I'm writing this one from a small hotel that's across the street from a Church called “Saint Paul's Within the Walls”

Rome is quite a beautiful city! I've fallen in love with the architecture here. I feel like the spirit behind the architecture and statues have meshed with my thoughts in subtle ways when writing this.

1. Moments of anger, annoyance, jealousy

People who are loosely acquainted with me generally remark that I'm a very calming presence – soft spoken, relaxed, positive, regulated. Although people who know me really well actually know that I'm a really, really moody person.

A lot of quietude comes from regulating expression (mostly speech) – when I feel an emotion, there's a filter that examines whether that emotion is appropriate to express, and that emotion is expressed only when it feels appropriate.

The regulation is rather interesting – it can make you calming to other people, but at the same time it can suppress spontaneity – by the time positive emotions passes through that filter, they tend to be a lot more muted.

On the other hand, I'm also noticing acutely when that regulation fails, when moments of sharp negativity make me say things that I don't really intend, and a lot of me wonder whether its possible to be spontaneous while also not being spiky.

I think that it's probably possible, and that the way to do it is to basically recognize emotions faster through practice. I suspect that meditation is basically this, and will probably tune some of my practices towards that direction.

2. Moments of projection

I was visiting a restaurant with my mom and stepdad the other day, and my mom struck up a conversation with one of the staff.

It had been a long day and by that time both my stepdad and I (who are both more introverted) didn't really feel like conversing. I distinctly remember observing the staff's vibe and body language and noting that he didn't seem interested in talking.

To my surprise, the staff was actually really happy to engage, and brought up conversation topics and kept the exchange going for a while.

To a certain extent, people mirror what vibes others put out, so my mom's openness to conversation probably contributed to that outcome.

Despite that, I usually consider myself pretty good at reading people, but clearly there was a moment of projection here as well. The moment that that evaluation was made, you are already biasing that conversation towards a certain direction too. I think my learning here is to not take my evaluation of people's vibes too seriously, and understand that they could change as well.

3. Initial Impressions

One benefit of living in a 3rd space is that you get a vast trove of data on how people interreact with you and each other. And one of the fascinating observations so far has been how people form different mental models of how the 3rd space operates based on their initial interactions.

For example, they tend to assume that the people they interact with the most is the most in charge of the space. They also assume that the events they went to first were the primary types of event for that space.

Seeing this has actually kinda drilled home to me how important first impressions is when interacting with people. I kinda always knew that it was important, but had nothing analogous to compare it to. When you see how differently people form first impressions of a space, you see how differently they could form an impression of a person as well.

There has been times in my life when I consistently gave people better or worse first impressions, depending on where I am in life at the time; but I don't think there really is a time when I paid much attention to first impressions, and now I distinctly notice when I unnecessarily come across to people as being unlikable, and how that could be improved with slightly better habits.

(I notice how I could fine-grain track the impression I'm making on people too, but am hesitant to pursue this because it could be construed as manipulative. I probably should feel less anxiety around this.)

4. Who's Going to Listen to Me?

Over the past few years, I feel like the notion of listening has become a relatively rare resource.

At least from my personal experience in both 1-on-1 and group conversations, conversations tend to stay at the surface level more often compared to a few years ago.

I'd like to dig deeper into what's changed, but at least for myself personally, I think a contributing factor is how often I hoist my immediate thoughts onto others.

My mind doesn't do much internal calculus on talking to specific people about specific subjects. Instead, it identifies people who seem to have a lot of similar interests, and sends all subjects to those people.

Thinking back, I don't think that's a great method. It contributes to a less exciting conversation usually, since the topic lands less. The topics would have been better matched to people with those specific interests.

Furthermore, the info-dumpy aspect of it makes it harder for me to provide others the space to tell me more about what they're interested in.

In an ideal world, I'd like conversations about the topics I'm specifically interested about to be directed to people who share those exact interests, and this opens up space in conversations outside of my immediate interest range to become opportunities to learn more about the worth.

That might be a good step towards a society that listens more.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #interactions, #communication