On the topic of "support your friends", if there's a funeral for someone you weren't super close with but your friend knew well and you're not sure whether to go, I would recommend just going, sitting up the back, offering your condolences if the opportunity comes up, and leaving.
I've failed to do this twice. Nobody else said or did anything, but I regretted it.
Well the thing is, that sometimes being there and giving them a nod is already saying enough. No need for words. Showing them you care is appropriate if you really do.
The relevant thing is care and aid for the grieving loved ones of the deceased.
Your presence at the funeral, while symbolic (some might even say empty symbolism) is a way of showing the mourners that the deceased was cared for by many. It is comforting to some extent.
But of course, if funerals are too difficult, there are other ways to accomplish the same thing.
I never had to do with the grieving though? What do I care about the grieving? I care about the deceased person. I am not going to fake interest in their family if it never occurred when my friend was alive.
Sure, skip the funeral. If you & the family didn't get along in life there's no reason to put yourself through something you don't want to go to.
2 - Anything else
I'd go as a show of support for the family because the family was important to my friend. "It's what my friend would want" is the guiding principle here.
That said - I'm writing this as someone who was very uncomfortable going to funerals and now, years later, I regret choosing to stay home rather than go.
This has all been explained to you, thoroughly and repeatedly.
In the end... whatever. There are a lot of things that go into being a decent human being.
At the very least, I'm sure we'd agree on the big picture: the sum of how we care for our friends when they're alive is more important than what we do on the day of their funeral. So if you're being a good friend in other ways... hey, good on you.
Why compartmentalize your love? I recently attended a funeral and shared sympathies with several strangers that over the course of time, became closer to friends.
Your friend almost certainly loved their family, and their family loved your friend. Although they may be gone, you can still keep that connective love alive by doing the same things for others that you’d do for your friend - sometimes, it’s as simple as showing up, even just once, for someone else.
Yes, I dont connect over these things. Also I have a pretty good circle of friends and dont need more people in my life. Every loss of a friend is like the world os falling apart and with more people in my life id have to go through that even more. I keep the number of people I have to deal with small.
Let me tell you, it is absolutely not ok. The family does notice who is and isn't at the funeral and they WILL assume you are just not emotionally involved. I have seen this scenario play out. Don't be surprised if people stop showing up at something you organize. Breaking down at a funeral is absolutely ok and will strengthen the bond with those left behind.
I made the complete opposite experience thankfully. I am very open about this and my friends understand. I dont care about their families, I care about the person in the casket.
Not a popular approach these days, but you’re absolutely right. This is an example where setting healthy boundaries has veered into hiding away from life and avoiding hard, messy human things.
It seems like, at least in online places like Reddit, "boundaries" has become this magical, get-out-of-jail-free word that justifies people to short-circuit norms and socialization and just do whatever they want in human relationships. "I want to do X, and I don't want to do Y, and I don't want my partner calling me out for doing Z. If you don't like it, that's your problem, and if you object, you're crossing my boundaries and are in the wrong!"
Before, it was just "being selfish and anti-social." Now, the same thing is called "setting healthy boundaries for myself."
To be fair, plenty of boundary setting is legitimate. I find that hypocrisy is an excellent tell for when someone is misusing the principle. Eg. when someone says "I don't like it when you talk about this subject" and then proceeds to bring up said subject all the time when they have something to say about it.
Amen. I had a long and damaging relationship with somebody who did exactly what you describe. Used "boundaries" as an excuse for being a toxic human being, as many narcissists do.
A good test of the boundary-setter's true nature is whether or not they find alternative means of doing the thing or if they are just claiming "but muh boundaries!" to excuse their lack of being a decent human being.
If their "boundaries" prevent them from showing up at a funeral to provide a moment of comfort to the survivors of the deceased... well okay. There could be valid reasons. Suppose funerals tend to induce suicidal ideation in an individual. Certainly nobody would suggest that individual should risk a suicidal episode.
But, is the person finding an alternative way to show that care? Flowers, letters, a visit at some other time? Or are they just narcissisticly using it as an excuse to avoid spending time for the benefit of anybody other than themselves?
You can live your life however you like, but dealing with hard messy human things is part of being a functioning adult in society. At some point if you can't grow up and learn to control your expression of emotion then it really limits your options. This is something you might want to work on, perhaps with professional help.
Avoidance can be self preservation. My friends are fine with me not attending, why aren't you? Because I dont wanna join some human made sadness gatherings with some religious idiot talking about how my atheist friend is with God now?
This conversation started as general advice, and as such, avoidance of human connection around death is poor advice. You sound like you have good reason for your avoidance, but you shouldn't extrapolate that it's a good general strategy.
Humans are societal creatures. That avoidance as self-preservation can be considered a weak trait. Society only really works if we know we have each other's backs when the chips are down, so with you abandoning situations when the chips are down demonstrates you won't be there when I need you to be, so it's probably better to cut you out now, right?
Or, why would I put food on the table for the slowest gazelle?
> Society only really works if we know we have each other's backs when the chips are down
I'd disagree with this - capitalism tends to reward defection from this norm, and it's been a stable equilibrium for centuries at this point. You have more of a point when it comes to community, but even many intentional communities are massively hypocritical when it comes to this, with higher-status people having the ability to deviate from norms at will.
We live in a post society. We are long past the "we need each other" part. Everybody only cares about themselves and im just reflecting what the world gives me.
Agreed. I used to hate going to funerals and skipped some, telling myself it was because I didn't know what to say, might embarrass myself, etc. After being in the receiving line of a couple, I realized someone else's funeral isn't about me. The truth is no one notices exactly what you say because they're dealing with their own grief, and "I'm sorry for your loss" is perfectly acceptable. So now I just go, pay my respects, and feel better for doing it.
This is the worst advice someone could give. It absolutely is ok to decide on your own if it's good for you and the others if you attend or not. I wouldn't want anyone to come to my funeral just because others expect him to.
If I was close to someone and they skipped my funeral for no other reason than their own mild discomfort I would seriously question how close we were after all.
Someone should attend your funeral because they made some kind of connection with you in this short life. Being uncomfortable for 30 minutes is the least one can do. I am so tired of people being so emotionally immature that they can’t handle a little discomfort.
Well, it turned from the original "breaking down", through "slight discomfort" to "skipping for a benefit".
Just let me tell you for someone to break down can mean a panic attack, where they can not catch breath, or they just crawl into a corner acting like a kid, it can mean throwing up violently or it can mean falling into a long term depression. Everyone can have their own reasons and way of processing pain.
Whats so special about a funeral? It's just tons of sad people. I meet the relevant people in unofficial circumstances. My friends understand this, so I dont see the issue.
I have no idea what point you’re trying to make here.
“It's just tons of sad people.” - this makes you sound like you have the emotional acuity of a 4 year old. You can fix that, but you can’t do it sitting in front of your computer.
It's weird, in one comment you say you only care about the deceased "person in the casket," and here you mention the respect of friends (who are presumably living) as important. It sounds to me like you might be a younger person with a slightly naive worldview on death.
This take is sad. We have become a society of emotionally weak people.
My wife and I make our kids do uncomfortable things because that’s what separates children from adults. An example, and not even the hardest one: Yesterday we were vacationing at the beach and we got a call from the dog boarding facility keeping our 8 year old dog, she was having seizures and had to be taken to an animal hospital. We drove 3 hours to see her. There was lots of crying, in front of everyone - who gives a shit. We had to have her euthanized. The 4 of us stayed with her for the entire process. We could have just told them to put her down over the phone and continued our vacation, or we could have left the room as they ended her life. She wasn’t conscious and we have no way of knowing if she was aware of our presence, but if something/someone makes an impact on your life, learn to be a little unselfish and be present. It hurts, but just because something hurts doesn’t mean we should shy away from doing it.
Learning to steel yourself is an important life skill. Obviously a dog is not a human, but the parallels are there - as humans we have honored the end of a impactful life throughout our history.
It's also selfish, narcissistic and kind of anti-social. Somehow, we've uplifted "taking care of yourself" over every other societal norm, obligation, and courtesy. Humans are not meant to be "on the comfortable/happy path" 100% of the time. Sometimes, we are expected to act altruistically. Sometimes we should make small sacrifices for others' benefits. Sometimes we should be go out of our comfort zone to comfort someone else. This doesn't mean torture yourself and ruin your mental health, but it does mean stepping out of your usual routine occasionally, for other people's sake.
This is such an anti social take. How dense to you have to be to not realize attendance is for the benefit of the living. The dead person is not the guest of honor it's the family of the deceased if there is any "guest of honor" at all
Not attending rightfully costs you a lot, even if you're lacking the social skills to perceive it
As far as I am concerned I dont exist for the families of my friends. I exist for my friends. Never cared about their families and they never cared about mine, its just how we move.
I’m in my mid-40s. When I randomly reconnect with friends from my 20s, they still ask about my parents and my parents still occasionally ask about them.
You're clearly not capable of seeing that humans live differently which is completely fine. Some tribes eat people, some tribes bury them. Just because most people value ordinary people things doesn't mean you should be forced into their culture
Look, if you want to live life like a hermit, that’s on you. As you get older, you will lose people, friends, family, acquaintances, not only through death, but growing apart for “normal” reasons, moving away, job changes, changes in interests, getting married, etc. Rarely in life do you make more connections later in life than you had when you were younger. The more you rail against social norms, the more you isolate yourself. If that’s what you want, fair enough. But if you want to be part of a well functioning social group, the rest of us value getting together at the end of someone’s life.
It's such a young person thing to believe the adrenaline of pushing against the envelope is a better feeling than the endorphins of expressing appropriate emotion. I'm sure they'll learn this when they come of age.
Life can be painful, and comfort, solace, and community are really nice when you're on the downswing instead of the upswing, which happens to all of us if you're strong enough to live that long.
Categorizing some of the most meaningful, most fundamental human experiences as "brainless" is no doubt part of the reason you struggle with having community. And, I'm guessing, why communities struggle with you.
Maybe I dont value community if I consider most people brainless? That's my conclusion of 30 years of life experience. I was traumatized at the age of 15 and didn't value community ever since. During that time I was dropped and ignored by society. Fake ass society, the only value you have as a human is what you can provide, you are never on the receiving end.
> I broke down every funeral I went to and would rather avoid that in the future.
I understand it can be emotionally challenging, but arguably that expression of grief is what provides meaning to attending a funeral. Furthermore, if you don't attend a close friend's funeral, don't expect him or her to attend yours.
Got to disagree. If there's one situation where a public breakdown is generally understood to be appropriate, it's a funeral. And if you're saying you don't want to because it's uncomfortable for you to be seen that way, well, the funeral isn't about you.
While it's OK if this truly is what you need, be mindful that you're not making a decision you'll come to regret. There is no shame in crying at a funeral. Helping each other through death is one of life's innate obligations. One of the few things we have no choice but to do as humans is die.
I read that as the author, going to the funeral, broke down. That is they felt devastated emotionally, internally and possibly externally as in "broke down crying".
The funeral itself probably continued without any issues. I guess that's another social skills lesson, the world carries on regardless of your emotions.
3rd option is you just don't understand. This is language people use to describe narcissists. Flying monkeys are people who help them manipulate others and vampires are "emotional vampires". Poster was saying a narcissist had died, leaving their support people leaderless.
Weird fantasies are fun and all until the world demands that you fit them into a pre-configured narrative a la whoever and then you lose the ability to have them.
It's an extremely uncalibrated reply given the context regardless, even more so expecting the general audience here to understand this weirdly specific language. Something is definitely off.
Is a lay ontology that's basically a folk offshoot of the proverbial 5th edition practitioner's manual and people use to keep the question of ethics in our closes relationships at arm's length (because they've also, like you and I, found this self-consistent set of just-so stories weirdly smeared atop all useful ethics and psychology discourse on the Internet) proto-AI spam or the reins of as many future mass psychoses as the doctor ordered? And are we cool yet?
Depending on culture and the people, just going might be uncomfortable for the people you want to support. Maybe your friend was close with the deceased and thus their family would like them to be there, but not a stranger. Additionally, your friend or the family of the deceased may feel obligated to interact with you and make you feel welcome because you went. Maybe they’d prefer if you hadn’t gone.
I’d instead recommend asking your friend (though again, this advice may be culturally dependent). Be sure they know it’s about you supporting them.
I remember when a family member died and only one classmate asked me if I wanted them to come to the funeral. I refused but remember the gesture to this day. It’s about the only thing I remember about the person. I also remember a couple of other friends to whom I was closer not asking me, and that stuck with me because they both disliked and badmouthed (I don’t really know why, I avoided dumb drama) the original person. That made me rethink a lot of things.
Anyway, I guess the point is to think of what your friend would like and make sure they understand you’re there for them.
I've found that no mater what country I've been to, or what social classes the people belong to, three topics have a 95% success rate when it comes to social relations with guys: sports, cars, fishing/hunting. And to some degree handywork.
It is a bit unfortunate, as I'm not at all interested in talking about those things - but they are such staple topics, that you can come off as a sort of outcast if you can't keep a short convo on those things.
Another observation has been that some topics are very polarized. In some countries you can talk pretty freely about politics, while in other places it is a faux pas.
But then again, part of finding out what the other party likes talking about is a skill in itself.
Wow, you've had a very different experience, and apparently met very different people (or at least saw different sides of them).
I have never discussed those things with my friends or acquaintances anywhere in the world, across many countries... I don't know anything (or care about) any of them, so I suppose I self-select out of those groups.
The people I end up bonding with (all over the world) are usually because of hiking and outdoor stuff, board games, Dungeons and Dragons, martial arts, history, travel, food, whiskey, couch surfing or hosting, national parks, musical theater, etc.
If someone tried to talk to me about cars, sports, or dead fish, I'd probably just excuse myself. It'd be a huge bore for me and them alike.
I don't doubt what you said, that these are popular topics with men in some parts of the world (especially parts of North America). But it's also totally possible to go through life meeting many people without ever discussing any of those, thankfully...
I believe that anyone who eats meat cannot take a moral stance against hunting in general. An animal that lived in the wild then was killed and eaten lived a more fulfilling life than an animal in a factory farm that was killed and eaten.
FWIW, I didn't mean to make it a moral argument. I'm just not personally interested in hunting and fishing, but I don't have an ethical problem with them if done in moderation. Nature is violent and ruthless... a well-aimed shot is one of the less miserable ways for a wild animal to die. And yes, they're absolutely outdoor activities :)
Like you said, it's at least better than factory farming, and in some cases, hunters are an important part of conservation efforts.
I happen to be vegan, but have also had a few friends who hunt & fish. I don't fault them for it, or hunters in general. It's just not something I would want to discuss with them or join them for. Not out of any ethical quandary, it's just not something I want to spend my time doing or thinking about (heh, they're just far less exciting when you can't eat what you catch).
In my country (western Europe) talking about hunting/fishing would put get you side looks and take you for a very rural or conservative weirdo.
Sports and cars is more common with the older generation, but anyone below 35 will probably be uninterested, unless your circle is finance or blue collar work.
I guess the general stuff is movies, Netflix shows, music, your last short weekend trip, and pretty much everyone has their own personal non work thing, usually attached to a club or group (hiking, photography, whatever).
I guess in that last category sports are commonplace, but it’s more “I’m training for a marathon next month” or “you should come bouldering sometime” rather than following professional sports on tv.
This sounds like it’s particular to your friend group rather than some coarse regional geography. If you toss a rock in Western Europe, you’ve got a better chance of hitting a football fan than someone who wants to go bouldering or train for a marathon.
>If you toss a rock in Western Europe, you’ve got a better chance of hitting a football fan than someone who wants to go bouldering or train for a marathon.
Yes and no. If you HAVE to choose a specific hobby, football will have more chances than others; but it will still work in a minority of cases and assuming carries an implication.
A comparison I could make is starting a conversation in the US with 'did you watch fox news yesterday?'. Out of all channels, it's the most watched one; but you still have high chances of asking a non-viewer, and then get hit by negative connotations.
Personal hobbies are much better topic for various reasons (you don't assume, people will naturally be exited about discussing their own, etc).
The problem with this is when the convo goes beyond the initial common phrase. The response is likely to go more in depth. Then you're stuck nodding awkwardly, laughing awkwardly or just fudging it further... Awkwardly. Personally if it's a sport I'm not into I'll just admit that and explain why. The conversation will usually naturally move on and you won't seem phony.
Huh, an AI that reads the latest news and suggest conversation topics would be funny, if conversing with someone interested in celebrity gossip, then it could delve into that topic, e.g. "What about astronaut Katy Perry, am I right?! Did you read that she was spotted having a meal with Justin Trudeau?".
"Aren't you concerned that so many people tie their civic identity to watching some rich guy's overproduced commercial sports theatre, but are disinterested in actual civics?"
While I’ve yet to meet somebody into fishing or hunting, I agree about cars and sports. Unfortunately since I have interest in neither it can be hard to fit in sometime.
Weirdly, as somebody non interested in these common topics it also feels like it’s up to you to figure out a topic of common interest and it really isn’t.
About sports also, most people super “into” sports don’t do any. Which is ironic because a conversation about technique is something I’ll gladly have.
For the few times where I had to speak to someone about topics I don't care much about, I found that simply asking questions to learn about them ( as well as the person I'm speaking to) is enough.
"What team do you support? Has it always been the case? How do you think they compare to <well-known other good team>?"
"What car do you drive? Any particular reason for that car model? What's the brand's best and worst things? Oh, that piece tends to break easily; pardon my ignorance, but what's the purpose of it?"
"Any key difference in the way you hunt/fish this or that animal, or the time of the year during which you hunt/fish? I don't know that word, what does it mean? Do you have any anecdotes about some hunting/fishing you did?"
Those have to be adapted to the person and situation, but they are pretty good to keep a conversation going. People love to speak about their interests, and a lot love to even teach about them. Putting yourself as the listener makes them perceive you as nice, and you might even gather interesting information to yourself, or at least gather enough knowledge to have an easier time speaking about it next time.
I found that simply asking questions to learn about
them ( as well as the person I'm speaking to) is enough.
This is such a great insight and skill.
This is something that 99% of "nerds" don't understand about sports. You don't have to fake your way through "knowing about sports" to have a conversation around it.
Suppose you're in Buffalo, NY and you don't know a thing about sports. However, unless visiting with your eyes and ears closed, it would be difficult not to see that the city is really into its football team.
If you are "stuck" in a conversation with a Bills fan and don't know a thing about football, you could just ask - are the Bills good this year? what's it like being a Bills fan? are Bills fans as crazy as they say? how did you come to be a Bills fan - were your parents Bills fans?
There's like 100 possible conversation angles there that don't require any knowledge of sports
Discussions like these show that some people really block out anything beyond their specific interests.
I don't care about superhero movies, so I haven't seen any of the Marvel or DC movies, yet I still know they exist and sometimes I know which one is being promoted right now. If I got stuck at a table somewhere with someone who is a big fan of them, we could have a conversation. It'd mostly consist of me asking questions, but that'd work fine, because as a fan he'd have opinions to share. Same thing with sports or anything, really.
Yeah, I noticed this too about sportball people - they’re generally out of shape and not actually athletic (I’m fit and active in several outdoor sports). I just find watching or talking about sports excruciatingly boring. To me it’s the same thing as pornography, watching other people who are really good at it while you are a bystander, but your brain gets the physiological and-psychological signal that you’re actually part of the action. Though I don’t recommend the latter as a potential topic of conversation.
I don't have the same experience at all. The people who I know and have met which enjoy watching sports come at all levels of fitness. I am not that interested myself but quite many of the members of my running club enjoy watching sports and some of them can run 3 hour marathons.
And if you have ever met football ultras most of them are very fit.
Somewhere between dedicated fans of (often working class) European Football teams and paramilitary organisations. Green Street starring Elijah Wood is a film accessible to overseas audiences detailing the cultural phenomenon n the UK.
In Europe however, Italy in particular, organised crime is embedded in the structure - e.g. Gennaro Di Tommaso aka "The C0rpse", the leader of Napoli's ultras whose approval is needed before a match can take place
This may be a more recent thing, but I find a lot of the "sportsball" conversations are actually just slightly disguised conversations about gambling. Everyone is on Draft Kings and when they talk about this guy's stats or that team's past, or this game's expected score, they're just talking about betting and stuff. I don't think a lot of the sportsball people are even really fans of the sport, they're just looking at stats and betting.
As somebody who enjoys both watching and playing sports, I agree and I think that sports betting is so gross and harmful.
I have a question, though. What's up with the "sportsball" thing?
I mean, I'm very familiar with it. It just seems like it's always been used as a mildly derogatory term by people who really dislike sports and sports fans. What does it mean to you? No wrong answers.
> It just seems like it's always been used as a mildly derogatory term by people who really dislike sports and sports fans.
Yeah, actually saying 'sportsball' in conversation in a non-ironic way is an excellent way to signal that you have poor social skills. No need to yuck someone's yum.
I don't know. OP used the word and I just repeated it. I figure it's a generic term for the kinds of ball sports that popular culture follows and/or bets on: Baseball, Basketball, Football and so on.
Yeah, it's funny. I find a lot of sedentary sports-enjoyment (particularly fantasy sports) to be way "nerdier" than stereotypically nerdy stuff like D&D.
That said, the sports fans I know really are quite the wide spectrum when it comes to their actual sports/exercise participation. Lot of very active people.
You don't need to know much about sports. If you can just keep up with what's in season that's typically enough. Who do you think will go to the super bowl? Have you done a final four bracket? are great questions as long as it's the right time of year.
"Going/been anywhere nice recently" is a pretty good one in the UK - most people have some kind of holiday and I don't follow football and my interest in cars is probably limited to my occasional bouts of incandescent rage at people not signalling correctly on roundabouts...
I think the main difference is the expectation that you start signalling, if appropriate, before joining the roundabout. My main complaint (OK one of my main complaints) is that drivers turning right start signalling right and then forget to signal left as they leave...
Might be a regionalism, but here in Oregon, we don't signal going in, but signal right before we intend to exit. That way the next incoming driver can enter the roundabout and keep traffic flowing. We have a LOT of roundabouts though, like dozens upon dozens, and many of them are over saturated. It may be a local response to the traffic patterns here, not sure.
The most important thing is for everyone to speak the same protocol, provided that the protocol meets some minimum standard of fitness-for-purpose. But… yeah, I think you're doing it wrong.
I was rather mocking the parent poster for suggesting such overly cliché topics. In reality, men and women share many common interests (music, movies, food, travel, etc.) which I also think are more universal than cars and fishing.
Your comment is the only one hateful here. Where I'm from there are absolutely different topics to talk to men and women. You may hate it as much as you like, but that's the world many of us live in.
> I've found that no mater what country I've been to, or what social classes the people belong to, three topics have a 95% success rate when it comes to social relations with guys: sports, cars, fishing/hunting. And to some degree handywork.
Have you generally been to the Americas and Western Europe? Sports is the one universal, that makes sense in my experience too. But most people outside the rich upper class don't give a hoot about cars anywhere in the parts of Asia I've been to. And if you talked about fishing/hunting, you'd probably get weird looks trying to decide if you came from some modern hunter-gatherer cult.
Hunting is extremely rare (and generally an indicator of old money or living in an extremely rural environment).
Fishing is a lot more popular but even that tends to date you a bit. At least for Eastern Europe, fishing is a lot more popular among the 45+ year olds.
OP is primarily speaking about a North American perspective, I think.
Seems to be quite popular with younger Polish immigrants in the UK. Although a key point of difference which might make it difficult to find common ground with British anglers is they often seem to regard cooking and eating the fish (rather than throwing it back) and important part of the exercise. More likely to find agreement if they stick to slagging off the UK government ;-)
Talking about cars in Western Europe isn't that safe bet either. In cities like Stockholm most people are not interested in cars. And similarily hunting and fishing are niche interests in urban areas.
I think most people here are mistaking cars as a subject for things like hotrods or racing or classic cars.
But you really can kick off a decent conversation by just commenting and asking about what they drive, usually by starting with "I see a lot of people prefer X here". And you end up learning a decent amount about them.
Assuming they have a car (which a lot of people don't), this would be on the same level as asking about what phone they use - some people carefully chose theirs and want to talk about it, but for a lot of people it's just a thing that exists and gets the job done. It might get the conversation going, just the same as many other topics, but it won't be a conversation they'll especially enjoy in most parts of the world.
Talking about the variety of facilities the region has, about traffic, new constructions - anything development related is guaranteed to get the conversation going. There's a lot of rapid urbanization and change going on, and people always have something they want to get off their chest about it.
If you don't mind a bit of griping, politics is not a bad shout either. People aren't hardline attached to one side or the other as much here, and even when they are, they're much more willing to admit corruption at a local city level even if their favourite party is in charge. Complaining about corruption is a common pastime.
Movies and music are also pretty good generic options, as are motorbikes or electric scooters with younger guys in their early-mid twenties.
Having lived in Japan, and spent a fair amount of time in China: food, fashion, music, film, culture and politics (in a polite way), work, among other things
However unless you're planning to visit very rural places I genuinely don't think I've ever met anyone in East Asia talk about cars or hunting. Even in Europe among Millenials or Gen Z I don't know anyone who is into cars at all, a lot of younger people in the larger cities don't even have drivers licenses.
The problem is that I find the conversations that flow from these openers incredibly dull. So I just stay at home and read my phone instead, however unfortunately I hear that that is correlated with various negative outcomes.
"Hi, I have no interest in you or these topics but let's converse to extend my lifespan." Beer can help with this.
A lot of "social skills" content drifts into pickup-artist-y territory, so it's refreshing when something frames it around comfort, support, and actual connection instead of just "winning" interactions
Mainstream pickup artists yea. Some niche ones, not really. Wayne Elise feels like a good example, from back in the day.
On a throwaway because the judgmental people will judge me for the rest of my life due to me nuancing that not all people associated to pickup artists looked at social interactions in a zero sum way.
Agreed, it feels risky to just be associated these days, even if it's "adjacent" groups that explicitly don't want to be part of the "mechanical" side of improving social skills like "classical" PUA.
But, no way to change that in public perception without taking risks and being open about it.
So, if you're an HN reader, not wanting to be branded as a PUA but still want to find help socially (especially romantically), my two cents is look into the Ars Amorata community.
> But, no way to change that in public perception without taking risks and being open about it.
Yea, I can't take it. I've fixed my dating life but I'm not a charismatic leader by any stretch of the imagination. I've taken multiple stabs in Reddit threads but there is just no good faith discussion to be had. I've also tried it a bit on HN. On HN it's also very dicey.
> So, if you're an HN reader, not wanting to be branded as a PUA but still want to find help socially (especially romantically), my two cents is look into the Ars Amorata community.
Interesting, will check it out. I don't need help by the way. I'm married. And for social skills that I'm still lacking, I know where to go. Unfortunately, not all social skills in dating transfer well to work social skills.
Edit: just checked it out. Good to see Zan is still doing his thing. I remember him "I love women". He definitely influenced me with that quote back in the day.
The founder seems to have missed the opportunity to make a classical reference to Ovid's writing on love, instead constructing some ungrammatical Latin.
I read the page https://www.succeedsocially.com/morefun. Here's my initial impressions. Pros: it identified several important painpoints and give several decent examples. Cons: Being a truly fun person is all about reaction reaction reaction. Fun people react authentically (while censoring their ahole side because you don't want to be fun but unlikable), ridiculously (while reading the room), and intelligently (playing to the top of the crowd's intelligence).
Consider the intended audience though. This is for people who are lost and need perspective and concrete steps for improving. Compared to all the "fake it 'till you make it" or "just stop caring" type of advice, it's helpful.
> Fun people react authentically (while censoring their ahole side because you don't want to be fun but unlikable)
But here you explain exactly what is difficult. It's like walking a tightrope and someone tells you not to fall to the left and by the way, also not to the right.
Mask every day. Life goal: Be 100% artificial person. All openings and responses must be calculated and faked. Your inner self is faulty and not appropriate at any situation. Once you train and work hard enough to suppress it at all times forever, you may be accepted and allowed to participate.
"Be yourself" is not wrong, but it's not specific enough.
You can be perfectly authentic, but that doesn't mean being socially uncalibrated.
Get good at being sociable, then blend that with your personal tastes and preferences.
I thought "be yourself" was fine until I grew up and learned I was just being rude to most people and called myself introverted when I didn't make friends.
"Be yourself" works when you're awesome already (and keep performing).
So it's not useful advice for most that need to build yourself up to something that performs decently, nicely or awesomely (the most you can).
And Fake it till you make it is an awful expression (encourages posing and faking is legitimate when is not by definition) to communicate that you just need practice to obtain a level of performance.
What are you trying to make though? You're pretending to want the same things the people you think you need to fit in with want, but if you don't actually want those things, what point is there to be in a competition to get them?
Social skills is moslty compromises. It’s kind of a protocol that signals that you’re not unfriendly, and if you’re part of a community, that you’re ready to pitch in, when someone or the entire community needs help.
Surely it would be simpler to identify who in the community actually needs help, help them, and gain a reputation thereby? Honest signalling works well among humans, in my experience.
it may be. But how are you going to identify who needs help? And if that someone is willing to accept help (pride and/or shame can be powerful blocker)?
Humans are social creatures. If you truly don't have the same desires as most - friendship, companionship, even career gain - then sure, it's purposeless. But why are you even in this thread then? If you clearly are actively dis- interested in this topic. Otherwise, skydhash is correct - it's about compromise.
Part of being truly social (and being emotionally mature) is to understand and apply the difference between manipulation and being mindful about behavior and speech. Same as honesty - honesty doesn't need to be brutal honesty. One can be authentic without being hurtful.
>Your inner self is faulty and not appropriate at any situation
Mostly true actually. If this was not so, the world would look like a daycare without supervision. Just a bunch of primal feelings and violence.
The actual meta-skill that is being developed by maturing emotionally and using soft skills appropriately (for the benefit of the situation and the participants, not for manipulation) is tact. Same as how people learn to apply just a little pressure when handling glassware, and a lot of pressure when lifting a heavy weight.
> Mostly true actually. If this was not so, the world would look like a daycare without supervision. Just a bunch of primal feelings and violence.
The inner self isn't just an id, it's your goals, interests, values and ways of thinking too. And the social fitness script is that you should only have acceptable goals and interests and acceptable ways of talking about them. Talking about wanting to buy a nice house and a sports car, good. Talking about wanting to beat the speedrun record for Mario 64 and how you've figured out a CPU glitch to use for it, keep it to yourself. "Let's agree to disagree", good, "let's sketch a causal model graph of this and plug in our guesses for priors to see where we get different intuitions", no.
I think if someone is already not taken by any of their inner things entirely, then they are already doing this regulation thing. The social skills that are described in the article (and soft skills in general) are just a next step on the same path, focusing on getting along, rather than completely internal regulation.
I too have wildly different area of interest, level of interest, and approach to things than most people around me do. Soft skills helped me to connect anyways, for at least two reasons:
1. With them I can approach, and connect to the interest of others.
2. I can explain to people my interest, and make it more interesting to them as well.
Also, these are not for all time, all the time. The healthy thing is to vary the guardedness in different contexts. The flexibility in this is a skill in itself, and again, something that connects to, and can raise, emotional intelligence.
There is a true asymmetry that's avoided by the anodyne "everyone needs to think about these things" talk. If you take a group of 20 people from your country chosen completely at random, some people are likely to find things being similar with themselves and several people in this group, no matter which group was picked, and other people are likely to find little in similar between themselves and the group for most of the groups.
Social skills instruction is often about how to get along with averaged random groups like this. The first sort of person might find it as useful know-how for a thing they already find agreeable. The second sort of person might not find the initial situation agreeable at all, so the instruction gets the implicit added bit of "first of all, you need to not be yourself".
Yes, that seems part of it, as long as all you know is "yourself without social skills". With social skills, and leaving some of that "yourself" behind, you will discover that don't just change, or reduce yourself, in a social setting, but become more yourself as a whole. The very definition of "yourself" changes, broadens because of this added experience.
> All openings and responses must be calculated and faked
Thinking about the things you say isn't faking it - it's just using your brain and being considerate.
If you just blurt out anything with no filter, that doesn't make you authentic, it usually makes you an asshole.
Not all thoughts are productive, many are bad and many are stupid. You should delete those or revise them. Not only when talking to other people, but even to yourself.
I can tell myself that I'm dumb or I'm fat or whatever, but that isn't true and just because I thought it doesn't mean I have to internalize it. No, I filter those thoughts, I tell myself "that's not true". Over time, I think them less.
Your own brain is not reliable. It does not operate on truth, or what is or is not productive. So tune it. Not for the sake of others, but for yourself too.
Being an asshole to others is bad, but being an asshole to yourself is arguably worse. The goal is to, overtime, build better thought procedses and mental models. Not to fake it.
> Thinking about the things you say isn't faking it - it's just using your brain and being considerate.
I guess what gets me with this stuff is that there are multiple things going on that are getting conflated. Considering your words is pretty straightforwardly good, it's learning to not say things you yourself wouldn't have wanted to say.
But then this stuff tends to show up in the context of work, or business, and it starts turning into selling. You are the seller, the other people are buyers. Buyers have no expectations on them, they react as they react and they want what they want. The seller must contort themselves to please the buyer and then close a sale to get one over the buyer. And this is where it gets corrosive for me. It feels like there's no common ground being built, the relationship is adversarial in both directions, and both sides are a bad model for a person to be. People are being split into feckless buyers who express immediate wants and judgments with no thought or development, and conniving sellers whose main order of business is to get themselves in front of the buyer and get noticed, no matter what the real value of what they are offering is. People might make money if they internalize this system and get good at it, but are they going to make lasting friends?
You can solve this by reapplying attribution elsewhere.
Instead of blaming the methods / soft skills / whatever, which can be used for good and bad, blame the people who misuse these tools for personal gain: politicians, salespeople, conmen, pua, what have you.
Which is fun and great if you came out as a happy cool human.
If you made it through the weird unadjusted side without any gimmick you just loose.
No one has to force you to stay what your surroundings made you. It's not your personality it's just a reflection and you can change it and make it better for you by adjusting and reflecting.
Sometimes people already are like something and don't want to change it or feel like they could change it, but also don't get along being like they are. This is more awkward to think about than just treating them as damaged or incomplete people who would get around to becoming people who can fit in fine once the damage is fixed or the incomplete development is completed, because it's harder to see good solutions.
You severely underestimate the biological side of things regarding social interaction. Neurodivergent people are what we are not just bc "surroundings made us so"
Then I don't understand what you are arguing about. If you're neurodivergent, you would always require self awareness and masking, faked as op rightfully stated. You could never natural, no matter what circumstances were.
Changing is possible even if you're neurodivergent, but you'll always have some barriers that neurotypicals don't. To interact with them, you will generally need some degree of masking.
After COVID, I stopped caring and trying to fake being a normal person, and choose just to be me, alone.
I wasn't good at trying to be normal, and it's so much nicer to be free to not bother to make the effort and not be me. But I have no friends or good relationships with family (who don't understand or tolerate who I am).
I wonder why this was written as these very small paragraphs with only a few lines of content? Apart from the hosting issues due to hackernews it leads to a lot of intros and 'in the next section we will learn...' but the actually useful content is quite little and you have to dig hard for it. I'd personally favor a normal article.
I found it frustrating because of all the links everywhere. In the “How to use this guide” section it links to a body language section.
But there’s no context as to where this body language section fits in.
Am I supposed to read the body language section now and then remember to go back to the how to section? Or is body language discussed later? Then why link to it now? This format stresses me out.
Maybe I'm weird, but I find the writing style almost condescending.
It's a style I've seen elsewhere as well so not particular to this site, but I find it grating and off-putting. Feels like it treats me like a 4 year old.
For those who think they are decent at socializing, one book that may extend your skill further is ' Never split the difference'. Its a book about negotiating, but I think it does teach some key skills. Mirroring for example where you literally repeat back the last few words a person has said, I've found unexpectedly super useful - it almost allows people to expand on what they are saying and helps them go deeper into things. Basically the book (and other tools) has helped me become a better listener (I have always been decent at the talking side).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-...
Note: I only 'mirror' 2-3 times in a conversation. I've found over using it makes it have less impact. But that's just me.
Agreed that is a classic - I think the essentials are true but the language is a bit dated.
Definitely "trying to think positively about people and their actions/understand them", and giving people "a sense of importance" are very helpful social skills.
I definitely second that its a great book, especially if you focus more on the principles it's getting at instead of necessarily the examples.
Funny experience with that:
A big part of How to Win Friends and Influence People that I took to heart was "be interested in other people". Flash forward a few years and I'm in a bar with a group of people I had recently met when one of them says to me "Hey, we've been talking a lot about ourselves but not really that much about you." One of the other people interrupted "That's because they are polite! They are showing interest in what we're interested in instead of insisting on talking about themselves."
So at least some people do notice when you put in an effort to use good social skills!
This is a very American society focused guide, a lot of these wouldn't even apply in Europe an especially not if you travel to Asia, Middle East, or Africa
> Interestingly enough, not nearly as much gets published for e.g. Europe. Innate ability ?
From my personal feeling:
US culture is more on the extraverted side (i.e. a lot of people want/need shallow conversation instead of shutting their mouth, except if they have something important to say) than what is common in many European countries.
Thus, people who are more on the introvert side have a harder time in the USA than in many European countries, I guess.
Also, for various reason the whole "self-improvement industrial complex" is much less prevalent in European countries than in the USA.
Relatedly, I would say that in the USA, there is the mentality "Our society is the greatest ever made since God created Earth, so if you don't feel happy, the fault is on you: you need to self-improve."
On the other hand, in many European countries, the mentality is rather like "The society [note that I didn't write "our" - there is barely any sense of belonging] is a corrupt, messed-up shithole. Yes, there exist those smooth talkers who tell you that you need to self-improve (e.g. social skills), but do you know what: those just want to make money from the mess you are in, and/or are telling you the things that those in power want you to brainwash with. So, instead of wasting time and money to get yourself a brainwashing to make yourself 'socially adapted', better invest this energy into exposing all these assholes in power who are responsible for the whole mess. Since there are so many people who also have this kind of hate, you will easily find friends this way, and thus become more socially skilled." :-)
>Relatedly, I would say that in the USA, there is the mentality "Our society is the greatest ever made since God created Earth, so if you don't feel happy, the fault is on you: you need to self-improve."
Unjustified self deprecation can lead to dereliction. IMO Americans feel this way because it's appropriate to.
With respect, that's only true if you are a member of certain social/personality classes in America. If you are poor or don't fit into the conservative ideal, then America is often not a great place to live.
Yup, in Europe you either have a 100 gun salute if you're new money or a Navy destroyer casually and coincidentally floating by your house on the Rivera when the souffle is served, if you're old money.
> Watch TV with the sound low and study the body language of the actors until you can recognize comfort and discomfort.
Bad advice. Actors don't mimic reality. Actors mimic what viewers expect to see in actors. This means that the body language you see in actors and the language you see in real life are different.
I hope they cover managing your own emotions: staying calm, responding with empathy, and breaking avoidance patterns.
In my last few relationships, I've been having to do relationship coaching with partners because their parents failed to teach them responding with physical or emotional violence is not how you maintain friendships or relationships.
I think this guide is already failing people by assuming successfully initiated conversations and labeling it as "basic". If you have plenty of social contacts, that already warrants being considered "intermediate".
The really difficult things are maintaining good first impression and talking to (perceived) strangers. You know nothing about a person until you talk with that person, so what exactly are you supposed to do? There is a bootstrapping problem.
Classified ads are a good example. It's not like ebay, where you click a button and the delivered product is guaranteed to arrive a few days later. Instead you get a blank form of nothing, where you can write whatever you want and there is always the possibility of rejection. It's very much unlike any store you've ever visited, where money is king and the customer('s money) is always right.
As an introvert I'd argue those are basically just: "be empathic". That means you should not treat others in a way that annoys or demeans them – because you yourself would not like that either, right?
Empathy implies you can feel with others. Example: You are a man and you talk to a woman. Being empathic means you have a clear mental image of what it might feel like to be a woman and can thus avoid saying things that aren't funny, like sexist bullshit. Or you talk to a student/junior and remember what it felt like when you had no fucking clue and how shitty it was when the old greybeards would scoff at you, with empathy you can talk to people where they are instead of highlighting the difference between you and them.
Most communicative problems I have ever seen (aside from language barriers) could have been resolved by a little bit of empathy.
> Most communicative problems I have ever seen (aside from language barriers) could have been resolved by a little bit of empathy.
Empathy is usually an internal process. On it's own, it wont't resolve a communication problem.
What ends up affecting a communication problem are the external actions that we take based on our internal empathy calculus (assuming we haven't totally miscalculated). Those actions will vary significantly by person and context, assuming any action follows at all.
Empathy is the relatively easy part. Acting on that empathy in a way that doesn't come across as condescending, disengaged, presumptious, judgemental, awkward, or scripted, while also remaining true to yourself and upholding your personal values are the hard parts.
Yet these rules aren’t so radically different that there aren’t any common patterns. For instance, noticing people’s birthday and adding them to your calendar so that you can congratulate them is a small, yet very powerful tip that works in pretty much everyday social circle.
This is a bit of a long shot, but a lot my social embarrassment comes from my tendency to mumble / be hard to understand. Anyone on here have any experience with improving at that stuff?
On the practical side there are many good options. Using the voice effectively is a key skill in many professions, such as singing, public speaking, education, religious, management. So there are many practitioners, and lots of learning materials out there. So I recommend to check of there are any of those angles that resonate more with you.
But very important - this is a challenge that needs practice to overcome - it cannot be dealt with only theoretically!
So as a simple starting point is: go on YouTube and search for vocal exercises. Start with something like warmup routines. And then try something like saying the same sentence at 7 different loudness levels, from a whisper into someones ear to a SHOUT that needs to go to another person at the other side of a lake. Observe just how much power you got!
This will be awkward and that is good - it means that you are stretching yourself, both physically and mentally! Like at the gym.
Then out a few sentences in the level you feel most comfortable with, plus 1 or 2 steps above. Try whole paragraphs.
PS: drink water and do not push harder if you feel pain.
Not an expert so take this with a HUGE grain of salt.
I think that the answer might depend on whether the difficulty is something with your speaking itself (e.g. you have a speech impediment, accent, stutter, etc.) versus if the difficulty is with the social side of things (e.g. mumbling due to nervousness, etc.).
For the former, maybe a speech therapist could help? For the later, I've heard people say that improv classes/clubs can do a lot for helping people be more confortable in unpredictable social situations.
Studied Film and worked professionally in overdubbing for a while. I recommend in that order:
1. figure out if your mumbling is just a habit or a logopedic issue
2. get a speakers training of the type actors or radio hosts would
If you wonder whether it is worth it, just consider how important it is in both your private and professional life to be clearly understood. There has been a study during the pandemic that showed that people who had the better sound quality in conferences would get their ideas through more often. This is truly the case for spoken words as well.
This may sound unhelpful, but just try to notice when you do it and then speak more clearly. Try to minimize the amount of "What" as a response to what you say.
If you have a medical type of problem that's of course not applicable.
I've worked with lots of folks on the spectrum and to be honest it's more fun dealing with them as team members rather than "normies".
One guy particularly stands out, he joined the team and started off on a solo run with a couple of projects a few others were involved in. A few weeks later I asked him if he'd setup any meetings with the team to get context and, you know, say hello and his response was "why should I do that, can't they read my PRs?". Classic.
Another one was the very loudly self-diagnosed neurodiverse girl, who seemed to just use it as cover for being a total jerk. Eventually she had to be managed out, as she tipped the scale between doing good work and tolerance of odd behaviors too far - screaming in meetings, histrionics and stuff you'd expect more of someone living on a street corner.
> I asked him if he'd setup any meetings with the team to get context and, you know, say hello and his response was "why should I do that, can't they read my PRs?". Classic.
Ditto. The contributions are saying 'hello' and soliciting input, in one. Also providing the contributor with an opportunity to learn the product in their terms.
I know, I know. The horror of an individual for us all.
I assume the proposition is this: one has no chance to produce value without firm guidance from the onset. Or the time learning is a tragedy. I doubt both of these very much. PRs are another conversation.
The others are free to take their turns. In this hypothetical, apparently, the other side has been unresponsive. Where's their ire; left behind at the bar?
Sorry we didn't apply the correct social pressure or wait until everyone was available at the same time for a call, I guess. I understand how that might hurt optics... I, the baby with superpowers in this scenario, just don't/can't care.
Handholding isn't a requirement. Guess what is: communicating the changes. Look at the PRs. Now that management is involved, we can have a meeting about them going unattended.
I assume the proposition is that trust between coworkers is important (even if you're autistic) and the best way to build extra trust with someone, on top of what you'd normally build just working with them, is to interact with them socially (unless they're autistic and haven't memorised this pattern, in such case they'll just be confused and annoyed).
I think your assumption that this is about "firm guidance" and "optics" and is an insult to your "superpowers" is unlikely to be the motivation.
"How can we have any pudding if we don't eat our meat?!"
Let's worry about extra trust once they start earning trust (and, arguably, their pay) by reviewing the PRs. Leaving those floating deserves none, from nobody.
To reiterate the original post, behaving as if they're a member of the team would be quite welcome, actually. Fun, no: work.
You're misreading it. Reading the speaker's PRs is presented as an alternative to talking to them, in the same way that if Alice and Bob were arguing whether song lyric sites should exist and Alice asked "can't they listen to the song?", it would be a rhetorical question and would not indicate that Bob did not listen to the song he wanted to read the lyrics of.
it really bothers me when people try to assert people aren't actually neurodivergent/disabled because they dislike the person, and seem to want to further justify their dislike on a personal level instead of having compassion for the fact that they're actually disabled. i think people feel the need to assert this because they know they'd be an asshole to dislike someone for refusing to stand up and walk if they were wheelchair bound, so it's easier to pretend they don't actually need the wheelchair and are faking it.
the other point to this being frustrating is you're asserting she wasn't neurodivergent and then go on to describe some hallmark characteristics of neurodivergence. emotional regulation is one of the biggest challenges for people with ADHD and autism, and emotional outbursts and control of mood/emotions are exactly why neurodivergence is so incredibly difficult for so many people.
Let's have it correct, businesses pay folks to do work. While they make some allowances for what's happening in a person's life, they're not therapy nor are they charities.
If you can't manage whatever you're suffering from sufficiently to do your job then pity for you.
something these guides indirectly touch on but don't explain more explicitly: frequently issues with socializing are rooted in trauma, and working on that trauma is what's going to fundamentally improve socialization. and for those unfamiliar, trauma isn't always "this one bad thing happened this one time, or many times". trauma is sometimes a lifelong pattern of small interactions, or lack of small interactions. childhood emotional neglect is sometimes impossible to even see from the outside, but can have lifelong implications to attachment styles that then later massively impact one's social anxiety and ability to socialize
I decided to be nicer to people in order to make more friends. I realized that most of them are boring and shallow and talking to them is waste of time and energy.
This applies to teaching anything ever; it's the difference between teaching the thing and teaching about the thing. It's a caveat to keep in mind, sure, but not much more.
On the topic of "support your friends", if there's a funeral for someone you weren't super close with but your friend knew well and you're not sure whether to go, I would recommend just going, sitting up the back, offering your condolences if the opportunity comes up, and leaving.
I've failed to do this twice. Nobody else said or did anything, but I regretted it.
Well the thing is, that sometimes being there and giving them a nod is already saying enough. No need for words. Showing them you care is appropriate if you really do.
"Words aren't remembered, but presence is."
In those moments it's rarely about you having the "right" words
It's also ok not to attend funerals at all, even if you were close. I broke down every funeral I went to and would rather avoid that in the future.
I fundamentally disagree with this, and especially people who need the website should not follow your advice.
Sometimes in life you just have to do stuff, even if you hate it.
These things also have a tendency to become easier the more you do it, so advising people to just not do it seems horrible advice.
Not showing up to a funeral of someone you were close to just because of your own discomfort is plain weird.
Not really. I've been to many funerals and I dont want to go to many more. You gotta learn that self preservation is more important sometimes.
The relevant thing is care and aid for the grieving loved ones of the deceased.
Your presence at the funeral, while symbolic (some might even say empty symbolism) is a way of showing the mourners that the deceased was cared for by many. It is comforting to some extent.
But of course, if funerals are too difficult, there are other ways to accomplish the same thing.
I never had to do with the grieving though? What do I care about the grieving? I care about the deceased person. I am not going to fake interest in their family if it never occurred when my friend was alive.
Personally I'd separate this out into two cases:
1 - Actively dislike the family
Sure, skip the funeral. If you & the family didn't get along in life there's no reason to put yourself through something you don't want to go to.
2 - Anything else
I'd go as a show of support for the family because the family was important to my friend. "It's what my friend would want" is the guiding principle here.
That said - I'm writing this as someone who was very uncomfortable going to funerals and now, years later, I regret choosing to stay home rather than go.
Your mileage may vary, as they say.
This has all been explained to you, thoroughly and repeatedly.
In the end... whatever. There are a lot of things that go into being a decent human being.
At the very least, I'm sure we'd agree on the big picture: the sum of how we care for our friends when they're alive is more important than what we do on the day of their funeral. So if you're being a good friend in other ways... hey, good on you.
Why compartmentalize your love? I recently attended a funeral and shared sympathies with several strangers that over the course of time, became closer to friends.
Your friend almost certainly loved their family, and their family loved your friend. Although they may be gone, you can still keep that connective love alive by doing the same things for others that you’d do for your friend - sometimes, it’s as simple as showing up, even just once, for someone else.
Do you really have to fake that?
Yes, I dont connect over these things. Also I have a pretty good circle of friends and dont need more people in my life. Every loss of a friend is like the world os falling apart and with more people in my life id have to go through that even more. I keep the number of people I have to deal with small.
Correct.
Sometimes.
Not for funerals of people you knew well.
Let me tell you, it is absolutely not ok. The family does notice who is and isn't at the funeral and they WILL assume you are just not emotionally involved. I have seen this scenario play out. Don't be surprised if people stop showing up at something you organize. Breaking down at a funeral is absolutely ok and will strengthen the bond with those left behind.
I made the complete opposite experience thankfully. I am very open about this and my friends understand. I dont care about their families, I care about the person in the casket.
It is not ok. Be an adult and deal with the emotional discomfort to pay your last respects.
Not a popular approach these days, but you’re absolutely right. This is an example where setting healthy boundaries has veered into hiding away from life and avoiding hard, messy human things.
It seems like, at least in online places like Reddit, "boundaries" has become this magical, get-out-of-jail-free word that justifies people to short-circuit norms and socialization and just do whatever they want in human relationships. "I want to do X, and I don't want to do Y, and I don't want my partner calling me out for doing Z. If you don't like it, that's your problem, and if you object, you're crossing my boundaries and are in the wrong!"
Before, it was just "being selfish and anti-social." Now, the same thing is called "setting healthy boundaries for myself."
To be fair, plenty of boundary setting is legitimate. I find that hypocrisy is an excellent tell for when someone is misusing the principle. Eg. when someone says "I don't like it when you talk about this subject" and then proceeds to bring up said subject all the time when they have something to say about it.
What exactly is wrong with being selfish and anti social? Most of yalls employers are selfish and you still work for them.
Max Stirner's ghost just smiled somewhere
Amen. I had a long and damaging relationship with somebody who did exactly what you describe. Used "boundaries" as an excuse for being a toxic human being, as many narcissists do.
A good test of the boundary-setter's true nature is whether or not they find alternative means of doing the thing or if they are just claiming "but muh boundaries!" to excuse their lack of being a decent human being.
If their "boundaries" prevent them from showing up at a funeral to provide a moment of comfort to the survivors of the deceased... well okay. There could be valid reasons. Suppose funerals tend to induce suicidal ideation in an individual. Certainly nobody would suggest that individual should risk a suicidal episode.
But, is the person finding an alternative way to show that care? Flowers, letters, a visit at some other time? Or are they just narcissisticly using it as an excuse to avoid spending time for the benefit of anybody other than themselves?
I had my fair share of hard messy human things and I distance from that. Self preservation is more important than some official gathering.
You can live your life however you like, but dealing with hard messy human things is part of being a functioning adult in society. At some point if you can't grow up and learn to control your expression of emotion then it really limits your options. This is something you might want to work on, perhaps with professional help.
It’s not self preservation, it’s avoidance and selfishness.
Avoidance can be self preservation. My friends are fine with me not attending, why aren't you? Because I dont wanna join some human made sadness gatherings with some religious idiot talking about how my atheist friend is with God now?
This conversation started as general advice, and as such, avoidance of human connection around death is poor advice. You sound like you have good reason for your avoidance, but you shouldn't extrapolate that it's a good general strategy.
It is a good general strategy. Place yourself before others. Ain't nobody is an altruist.
Humans are societal creatures. That avoidance as self-preservation can be considered a weak trait. Society only really works if we know we have each other's backs when the chips are down, so with you abandoning situations when the chips are down demonstrates you won't be there when I need you to be, so it's probably better to cut you out now, right?
Or, why would I put food on the table for the slowest gazelle?
> Society only really works if we know we have each other's backs when the chips are down
I'd disagree with this - capitalism tends to reward defection from this norm, and it's been a stable equilibrium for centuries at this point. You have more of a point when it comes to community, but even many intentional communities are massively hypocritical when it comes to this, with higher-status people having the ability to deviate from norms at will.
helpful reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinschaft_and_Gesellschaft
We live in a post society. We are long past the "we need each other" part. Everybody only cares about themselves and im just reflecting what the world gives me.
Agreed. I used to hate going to funerals and skipped some, telling myself it was because I didn't know what to say, might embarrass myself, etc. After being in the receiving line of a couple, I realized someone else's funeral isn't about me. The truth is no one notices exactly what you say because they're dealing with their own grief, and "I'm sorry for your loss" is perfectly acceptable. So now I just go, pay my respects, and feel better for doing it.
This is the worst advice someone could give. It absolutely is ok to decide on your own if it's good for you and the others if you attend or not. I wouldn't want anyone to come to my funeral just because others expect him to.
If I was close to someone and they skipped my funeral for no other reason than their own mild discomfort I would seriously question how close we were after all.
> ...they skipped my funeral ... I would seriously question ...
This isn't how death works
Maybe you could haunt them or something, who knows
Someone should attend your funeral because they made some kind of connection with you in this short life. Being uncomfortable for 30 minutes is the least one can do. I am so tired of people being so emotionally immature that they can’t handle a little discomfort.
Seconded, the person you initially respond to is the target audience of this website, and would probably do well to take it in.
A funeral is not 'some event' that you can just skip for your own benefit. That's not what it's about.
Well, it turned from the original "breaking down", through "slight discomfort" to "skipping for a benefit". Just let me tell you for someone to break down can mean a panic attack, where they can not catch breath, or they just crawl into a corner acting like a kid, it can mean throwing up violently or it can mean falling into a long term depression. Everyone can have their own reasons and way of processing pain.
Whats so special about a funeral? It's just tons of sad people. I meet the relevant people in unofficial circumstances. My friends understand this, so I dont see the issue.
I have no idea what point you’re trying to make here.
“It's just tons of sad people.” - this makes you sound like you have the emotional acuity of a 4 year old. You can fix that, but you can’t do it sitting in front of your computer.
It's weird, in one comment you say you only care about the deceased "person in the casket," and here you mention the respect of friends (who are presumably living) as important. It sounds to me like you might be a younger person with a slightly naive worldview on death.
Looking at his submissions, he/she is a younger person. But even still my 13 year old has more sense than them.
Tim Dillon has a nice explanation if you want something a little more bombastic and attention grabbing.
It’s absolutely okay to prioritize the needs and comfort of the living.
The guest of honor won’t notice, I promise.
If the other (living) attendees have a problem with it, it’s at least 51% a them problem, IMO.
This take is sad. We have become a society of emotionally weak people.
My wife and I make our kids do uncomfortable things because that’s what separates children from adults. An example, and not even the hardest one: Yesterday we were vacationing at the beach and we got a call from the dog boarding facility keeping our 8 year old dog, she was having seizures and had to be taken to an animal hospital. We drove 3 hours to see her. There was lots of crying, in front of everyone - who gives a shit. We had to have her euthanized. The 4 of us stayed with her for the entire process. We could have just told them to put her down over the phone and continued our vacation, or we could have left the room as they ended her life. She wasn’t conscious and we have no way of knowing if she was aware of our presence, but if something/someone makes an impact on your life, learn to be a little unselfish and be present. It hurts, but just because something hurts doesn’t mean we should shy away from doing it.
Learning to steel yourself is an important life skill. Obviously a dog is not a human, but the parallels are there - as humans we have honored the end of a impactful life throughout our history.
It's also selfish, narcissistic and kind of anti-social. Somehow, we've uplifted "taking care of yourself" over every other societal norm, obligation, and courtesy. Humans are not meant to be "on the comfortable/happy path" 100% of the time. Sometimes, we are expected to act altruistically. Sometimes we should make small sacrifices for others' benefits. Sometimes we should be go out of our comfort zone to comfort someone else. This doesn't mean torture yourself and ruin your mental health, but it does mean stepping out of your usual routine occasionally, for other people's sake.
This is such an anti social take. How dense to you have to be to not realize attendance is for the benefit of the living. The dead person is not the guest of honor it's the family of the deceased if there is any "guest of honor" at all
Not attending rightfully costs you a lot, even if you're lacking the social skills to perceive it
As far as I am concerned I dont exist for the families of my friends. I exist for my friends. Never cared about their families and they never cared about mine, its just how we move.
I’m in my mid-40s. When I randomly reconnect with friends from my 20s, they still ask about my parents and my parents still occasionally ask about them.
Yea so everyone should do that? Or are other platonic relationships allowed?
You’re clearly not receptive to anything outside of your comfort zone, so I think we can end this thread right here.
You're clearly not capable of seeing that humans live differently which is completely fine. Some tribes eat people, some tribes bury them. Just because most people value ordinary people things doesn't mean you should be forced into their culture
Look, if you want to live life like a hermit, that’s on you. As you get older, you will lose people, friends, family, acquaintances, not only through death, but growing apart for “normal” reasons, moving away, job changes, changes in interests, getting married, etc. Rarely in life do you make more connections later in life than you had when you were younger. The more you rail against social norms, the more you isolate yourself. If that’s what you want, fair enough. But if you want to be part of a well functioning social group, the rest of us value getting together at the end of someone’s life.
A funeral is not done for the deceased. A funeral is for the people who are still there.
These people, the real guests of honour, will remember your absence for the rest of their lives.
There's nothing to be ashamed of when crying while being faced with the limitedness of life.
Still doesn't wanna make me do it in public.
grow up and learn to steel yourself
No: grow up and realize that expressing an emotion is neither childish nor shameful.
It's such a young person thing to believe the adrenaline of pushing against the envelope is a better feeling than the endorphins of expressing appropriate emotion. I'm sure they'll learn this when they come of age.
Life can be painful, and comfort, solace, and community are really nice when you're on the downswing instead of the upswing, which happens to all of us if you're strong enough to live that long.
Community is having to deal with way too many unauthentic brainless people.
Categorizing some of the most meaningful, most fundamental human experiences as "brainless" is no doubt part of the reason you struggle with having community. And, I'm guessing, why communities struggle with you.
Maybe I dont value community if I consider most people brainless? That's my conclusion of 30 years of life experience. I was traumatized at the age of 15 and didn't value community ever since. During that time I was dropped and ignored by society. Fake ass society, the only value you have as a human is what you can provide, you are never on the receiving end.
"grow up" is such a boomer thing to say
Because they grew up?
Maybe you should try it
> I broke down every funeral I went to and would rather avoid that in the future.
I understand it can be emotionally challenging, but arguably that expression of grief is what provides meaning to attending a funeral. Furthermore, if you don't attend a close friend's funeral, don't expect him or her to attend yours.
> if you don't attend a close friend's funeral, don't expect him or her to attend yours.
Well, regardless if you attend your friend's funeral or not, you can be sure he or she will not attend yours.
I think that's the point, showing vulnerability in front of others helps them to trust you.
Got to disagree. If there's one situation where a public breakdown is generally understood to be appropriate, it's a funeral. And if you're saying you don't want to because it's uncomfortable for you to be seen that way, well, the funeral isn't about you.
If i am forced to attend its about me.
How old are you, 14?
30 with lots of dead people in my life. Just dont tell other people what to do.
While it's OK if this truly is what you need, be mindful that you're not making a decision you'll come to regret. There is no shame in crying at a funeral. Helping each other through death is one of life's innate obligations. One of the few things we have no choice but to do as humans is die.
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I read that as the author, going to the funeral, broke down. That is they felt devastated emotionally, internally and possibly externally as in "broke down crying".
The funeral itself probably continued without any issues. I guess that's another social skills lesson, the world carries on regardless of your emotions.
“Break down” means to cry.
Zwnow threw the undertaker off hell in a cell and he plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer's table.
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Is this AI spam or psychosis? I don't understand.
3rd option is you just don't understand. This is language people use to describe narcissists. Flying monkeys are people who help them manipulate others and vampires are "emotional vampires". Poster was saying a narcissist had died, leaving their support people leaderless.
I think you're right, but for a wonderful second I thought there was some weird fantasy reference going on
Weird fantasies are fun and all until the world demands that you fit them into a pre-configured narrative a la whoever and then you lose the ability to have them.
A reference to the Wizard of Oz movie? I hadn't heard this jargon before.
It's an extremely uncalibrated reply given the context regardless, even more so expecting the general audience here to understand this weirdly specific language. Something is definitely off.
Calibrate my barometer, good sir. Needed to hang around the 80s a little longer.
Could you explain how it relates to what you were replying to about breaking down funerals?
Is a lay ontology that's basically a folk offshoot of the proverbial 5th edition practitioner's manual and people use to keep the question of ethics in our closes relationships at arm's length (because they've also, like you and I, found this self-consistent set of just-so stories weirdly smeared atop all useful ethics and psychology discourse on the Internet) proto-AI spam or the reins of as many future mass psychoses as the doctor ordered? And are we cool yet?
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Depending on culture and the people, just going might be uncomfortable for the people you want to support. Maybe your friend was close with the deceased and thus their family would like them to be there, but not a stranger. Additionally, your friend or the family of the deceased may feel obligated to interact with you and make you feel welcome because you went. Maybe they’d prefer if you hadn’t gone.
I’d instead recommend asking your friend (though again, this advice may be culturally dependent). Be sure they know it’s about you supporting them.
I remember when a family member died and only one classmate asked me if I wanted them to come to the funeral. I refused but remember the gesture to this day. It’s about the only thing I remember about the person. I also remember a couple of other friends to whom I was closer not asking me, and that stuck with me because they both disliked and badmouthed (I don’t really know why, I avoided dumb drama) the original person. That made me rethink a lot of things.
Anyway, I guess the point is to think of what your friend would like and make sure they understand you’re there for them.
I've found that no mater what country I've been to, or what social classes the people belong to, three topics have a 95% success rate when it comes to social relations with guys: sports, cars, fishing/hunting. And to some degree handywork.
It is a bit unfortunate, as I'm not at all interested in talking about those things - but they are such staple topics, that you can come off as a sort of outcast if you can't keep a short convo on those things.
Another observation has been that some topics are very polarized. In some countries you can talk pretty freely about politics, while in other places it is a faux pas.
But then again, part of finding out what the other party likes talking about is a skill in itself.
Wow, you've had a very different experience, and apparently met very different people (or at least saw different sides of them).
I have never discussed those things with my friends or acquaintances anywhere in the world, across many countries... I don't know anything (or care about) any of them, so I suppose I self-select out of those groups.
The people I end up bonding with (all over the world) are usually because of hiking and outdoor stuff, board games, Dungeons and Dragons, martial arts, history, travel, food, whiskey, couch surfing or hosting, national parks, musical theater, etc.
If someone tried to talk to me about cars, sports, or dead fish, I'd probably just excuse myself. It'd be a huge bore for me and them alike.
I don't doubt what you said, that these are popular topics with men in some parts of the world (especially parts of North America). But it's also totally possible to go through life meeting many people without ever discussing any of those, thankfully...
Hunting/fishing are one type of "outdoor stuff".
Like how bombs / machine guns are types of “engineering”? :)
Sure.
I believe that anyone who eats meat cannot take a moral stance against hunting in general. An animal that lived in the wild then was killed and eaten lived a more fulfilling life than an animal in a factory farm that was killed and eaten.
FWIW, I didn't mean to make it a moral argument. I'm just not personally interested in hunting and fishing, but I don't have an ethical problem with them if done in moderation. Nature is violent and ruthless... a well-aimed shot is one of the less miserable ways for a wild animal to die. And yes, they're absolutely outdoor activities :)
Like you said, it's at least better than factory farming, and in some cases, hunters are an important part of conservation efforts.
I happen to be vegan, but have also had a few friends who hunt & fish. I don't fault them for it, or hunters in general. It's just not something I would want to discuss with them or join them for. Not out of any ethical quandary, it's just not something I want to spend my time doing or thinking about (heh, they're just far less exciting when you can't eat what you catch).
I think that’s fair; I’m coming up on seven years meat-free and can confidently say that hunting is disgusting.
Whether done in captivity or in the wild, there is no such thing as humane slaughter.
Indeed
In my country (western Europe) talking about hunting/fishing would put get you side looks and take you for a very rural or conservative weirdo.
Sports and cars is more common with the older generation, but anyone below 35 will probably be uninterested, unless your circle is finance or blue collar work.
Is this a function of Western Europe, or an urban area? There’s quite a bit of hunting and fishing in rural Western Europe…
What do people talk about in your country?
I guess the general stuff is movies, Netflix shows, music, your last short weekend trip, and pretty much everyone has their own personal non work thing, usually attached to a club or group (hiking, photography, whatever).
I guess in that last category sports are commonplace, but it’s more “I’m training for a marathon next month” or “you should come bouldering sometime” rather than following professional sports on tv.
This sounds like it’s particular to your friend group rather than some coarse regional geography. If you toss a rock in Western Europe, you’ve got a better chance of hitting a football fan than someone who wants to go bouldering or train for a marathon.
>If you toss a rock in Western Europe, you’ve got a better chance of hitting a football fan than someone who wants to go bouldering or train for a marathon.
Yes and no. If you HAVE to choose a specific hobby, football will have more chances than others; but it will still work in a minority of cases and assuming carries an implication.
A comparison I could make is starting a conversation in the US with 'did you watch fox news yesterday?'. Out of all channels, it's the most watched one; but you still have high chances of asking a non-viewer, and then get hit by negative connotations.
Personal hobbies are much better topic for various reasons (you don't assume, people will naturally be exited about discussing their own, etc).
politics, music, food (Berlin here)
If only someone could create an app or website to help us uninformed out with common phrases to use. Sentences like:
"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"
The thing about Arsenal is they always try to walk it in.
I've been known to drop this one in conversation to see if people pick up on it.
Have no idea if it's still true, but it certainly was in Wenger's time.
The current trendy insult is that they rely on set pieces too much.
The problem with this is when the convo goes beyond the initial common phrase. The response is likely to go more in depth. Then you're stuck nodding awkwardly, laughing awkwardly or just fudging it further... Awkwardly. Personally if it's a sport I'm not into I'll just admit that and explain why. The conversation will usually naturally move on and you won't seem phony.
The person you’re responding to was making a joke/reference.
https://youtu.be/EfE-ts3IwPM?t=68
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1320784/
Let's use blockcha... I mean, AI!
Huh, an AI that reads the latest news and suggest conversation topics would be funny, if conversing with someone interested in celebrity gossip, then it could delve into that topic, e.g. "What about astronaut Katy Perry, am I right?! Did you read that she was spotted having a meal with Justin Trudeau?".
"How about this season, huh?"
"You catch the game?"
"They got some bad calls."
"Aren't you concerned that so many people tie their civic identity to watching some rich guy's overproduced commercial sports theatre, but are disinterested in actual civics?"
While I’ve yet to meet somebody into fishing or hunting, I agree about cars and sports. Unfortunately since I have interest in neither it can be hard to fit in sometime.
Weirdly, as somebody non interested in these common topics it also feels like it’s up to you to figure out a topic of common interest and it really isn’t.
About sports also, most people super “into” sports don’t do any. Which is ironic because a conversation about technique is something I’ll gladly have.
For the few times where I had to speak to someone about topics I don't care much about, I found that simply asking questions to learn about them ( as well as the person I'm speaking to) is enough.
"What team do you support? Has it always been the case? How do you think they compare to <well-known other good team>?" "What car do you drive? Any particular reason for that car model? What's the brand's best and worst things? Oh, that piece tends to break easily; pardon my ignorance, but what's the purpose of it?" "Any key difference in the way you hunt/fish this or that animal, or the time of the year during which you hunt/fish? I don't know that word, what does it mean? Do you have any anecdotes about some hunting/fishing you did?"
Those have to be adapted to the person and situation, but they are pretty good to keep a conversation going. People love to speak about their interests, and a lot love to even teach about them. Putting yourself as the listener makes them perceive you as nice, and you might even gather interesting information to yourself, or at least gather enough knowledge to have an easier time speaking about it next time.
This is something that 99% of "nerds" don't understand about sports. You don't have to fake your way through "knowing about sports" to have a conversation around it.
Suppose you're in Buffalo, NY and you don't know a thing about sports. However, unless visiting with your eyes and ears closed, it would be difficult not to see that the city is really into its football team.
If you are "stuck" in a conversation with a Bills fan and don't know a thing about football, you could just ask - are the Bills good this year? what's it like being a Bills fan? are Bills fans as crazy as they say? how did you come to be a Bills fan - were your parents Bills fans?
There's like 100 possible conversation angles there that don't require any knowledge of sports
Discussions like these show that some people really block out anything beyond their specific interests.
I don't care about superhero movies, so I haven't seen any of the Marvel or DC movies, yet I still know they exist and sometimes I know which one is being promoted right now. If I got stuck at a table somewhere with someone who is a big fan of them, we could have a conversation. It'd mostly consist of me asking questions, but that'd work fine, because as a fan he'd have opinions to share. Same thing with sports or anything, really.
Right! It's so simple to me, that I actually get kind of frustrated with people who haven't figured this out.
Being a good listener is key for any relationship, however brief it may be.
Definitely agree on the listening and just asking questions. It helps to have one or two factoids about many subjects to sneak into any conversation.
Yeah, I noticed this too about sportball people - they’re generally out of shape and not actually athletic (I’m fit and active in several outdoor sports). I just find watching or talking about sports excruciatingly boring. To me it’s the same thing as pornography, watching other people who are really good at it while you are a bystander, but your brain gets the physiological and-psychological signal that you’re actually part of the action. Though I don’t recommend the latter as a potential topic of conversation.
I don't have the same experience at all. The people who I know and have met which enjoy watching sports come at all levels of fitness. I am not that interested myself but quite many of the members of my running club enjoy watching sports and some of them can run 3 hour marathons.
And if you have ever met football ultras most of them are very fit.
Are you coming from UK or US perspective? Never heard the term Ultra.
What are football ultras?
Somewhere between dedicated fans of (often working class) European Football teams and paramilitary organisations. Green Street starring Elijah Wood is a film accessible to overseas audiences detailing the cultural phenomenon n the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultras
In Europe however, Italy in particular, organised crime is embedded in the structure - e.g. Gennaro Di Tommaso aka "The C0rpse", the leader of Napoli's ultras whose approval is needed before a match can take place
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/curva-nostra-mob-infilt...
Extremely fanatic soccer "fans", aka hooligans. Basically just an excuse to be antisocial.
the mob that pretends to be the core fans.
This may be a more recent thing, but I find a lot of the "sportsball" conversations are actually just slightly disguised conversations about gambling. Everyone is on Draft Kings and when they talk about this guy's stats or that team's past, or this game's expected score, they're just talking about betting and stuff. I don't think a lot of the sportsball people are even really fans of the sport, they're just looking at stats and betting.
As somebody who enjoys both watching and playing sports, I agree and I think that sports betting is so gross and harmful.
I have a question, though. What's up with the "sportsball" thing?
I mean, I'm very familiar with it. It just seems like it's always been used as a mildly derogatory term by people who really dislike sports and sports fans. What does it mean to you? No wrong answers.
> It just seems like it's always been used as a mildly derogatory term by people who really dislike sports and sports fans.
Yeah, actually saying 'sportsball' in conversation in a non-ironic way is an excellent way to signal that you have poor social skills. No need to yuck someone's yum.
That's certainly been my experience. I've never heard it used in a way that wasn't a mild yucking of somebody else's yum.
I don't know. OP used the word and I just repeated it. I figure it's a generic term for the kinds of ball sports that popular culture follows and/or bets on: Baseball, Basketball, Football and so on.
Yeah, it's funny. I find a lot of sedentary sports-enjoyment (particularly fantasy sports) to be way "nerdier" than stereotypically nerdy stuff like D&D.
That said, the sports fans I know really are quite the wide spectrum when it comes to their actual sports/exercise participation. Lot of very active people.
You don't need to know much about sports. If you can just keep up with what's in season that's typically enough. Who do you think will go to the super bowl? Have you done a final four bracket? are great questions as long as it's the right time of year.
"Going/been anywhere nice recently" is a pretty good one in the UK - most people have some kind of holiday and I don't follow football and my interest in cars is probably limited to my occasional bouts of incandescent rage at people not signalling correctly on roundabouts...
In the US I was taught you don’t need to signal at roundabouts. Am I doing something terribly wrong?
>Signal when you change lanes or exit the roundabout.
California Driver Handbook
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/web/eng_pdf/dl600.pdf
The UK version:
https://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/roundabouts.html
I think the main difference is the expectation that you start signalling, if appropriate, before joining the roundabout. My main complaint (OK one of my main complaints) is that drivers turning right start signalling right and then forget to signal left as they leave...
Roundabouts are a one way road, you don´t need to signal when driving on it. But you do need to indicate when you are leaving the roundabout.
Might be a regionalism, but here in Oregon, we don't signal going in, but signal right before we intend to exit. That way the next incoming driver can enter the roundabout and keep traffic flowing. We have a LOT of roundabouts though, like dozens upon dozens, and many of them are over saturated. It may be a local response to the traffic patterns here, not sure.
The most important thing is for everyone to speak the same protocol, provided that the protocol meets some minimum standard of fitness-for-purpose. But… yeah, I think you're doing it wrong.
Which countries have you been to? Sports I'll give you. Cars are already questionable. But fishing and hunting!?
Now I'm interested: what are your top three topics for talking to women? :)
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Have you found a generally equal level of interest in hunting, fishing, sports, and cars across the genders?
That’s not been my experience and, as a basic social skill, I seek to adapt my conversational topics to the audience’s interest.
I was rather mocking the parent poster for suggesting such overly cliché topics. In reality, men and women share many common interests (music, movies, food, travel, etc.) which I also think are more universal than cars and fishing.
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Gender equality does not imply nor require gender indistinguishability.
Rejecting the latter does not imply rejecting the former, but of course you know that and are just being a gender-neutral cylindrical appendage.
> Gender equality does not imply nor require gender indistinguishability
Careful, in a few years talking like this will get you canceled.
> being a gender-neutral cylindrical appendage
Now that's better! This is what we must all strive to be.
Your comment is the only one hateful here. Where I'm from there are absolutely different topics to talk to men and women. You may hate it as much as you like, but that's the world many of us live in.
He's very probably mocking "the woke" by exaggerating how they criticize people...
Oh, man. I think you are right, I can't believe i took it at face value.
No you are wrong, usually it's conlang, microtonal music, and functional programming ;).
> I've found that no mater what country I've been to, or what social classes the people belong to, three topics have a 95% success rate when it comes to social relations with guys: sports, cars, fishing/hunting. And to some degree handywork.
Have you generally been to the Americas and Western Europe? Sports is the one universal, that makes sense in my experience too. But most people outside the rich upper class don't give a hoot about cars anywhere in the parts of Asia I've been to. And if you talked about fishing/hunting, you'd probably get weird looks trying to decide if you came from some modern hunter-gatherer cult.
Even in Western Europe.
Hunting is extremely rare (and generally an indicator of old money or living in an extremely rural environment).
Fishing is a lot more popular but even that tends to date you a bit. At least for Eastern Europe, fishing is a lot more popular among the 45+ year olds.
OP is primarily speaking about a North American perspective, I think.
Even here in Sweden a lot of the people fishing are older Polish immigrants unless you live in s rural area.
Seems to be quite popular with younger Polish immigrants in the UK. Although a key point of difference which might make it difficult to find common ground with British anglers is they often seem to regard cooking and eating the fish (rather than throwing it back) and important part of the exercise. More likely to find agreement if they stick to slagging off the UK government ;-)
Talking about cars in Western Europe isn't that safe bet either. In cities like Stockholm most people are not interested in cars. And similarily hunting and fishing are niche interests in urban areas.
I think most people here are mistaking cars as a subject for things like hotrods or racing or classic cars.
But you really can kick off a decent conversation by just commenting and asking about what they drive, usually by starting with "I see a lot of people prefer X here". And you end up learning a decent amount about them.
Assuming they have a car (which a lot of people don't), this would be on the same level as asking about what phone they use - some people carefully chose theirs and want to talk about it, but for a lot of people it's just a thing that exists and gets the job done. It might get the conversation going, just the same as many other topics, but it won't be a conversation they'll especially enjoy in most parts of the world.
What do Asians talk about then?
Talking about the variety of facilities the region has, about traffic, new constructions - anything development related is guaranteed to get the conversation going. There's a lot of rapid urbanization and change going on, and people always have something they want to get off their chest about it.
If you don't mind a bit of griping, politics is not a bad shout either. People aren't hardline attached to one side or the other as much here, and even when they are, they're much more willing to admit corruption at a local city level even if their favourite party is in charge. Complaining about corruption is a common pastime.
Movies and music are also pretty good generic options, as are motorbikes or electric scooters with younger guys in their early-mid twenties.
Having lived in Japan, and spent a fair amount of time in China: food, fashion, music, film, culture and politics (in a polite way), work, among other things
However unless you're planning to visit very rural places I genuinely don't think I've ever met anyone in East Asia talk about cars or hunting. Even in Europe among Millenials or Gen Z I don't know anyone who is into cars at all, a lot of younger people in the larger cities don't even have drivers licenses.
In the US, I've never met one who doesn't enjoy talking about food, especially boba and banh mi.
Beyond that, it just depends on the person...
Food of course!
The problem is that I find the conversations that flow from these openers incredibly dull. So I just stay at home and read my phone instead, however unfortunately I hear that that is correlated with various negative outcomes.
"Hi, I have no interest in you or these topics but let's converse to extend my lifespan." Beer can help with this.
If that's true then The Onion's "The Sports Team From My Area..." T-shirt[1] is a guaranteed (conversation|fight) starter.
[1] https://store.theonion.com/collections/best-selling-products...
In my experience, men mostly want to talk about women, money, and crypto.
This is why I prefer talking to women.
Yeah, it's kind of the social equivalent of knowing a few phrases in another language
A lot of "social skills" content drifts into pickup-artist-y territory, so it's refreshing when something frames it around comfort, support, and actual connection instead of just "winning" interactions
> instead of just "winning" interactions
Mainstream pickup artists yea. Some niche ones, not really. Wayne Elise feels like a good example, from back in the day.
On a throwaway because the judgmental people will judge me for the rest of my life due to me nuancing that not all people associated to pickup artists looked at social interactions in a zero sum way.
Agreed, it feels risky to just be associated these days, even if it's "adjacent" groups that explicitly don't want to be part of the "mechanical" side of improving social skills like "classical" PUA.
But, no way to change that in public perception without taking risks and being open about it.
So, if you're an HN reader, not wanting to be branded as a PUA but still want to find help socially (especially romantically), my two cents is look into the Ars Amorata community.
> But, no way to change that in public perception without taking risks and being open about it.
Yea, I can't take it. I've fixed my dating life but I'm not a charismatic leader by any stretch of the imagination. I've taken multiple stabs in Reddit threads but there is just no good faith discussion to be had. I've also tried it a bit on HN. On HN it's also very dicey.
> So, if you're an HN reader, not wanting to be branded as a PUA but still want to find help socially (especially romantically), my two cents is look into the Ars Amorata community.
Interesting, will check it out. I don't need help by the way. I'm married. And for social skills that I'm still lacking, I know where to go. Unfortunately, not all social skills in dating transfer well to work social skills.
Edit: just checked it out. Good to see Zan is still doing his thing. I remember him "I love women". He definitely influenced me with that quote back in the day.
The founder seems to have missed the opportunity to make a classical reference to Ovid's writing on love, instead constructing some ungrammatical Latin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_Amatoria
It's on purpose! Quirks of the group kind of thing.
I'm glad to hear somebody say that. I never dug very deeply into the PUA stuff as the community seemed like quite a toxic dump.
But, a lot of the actual material I did see actually seemed like it was universally applicable in non-toxic and non-exploitative ways.
I think a lot of the basic skills and concepts are the same, whether using them for positive goals or for selfishly manipulative goals.
The best guide I have ever seen is https://succeedsocially.com/
It’s so unbelievably straightforward and useful. It’s unfortunate that I discovered it after learning everything the hard way.
It's not bad. Maybe 7/10.
I read the page https://www.succeedsocially.com/morefun. Here's my initial impressions. Pros: it identified several important painpoints and give several decent examples. Cons: Being a truly fun person is all about reaction reaction reaction. Fun people react authentically (while censoring their ahole side because you don't want to be fun but unlikable), ridiculously (while reading the room), and intelligently (playing to the top of the crowd's intelligence).
Consider the intended audience though. This is for people who are lost and need perspective and concrete steps for improving. Compared to all the "fake it 'till you make it" or "just stop caring" type of advice, it's helpful.
> Fun people react authentically (while censoring their ahole side because you don't want to be fun but unlikable)
But here you explain exactly what is difficult. It's like walking a tightrope and someone tells you not to fall to the left and by the way, also not to the right.
Great comment - it feels very true
Wow, after reading the various pages on this link for ~20m+ I have to agree this is one of the best resources I've ever encountered.
Mask every day. Life goal: Be 100% artificial person. All openings and responses must be calculated and faked. Your inner self is faulty and not appropriate at any situation. Once you train and work hard enough to suppress it at all times forever, you may be accepted and allowed to participate.
Fake it till you make it.
"Be yourself" is not wrong, but it's not specific enough.
You can be perfectly authentic, but that doesn't mean being socially uncalibrated.
Get good at being sociable, then blend that with your personal tastes and preferences.
I thought "be yourself" was fine until I grew up and learned I was just being rude to most people and called myself introverted when I didn't make friends.
"Be yourself" works when you're awesome already (and keep performing).
So it's not useful advice for most that need to build yourself up to something that performs decently, nicely or awesomely (the most you can).
And Fake it till you make it is an awful expression (encourages posing and faking is legitimate when is not by definition) to communicate that you just need practice to obtain a level of performance.
> Fake it till you make it.
What are you trying to make though? You're pretending to want the same things the people you think you need to fit in with want, but if you don't actually want those things, what point is there to be in a competition to get them?
Social skills is moslty compromises. It’s kind of a protocol that signals that you’re not unfriendly, and if you’re part of a community, that you’re ready to pitch in, when someone or the entire community needs help.
Surely it would be simpler to identify who in the community actually needs help, help them, and gain a reputation thereby? Honest signalling works well among humans, in my experience.
it may be. But how are you going to identify who needs help? And if that someone is willing to accept help (pride and/or shame can be powerful blocker)?
Humans are social creatures. If you truly don't have the same desires as most - friendship, companionship, even career gain - then sure, it's purposeless. But why are you even in this thread then? If you clearly are actively dis- interested in this topic. Otherwise, skydhash is correct - it's about compromise.
Part of being truly social (and being emotionally mature) is to understand and apply the difference between manipulation and being mindful about behavior and speech. Same as honesty - honesty doesn't need to be brutal honesty. One can be authentic without being hurtful.
>Your inner self is faulty and not appropriate at any situation
Mostly true actually. If this was not so, the world would look like a daycare without supervision. Just a bunch of primal feelings and violence.
The actual meta-skill that is being developed by maturing emotionally and using soft skills appropriately (for the benefit of the situation and the participants, not for manipulation) is tact. Same as how people learn to apply just a little pressure when handling glassware, and a lot of pressure when lifting a heavy weight.
This is addressed by the author here:
https://www.improveyoursocialskills.com/foundations/social-m...
> Mostly true actually. If this was not so, the world would look like a daycare without supervision. Just a bunch of primal feelings and violence.
The inner self isn't just an id, it's your goals, interests, values and ways of thinking too. And the social fitness script is that you should only have acceptable goals and interests and acceptable ways of talking about them. Talking about wanting to buy a nice house and a sports car, good. Talking about wanting to beat the speedrun record for Mario 64 and how you've figured out a CPU glitch to use for it, keep it to yourself. "Let's agree to disagree", good, "let's sketch a causal model graph of this and plug in our guesses for priors to see where we get different intuitions", no.
I think if someone is already not taken by any of their inner things entirely, then they are already doing this regulation thing. The social skills that are described in the article (and soft skills in general) are just a next step on the same path, focusing on getting along, rather than completely internal regulation.
I too have wildly different area of interest, level of interest, and approach to things than most people around me do. Soft skills helped me to connect anyways, for at least two reasons:
1. With them I can approach, and connect to the interest of others.
2. I can explain to people my interest, and make it more interesting to them as well.
Also, these are not for all time, all the time. The healthy thing is to vary the guardedness in different contexts. The flexibility in this is a skill in itself, and again, something that connects to, and can raise, emotional intelligence.
There is a true asymmetry that's avoided by the anodyne "everyone needs to think about these things" talk. If you take a group of 20 people from your country chosen completely at random, some people are likely to find things being similar with themselves and several people in this group, no matter which group was picked, and other people are likely to find little in similar between themselves and the group for most of the groups.
Social skills instruction is often about how to get along with averaged random groups like this. The first sort of person might find it as useful know-how for a thing they already find agreeable. The second sort of person might not find the initial situation agreeable at all, so the instruction gets the implicit added bit of "first of all, you need to not be yourself".
>"first of all, you need to not be yourself"
Yes, that seems part of it, as long as all you know is "yourself without social skills". With social skills, and leaving some of that "yourself" behind, you will discover that don't just change, or reduce yourself, in a social setting, but become more yourself as a whole. The very definition of "yourself" changes, broadens because of this added experience.
Right. You don't need to be fake; but you need to be in control of yourself. Aware, mindful, and civilized.
> All openings and responses must be calculated and faked
Thinking about the things you say isn't faking it - it's just using your brain and being considerate.
If you just blurt out anything with no filter, that doesn't make you authentic, it usually makes you an asshole.
Not all thoughts are productive, many are bad and many are stupid. You should delete those or revise them. Not only when talking to other people, but even to yourself.
I can tell myself that I'm dumb or I'm fat or whatever, but that isn't true and just because I thought it doesn't mean I have to internalize it. No, I filter those thoughts, I tell myself "that's not true". Over time, I think them less.
Your own brain is not reliable. It does not operate on truth, or what is or is not productive. So tune it. Not for the sake of others, but for yourself too.
Being an asshole to others is bad, but being an asshole to yourself is arguably worse. The goal is to, overtime, build better thought procedses and mental models. Not to fake it.
> Thinking about the things you say isn't faking it - it's just using your brain and being considerate.
I guess what gets me with this stuff is that there are multiple things going on that are getting conflated. Considering your words is pretty straightforwardly good, it's learning to not say things you yourself wouldn't have wanted to say.
But then this stuff tends to show up in the context of work, or business, and it starts turning into selling. You are the seller, the other people are buyers. Buyers have no expectations on them, they react as they react and they want what they want. The seller must contort themselves to please the buyer and then close a sale to get one over the buyer. And this is where it gets corrosive for me. It feels like there's no common ground being built, the relationship is adversarial in both directions, and both sides are a bad model for a person to be. People are being split into feckless buyers who express immediate wants and judgments with no thought or development, and conniving sellers whose main order of business is to get themselves in front of the buyer and get noticed, no matter what the real value of what they are offering is. People might make money if they internalize this system and get good at it, but are they going to make lasting friends?
You can solve this by reapplying attribution elsewhere.
Instead of blaming the methods / soft skills / whatever, which can be used for good and bad, blame the people who misuse these tools for personal gain: politicians, salespeople, conmen, pua, what have you.
You are what you are because of circumstances.
Which is fun and great if you came out as a happy cool human.
If you made it through the weird unadjusted side without any gimmick you just loose.
No one has to force you to stay what your surroundings made you. It's not your personality it's just a reflection and you can change it and make it better for you by adjusting and reflecting.
Sometimes people already are like something and don't want to change it or feel like they could change it, but also don't get along being like they are. This is more awkward to think about than just treating them as damaged or incomplete people who would get around to becoming people who can fit in fine once the damage is fixed or the incomplete development is completed, because it's harder to see good solutions.
You severely underestimate the biological side of things regarding social interaction. Neurodivergent people are what we are not just bc "surroundings made us so"
That includes people like me who are neurodivergent
And I'm also not shaming anyone not wanting or unable to chain themselves.
It was a statement about the uniqueness of ones character and the agency of controlling it/changing or adjusting it by yourself
Then I don't understand what you are arguing about. If you're neurodivergent, you would always require self awareness and masking, faked as op rightfully stated. You could never natural, no matter what circumstances were.
I changed very slowly and steady over the last 20 years.
This has very little to do with masking.
Changing is possible even if you're neurodivergent, but you'll always have some barriers that neurotypicals don't. To interact with them, you will generally need some degree of masking.
This hits home.
After COVID, I stopped caring and trying to fake being a normal person, and choose just to be me, alone.
I wasn't good at trying to be normal, and it's so much nicer to be free to not bother to make the effort and not be me. But I have no friends or good relationships with family (who don't understand or tolerate who I am).
The problem is, that's the best strategy to gather resources and reproduce, aka "win at life".
I wonder why this was written as these very small paragraphs with only a few lines of content? Apart from the hosting issues due to hackernews it leads to a lot of intros and 'in the next section we will learn...' but the actually useful content is quite little and you have to dig hard for it. I'd personally favor a normal article.
I found it frustrating because of all the links everywhere. In the “How to use this guide” section it links to a body language section.
But there’s no context as to where this body language section fits in.
Am I supposed to read the body language section now and then remember to go back to the how to section? Or is body language discussed later? Then why link to it now? This format stresses me out.
Most likely, it's for tracking reasons. To figure out what sections people hit more and less...
I agree with you though. It's sad that content is being reformulated for those reasons.
Maybe I'm weird, but I find the writing style almost condescending.
It's a style I've seen elsewhere as well so not particular to this site, but I find it grating and off-putting. Feels like it treats me like a 4 year old.
Finally something for an LLM to crawl and assemble into a coherent document that can be read from start to finish.
For those who think they are decent at socializing, one book that may extend your skill further is ' Never split the difference'. Its a book about negotiating, but I think it does teach some key skills. Mirroring for example where you literally repeat back the last few words a person has said, I've found unexpectedly super useful - it almost allows people to expand on what they are saying and helps them go deeper into things. Basically the book (and other tools) has helped me become a better listener (I have always been decent at the talking side). https://www.amazon.co.uk/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-...
Note: I only 'mirror' 2-3 times in a conversation. I've found over using it makes it have less impact. But that's just me.
That's my experience as well. I just ask questions or talk to you like we are trying to find out more about whatever it is you are talking about.
And the book gives you a few useful tools to do that.
There's also the classic 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'. Many later books are rehashing of parts of HTWFAIP.
Agreed that is a classic - I think the essentials are true but the language is a bit dated. Definitely "trying to think positively about people and their actions/understand them", and giving people "a sense of importance" are very helpful social skills.
I definitely second that its a great book, especially if you focus more on the principles it's getting at instead of necessarily the examples.
Funny experience with that:
A big part of How to Win Friends and Influence People that I took to heart was "be interested in other people". Flash forward a few years and I'm in a bar with a group of people I had recently met when one of them says to me "Hey, we've been talking a lot about ourselves but not really that much about you." One of the other people interrupted "That's because they are polite! They are showing interest in what we're interested in instead of insisting on talking about themselves."
So at least some people do notice when you put in an effort to use good social skills!
This is a very American society focused guide, a lot of these wouldn't even apply in Europe an especially not if you travel to Asia, Middle East, or Africa
Interestingly enough, not nearly as much gets published for e.g. Europe. Innate ability ?
> Interestingly enough, not nearly as much gets published for e.g. Europe. Innate ability ?
From my personal feeling:
US culture is more on the extraverted side (i.e. a lot of people want/need shallow conversation instead of shutting their mouth, except if they have something important to say) than what is common in many European countries.
Thus, people who are more on the introvert side have a harder time in the USA than in many European countries, I guess.
Also, for various reason the whole "self-improvement industrial complex" is much less prevalent in European countries than in the USA.
Relatedly, I would say that in the USA, there is the mentality "Our society is the greatest ever made since God created Earth, so if you don't feel happy, the fault is on you: you need to self-improve."
On the other hand, in many European countries, the mentality is rather like "The society [note that I didn't write "our" - there is barely any sense of belonging] is a corrupt, messed-up shithole. Yes, there exist those smooth talkers who tell you that you need to self-improve (e.g. social skills), but do you know what: those just want to make money from the mess you are in, and/or are telling you the things that those in power want you to brainwash with. So, instead of wasting time and money to get yourself a brainwashing to make yourself 'socially adapted', better invest this energy into exposing all these assholes in power who are responsible for the whole mess. Since there are so many people who also have this kind of hate, you will easily find friends this way, and thus become more socially skilled." :-)
>Relatedly, I would say that in the USA, there is the mentality "Our society is the greatest ever made since God created Earth, so if you don't feel happy, the fault is on you: you need to self-improve."
Unjustified self deprecation can lead to dereliction. IMO Americans feel this way because it's appropriate to.
With respect, that's only true if you are a member of certain social/personality classes in America. If you are poor or don't fit into the conservative ideal, then America is often not a great place to live.
Maybe there are more languages than english in Europe?
What wouldn’t apply to Europe?
The 10-gun salute when strangers come over to your house.
Yup, in Europe you either have a 100 gun salute if you're new money or a Navy destroyer casually and coincidentally floating by your house on the Rivera when the souffle is served, if you're old money.
> Watch TV with the sound low and study the body language of the actors until you can recognize comfort and discomfort.
Bad advice. Actors don't mimic reality. Actors mimic what viewers expect to see in actors. This means that the body language you see in actors and the language you see in real life are different.
I hope they cover managing your own emotions: staying calm, responding with empathy, and breaking avoidance patterns.
In my last few relationships, I've been having to do relationship coaching with partners because their parents failed to teach them responding with physical or emotional violence is not how you maintain friendships or relationships.
I think this guide is already failing people by assuming successfully initiated conversations and labeling it as "basic". If you have plenty of social contacts, that already warrants being considered "intermediate".
The really difficult things are maintaining good first impression and talking to (perceived) strangers. You know nothing about a person until you talk with that person, so what exactly are you supposed to do? There is a bootstrapping problem.
Classified ads are a good example. It's not like ebay, where you click a button and the delivered product is guaranteed to arrive a few days later. Instead you get a blank form of nothing, where you can write whatever you want and there is always the possibility of rejection. It's very much unlike any store you've ever visited, where money is king and the customer('s money) is always right.
Being able to communicate despite differences in status.
Don't try to qualify people.
Do not let others feel contempt.
Don't speak any words outside what someone would commonly be able to accept.
Suppression of ego so others are not uncomfortable. Knowing when to not suppress it if others think you are fake.
What does don't try to qualify people mean to you? Does it relate to putting people in boxes/labelling people and making very strong assumptions?
As an introvert I'd argue those are basically just: "be empathic". That means you should not treat others in a way that annoys or demeans them – because you yourself would not like that either, right?
Empathy implies you can feel with others. Example: You are a man and you talk to a woman. Being empathic means you have a clear mental image of what it might feel like to be a woman and can thus avoid saying things that aren't funny, like sexist bullshit. Or you talk to a student/junior and remember what it felt like when you had no fucking clue and how shitty it was when the old greybeards would scoff at you, with empathy you can talk to people where they are instead of highlighting the difference between you and them.
Most communicative problems I have ever seen (aside from language barriers) could have been resolved by a little bit of empathy.
> Most communicative problems I have ever seen (aside from language barriers) could have been resolved by a little bit of empathy.
Empathy is usually an internal process. On it's own, it wont't resolve a communication problem.
What ends up affecting a communication problem are the external actions that we take based on our internal empathy calculus (assuming we haven't totally miscalculated). Those actions will vary significantly by person and context, assuming any action follows at all.
Empathy is the relatively easy part. Acting on that empathy in a way that doesn't come across as condescending, disengaged, presumptious, judgemental, awkward, or scripted, while also remaining true to yourself and upholding your personal values are the hard parts.
Hm, that’s all a bit shallow, isn’t it? Can anyone recommend a more thorough source?
Life. It's a live and learn type thing. Social has everything to do with the social club you're in. Every club has different rules.
Yet these rules aren’t so radically different that there aren’t any common patterns. For instance, noticing people’s birthday and adding them to your calendar so that you can congratulate them is a small, yet very powerful tip that works in pretty much everyday social circle.
This is a bit of a long shot, but a lot my social embarrassment comes from my tendency to mumble / be hard to understand. Anyone on here have any experience with improving at that stuff?
Take a look at Vinh Giang [1], he specializes in communication skills and vocal clarity, and is a super fun guy to listen to speak.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@askvinh
On the practical side there are many good options. Using the voice effectively is a key skill in many professions, such as singing, public speaking, education, religious, management. So there are many practitioners, and lots of learning materials out there. So I recommend to check of there are any of those angles that resonate more with you. But very important - this is a challenge that needs practice to overcome - it cannot be dealt with only theoretically! So as a simple starting point is: go on YouTube and search for vocal exercises. Start with something like warmup routines. And then try something like saying the same sentence at 7 different loudness levels, from a whisper into someones ear to a SHOUT that needs to go to another person at the other side of a lake. Observe just how much power you got! This will be awkward and that is good - it means that you are stretching yourself, both physically and mentally! Like at the gym.
Then out a few sentences in the level you feel most comfortable with, plus 1 or 2 steps above. Try whole paragraphs.
PS: drink water and do not push harder if you feel pain.
Not an expert so take this with a HUGE grain of salt.
I think that the answer might depend on whether the difficulty is something with your speaking itself (e.g. you have a speech impediment, accent, stutter, etc.) versus if the difficulty is with the social side of things (e.g. mumbling due to nervousness, etc.).
For the former, maybe a speech therapist could help? For the later, I've heard people say that improv classes/clubs can do a lot for helping people be more confortable in unpredictable social situations.
Studied Film and worked professionally in overdubbing for a while. I recommend in that order:
1. figure out if your mumbling is just a habit or a logopedic issue
2. get a speakers training of the type actors or radio hosts would
If you wonder whether it is worth it, just consider how important it is in both your private and professional life to be clearly understood. There has been a study during the pandemic that showed that people who had the better sound quality in conferences would get their ideas through more often. This is truly the case for spoken words as well.
This may sound unhelpful, but just try to notice when you do it and then speak more clearly. Try to minimize the amount of "What" as a response to what you say.
If you have a medical type of problem that's of course not applicable.
I've worked with lots of folks on the spectrum and to be honest it's more fun dealing with them as team members rather than "normies".
One guy particularly stands out, he joined the team and started off on a solo run with a couple of projects a few others were involved in. A few weeks later I asked him if he'd setup any meetings with the team to get context and, you know, say hello and his response was "why should I do that, can't they read my PRs?". Classic.
Another one was the very loudly self-diagnosed neurodiverse girl, who seemed to just use it as cover for being a total jerk. Eventually she had to be managed out, as she tipped the scale between doing good work and tolerance of odd behaviors too far - screaming in meetings, histrionics and stuff you'd expect more of someone living on a street corner.
that surely might be a... diversion from boring work, but fun? fun is something else
Type 2 fun maybe.
> I asked him if he'd setup any meetings with the team to get context and, you know, say hello and his response was "why should I do that, can't they read my PRs?". Classic.
That would have been my reply, too.
Ditto. The contributions are saying 'hello' and soliciting input, in one. Also providing the contributor with an opportunity to learn the product in their terms.
I know, I know. The horror of an individual for us all.
I assume the proposition is this: one has no chance to produce value without firm guidance from the onset. Or the time learning is a tragedy. I doubt both of these very much. PRs are another conversation.
The others are free to take their turns. In this hypothetical, apparently, the other side has been unresponsive. Where's their ire; left behind at the bar?
Sorry we didn't apply the correct social pressure or wait until everyone was available at the same time for a call, I guess. I understand how that might hurt optics... I, the baby with superpowers in this scenario, just don't/can't care.
Handholding isn't a requirement. Guess what is: communicating the changes. Look at the PRs. Now that management is involved, we can have a meeting about them going unattended.
I assume the proposition is that trust between coworkers is important (even if you're autistic) and the best way to build extra trust with someone, on top of what you'd normally build just working with them, is to interact with them socially (unless they're autistic and haven't memorised this pattern, in such case they'll just be confused and annoyed).
I think your assumption that this is about "firm guidance" and "optics" and is an insult to your "superpowers" is unlikely to be the motivation.
"How can we have any pudding if we don't eat our meat?!"
Let's worry about extra trust once they start earning trust (and, arguably, their pay) by reviewing the PRs. Leaving those floating deserves none, from nobody.
To reiterate the original post, behaving as if they're a member of the team would be quite welcome, actually. Fun, no: work.
Has there been any hint that the PRs were not being reviewed? I haven't read any suggestion of that in the direct chain of replies.
Sure. Look not to the replies, but the top of the thread. The 'hint':
> " ... can't they read my PRs?"
I know one really good way to answer that. The requirement for the question suggests the same for review.
You're misreading it. Reading the speaker's PRs is presented as an alternative to talking to them, in the same way that if Alice and Bob were arguing whether song lyric sites should exist and Alice asked "can't they listen to the song?", it would be a rhetorical question and would not indicate that Bob did not listen to the song he wanted to read the lyrics of.
Hah. Disagree, don't care to continue. Have fun/take care.
it really bothers me when people try to assert people aren't actually neurodivergent/disabled because they dislike the person, and seem to want to further justify their dislike on a personal level instead of having compassion for the fact that they're actually disabled. i think people feel the need to assert this because they know they'd be an asshole to dislike someone for refusing to stand up and walk if they were wheelchair bound, so it's easier to pretend they don't actually need the wheelchair and are faking it.
the other point to this being frustrating is you're asserting she wasn't neurodivergent and then go on to describe some hallmark characteristics of neurodivergence. emotional regulation is one of the biggest challenges for people with ADHD and autism, and emotional outbursts and control of mood/emotions are exactly why neurodivergence is so incredibly difficult for so many people.
Let's have it correct, businesses pay folks to do work. While they make some allowances for what's happening in a person's life, they're not therapy nor are they charities.
If you can't manage whatever you're suffering from sufficiently to do your job then pity for you.
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so much for my social skills :(
we'll have to get by with grunting
something these guides indirectly touch on but don't explain more explicitly: frequently issues with socializing are rooted in trauma, and working on that trauma is what's going to fundamentally improve socialization. and for those unfamiliar, trauma isn't always "this one bad thing happened this one time, or many times". trauma is sometimes a lifelong pattern of small interactions, or lack of small interactions. childhood emotional neglect is sometimes impossible to even see from the outside, but can have lifelong implications to attachment styles that then later massively impact one's social anxiety and ability to socialize
also autism
Previous discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21585235 - 2019 (419 comments)
While there is value in a product like this, the creator did little to nothing to explain his credibility or earn my trust.
Some TEDx talks to degrees from unnamed programs.
https://archive.ph/zqFVm
I suspect that books about this type of guide differ much depends on the country/reader.
hacker news hug of death
If that's the reason, I kinda wonder what kind of numbers we're talking about in this case.
I decided to be nicer to people in order to make more friends. I realized that most of them are boring and shallow and talking to them is waste of time and energy.
Can text ever really teach you social skills? Aren't they, by definition, "social" and thus only obtainable through exposure and practice?
This applies to teaching anything ever; it's the difference between teaching the thing and teaching about the thing. It's a caveat to keep in mind, sure, but not much more.
Finally.
Ah yes, a very pertinent article for HN!
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