zushi's place

One of the things I always liked about myself is that I have an interest in people. Looking at the things that occupy my mind the most – psychology, sociology, music, art, writing, reading, culture – there's no doubt that there's always been a humanist bent to it.

The other day, during a meetup, I was chatting with an artist who specialize in doing portraits. She really liked drawing portraits, and her portraits looked really good, but she mentioned that she was always a bit scared of doing full character drawings. The body was really hard to draw for her, she was less interested in the subject, and she had no confidence that she could get the body proportions right. So we chatted a bit about strategies for tackling that.

This episode stuck in my mind for a while afterwards. When I think about it, it's natural to like drawing specific parts of people (like faces). However, the idea of liking specific aspects of people has never occurred to me before. Looking at my own interest in people, it becomes extremely obvious that I'm interested in specific aspects of people, rather than people in general.

For example, most of my interest in people lies in self-help, aesthetics, culture, and social psychology. On the other hand my interest in learning about the life of a stranger, the idea of how to navigate conversations in a selfless way, and my attentiveness in putting people at ease are pretty deficient. There are weaknesses in many other parts too. In other worlds, despite knowing a decent amount about people, my social intelligence is still pretty low.

I have friends who are quite skilled in these areas, and when I talk to them, it becomes apparent that one of the critical skills here is to deeply understand the headspace of the other people, and understand how various ways of interaction affects the headspace. This is pretty often done using yourself as a kind of simulation. Though this is something I do occasionally, I don't really go as far as I would like with it (I feel that it doesn't naturally go that direction), and to me it feels a bit selfish to be so occupied with other things that I don't think about this, especially now that I've become more aware of this flaw.

In my mind, interactions with people can really be a lot more. Instead of two, three, or many people anxious to fill the silence with small talk, it could be a musical duet, or trio, or symphony where everyone gets to pick what music to play, contribute their own interpretation to the mix, and come out happy after partaking in something that was fun, beautiful, and validating.

Right now I'm still pretty far from contributing to it, but at least I'm becoming more motivated in getting there.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #philosophy