself vicariously at a bonfire too for a moment.

This is the thing with socialization, it never seems like a bad thing and people’s overall view of them doing all this is always great to learn about.

I’m a woman too but I think I crave positive reinforcement in the form of quantized and measurable feedback which a high-impact, complex job seems to offer. Sometimes I struggle with such feedback from human beings, and it might be unseemly to ask people to rate their social interactions with me on a scale of 1-10?

it might be unseemly to ask people to rate their social interactions with me on a scale of 1-10?

Haha.

I remember enjoying how CS Lewis talked about philia in The Four Loves.

My parents keep joining book clubs; currently they're looking forwards to a TS Eliot meetup. But we were all educated lower middle class, and didn't have any idea how to get complex, satisfying jobs with quantized and measurable feedback. We've mostly had the kinds of jobs where feedback came in the form of getting yelled at, or sometimes unexpectedly fired. I can see how it would be very appealing to put time and effort into an actually good job that you're good at.

We've mostly had the kinds of jobs where feedback came in the form of getting yelled at, or sometimes unexpectedly fired

That sounds terrible and that is my fear that if you devote yourself even to a satisfying job at some point you may lose your humanity and see people as numbers (or worse human resources, or worse liabilities on a balance sheet)

I'm curious to see what, if anything, comes of the LLM driven automation of the next decade. It seems primed, especially, to take over low level management work. I wonder if it would be better or worse for the average worker to have high level decisions made by an AI program vs a human manager. Thinking of some of the human decisions, it might be mixed. Reports out of Amazon warehouses aren't great.

We've been learning about the mining labor struggles of 19th Century Colorado. This isn't from Colorado, but is a good song: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MjFcllICjUc

I’m a woman too but I think I crave positive reinforcement in the form of quantized and measurable feedback which a high-impact, complex job seems to offer. Sometimes I struggle with such feedback from human beings, and it might be unseemly to ask people to rate their social interactions with me on a scale of 1-10?

Has The Motte finally found a mythical Manic Pixie Dream Girl Autist?

Welcome! I suspect you will not suffer from lack of positive reinforcement around here.

You think so? This place scratches some autistic itch I have to observe humans as anthropological interests, but yet I love the feeling of being outside the bubble of it. I’m too stupid for astral codex ten though sadly. Wish I had that advanced form of autism.

If you're wondering where the cranky conservatives from the Slate Star Codex comment section went, it's https://www.datasecretslox.com

I’m too stupid for astral codex ten though sadly

Scott Alexander himself is an exceedingly brilliant thinker, but I am frequently told AstralCodexTen comment sections, because of their higher penetration and mass appeal are actually more stupid than the rocket scientists at TheMotte. I'm confused, I want to know what is true and what isn't. 🤔

The other comment can be interpreted as a joke with two meanings.

In the misty past, it was the default assumption that all users of the Internet were ugly men, and any user claiming otherwise without providing proof was a liar—a person shrewd enough to assume a convincing false persona in order to gain social clout in online spaces. (A long-dead shorthand phrase related to this phenomenon is "tits or GTFO"—i. e., the identity of an Internet poster as female cannot be confirmed without a photograph in which the subject exposes herself while holding a piece of paper with a timestamp.)

In modern times, this assumption has greatly weakened. (In particular, the "rationalist" community has been accused of being too trusting and incapable of simulating the thought processes of liars.) But it has not totally disappeared. So, in the opinion of the other commenter, if you are actually a woman you will get the deserved attention that you want, and if you are an ugly man pretending to be a woman you will get the undeserved attention that you want from this website's "quokka" denizens (positive reinforcement for your evil trolling).

In the misty past, it was the default assumption that all users of the Internet were ugly men

The joke I remember was "Welcome to the Internet, where all the men are men, all the women are men, and all the children are FBI agents."

That was before anyone was really thinking of trans-ness or anything like that, just the demographics of those inclined to figure out dial-up modems or work in tech in that era.

Haha, I started using the internet when I was 16 so I do remember TITS OR GTFO phase; those men probably have families now. Strange thing to consider.

if you are actually a woman you will get the deserved attention that you want

What type of attention do women deserve and want? I want to imagine the internet is more egalitarian now and just being a woman online (an egirl?) isn’t enough to warrant any special treatment or attention.

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Has The Motte finally found a mythical Manic Pixie Dream Girl Autist?

Could be. I'm fascinated to see if the Sim decides to run with this plotline.

Hang around a while, here I mean, and you could probably get loads of respondents.

I will! Mostly just to read and learn

She definitely found the correct corner of the internet.

There are so many worse corners to be in, this one is cool!

Has anyone else led a somewhat more solitary existence and prioritized only themselves over connections with others (outside of the connections you make at work anyway in a team, although those connections are more transactional in nature)?

There is some historic precedent.

Broadly speaking, there's a limited window for family formation (yes, even for men), so that's something that needs to be prioritized if that's something you want.

Thank you for directing me to the concept of anchoress; I wasn’t previously familiar.

I understand the obligations of starting a family early enough but imagine if you weren’t bound by that

Out of curiosity, how did you find this forum?

someone on a private discord told me about it, it’s a bit overwhelming but intriguing!

I suppose it depends on how connected to your college peers you are and how old you are.

If you're a year or less out after college and you're still close to your college friends (like you're all in the same town, it's going to be a lot less important to start building connections. If you're 30 and still throwing 100% into work, you better be on a career path where wealth or fame will open doors or change your plans ASAP.

Not in my 20s anymore, but spent all of my 20s in education so the start of the career was somewhat delayed (but everyone should go to graduate school I think).

It feels gauche to say that wealth is a good motivator but it does seem to be. Your opinion is really helpful in this.

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