The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
I get a bit anxious in big groups where I don't know many of the people. The anxiety gets worse if the people are considered high status or "popular" in the high school/college sense (e.g., more attractive, partiers, frat guys, that kind of vibe). Examples of big group environments are popular bars and house parties (again, it gets worse with high status or so-called popular people).
Modesty aside, I'm fairly witty, sharp, and interesting when I'm around people I'm comfortable with, but I clam up when put in the aforementioned environments.
Things I've done to make it better:
Act like the person I'm talking to is already my friend
Find a way that I'm higher status than them
Convince myself that I don't care about the outcome of this interaction
Put myself in these situations more
Things I'm working on to make it better:
Improving my ability to talk to everyone, regardless of the topic. I mostly enjoy deep, intellectual convos and don't keep up with pop culture, sports, etc. I find surface-level convos boring and tend to detach myself if we move down that path. Maybe there's a minimum amount of "normie" (I hate that word, but you get the idea) topics I should keep up with?
Putting myself in these situations more
Any other suggestions are welcome!
Of course some people really are duller than others, or just worse fits conversationally for each other. Some people do like more or less substantative discussions, more or less argument, more or less critique, etc.
But taken too far this becomes a cope. And it's best not to self-frame like that. Almost everyone enjoys a good conversation. If you want to check out of a tedius or boring conversation, by all mean, it's your right, and might be the best use of your time.
But recognize internally that it's usually because you don't have the patience or interest in fishing, and probably NOT that the other person likes standing with his pole in the water not catching bites.
Two people go out fishing. Both are bad at it or are in an unfamiliar lake. They fumble around, leading eachother to different spots, as often moving on too quickly from a promising spot for other's taste or linger too long in an apparently bad spot. Neither one has the confidence, knowledge of the lake, or strategy to lead, so they keep stepping on each other's (and their own) attempts at catching something.
After an unproduction adventure they both walk away thinking, "It's too bad that guy didn't want to catch any fish. What a waste of time."
Thinking they're being charitable and getting the entirely wrong message, the fishermen later say to themselves
"Maybe I should spend more time practicing puttering around in bad fishing spots, since the other guy seemed to like that."
No, that's not necessary at all.
In small doses, any kind of conversation can be interesting. Even the guy who only wants to talk about the drugs he's ingested today or how hot various women are - a lot of people are like that, it's worth having some understanding of how and why! Those people are 99.9% the same pathways as you, just (on a cosmic scale) ever so slightly dumber and with different tendencies, and it's interesting how that shakes out. And surely, if you're so far above that, you should be able to participate competently.
You can, but I think this perspective dismisses an important point.
People have limited metabolic energy and therefore must have a system of filtering information in the environment to avoid combinatorial explosion. If your relevance realization machinery focuses on mastering a domain and looking into the unsolved questions of the domain then you can start finding small talk far less relevant. It is taking time away from you making a potential contribution to the domain that could help many people.
Small talk becomes far less interesting when you get good at predicting what the other person will say because you’ve had similar conversations with other people. It is no longer a source of interesting/relevant information.
'relevance realization'? I feel like paragraph 1 is a fully general argument against e.g. having fun, randomly reading wikipedia pages to learn new things, or really anything other than 'working in the domain you specialize in', unless i'm misunderstanding, which is plausible.
I agree with paragraph 2. But there are a variety of people out there, with a variety of experiences, and there are a lot of potential things to talk about. The common man isn't an infinite well of wisdom, but if you can't get anything out of talking to random people at a reasonable frequently you're doing it wrong.
I was using relevance realization to mean the process by which things motivate people, what arouses their energy, what attracts their attention, etc. Right now you probably aren't paying attention to the wall or the furniture even though it is in your environment, there is a process that puts it in the background as not important.
You can find anything relevant, including just having fun. A drug addict finds drugs highly relevant and salient. I was indicating that there is a process that causes people to find certain things relevant and causes them to background other things. Relevance changes depending on context too (such as when someone is at work, and when they are at home).
It isn't that you can't get anything out of it. It is that you have limited time/energy and you can get similar things more efficiently. If you read certain books you will gain knowledge you find relevant at a faster pace than if you spent that time on small talk.
I think there's something weird going on with the way you're using that concept, but whatever.
I think translating out of that language - you're arguing that such conversations aren't a good way to get information on the margin, but I'm arguing that, if approached correctly, they are. It's the same reason I just read random comments/posts on all social media websites - it's both valuable and intrinsically interesting to learn about all the varied aspects of the human experience.
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