In the circle I hang out in nowadays, there is a lot of lament that people don't take the small risk of taking time to discover themselves even if they don't feel passionate about their jobs.

There is a book called “The Pathless Path” that does basically exactly this. It argues that too many people are stuck at the grindy jobs prescribed to them by society for a sense of safety, and that one day it would be too late for them to do so.

The book has a lot of followers, and I said a lot of such laments myself – why aren't people doing more to actualize themselves, even when the risks appear to be so low?

A few months ago I saw a thread on Twitter that changed my opinions on this. I've only read it once and the thread has now been deleted, but at some point I realized that I've been passively thinking about it for a few months.

The gist of it is that “a person pursuing their own path is on a constant, endless quest to discover their value systems, pursue it, and justify yourself to other people. A person on the default path does not need to justify their purpose and usefulness, while someone on the non-default path needs to be thinking about it all the time. This is effortful enough that it can be rational to do away with the process altogether and stay with the default path”.

Over the past few month, this thread has been reworking my perception of people with common day-jobs, to the point that I don't really think negatively about people on the default path more. Sometimes, I even admire it. And overall, this has been a beneficial change to me.

— Categorized under: #social, #interactions, #life

In conversations with friends, I've chatted about the idea that the concept of love could be decoupled from the idea of providing resources. In our culture, we tend to associate love with willingness to provide resources – whether it's time, money, food, shelter, or attention – to the person we love. However, if we decouple them altogether, it's now possible to love anyone unconditionally without feeling like you are stretching yourself thin.

But after thinking more about how kindness works, I'm realizing that looking at it as providing “resources” doesn't really capture the process of giving all that well.

For one, I think that there are plenty of times when what we give are much, much more nebulous than what can be strictly defined as “resources”. For example, instead of giving time or money, we might give kind words or put ourselves in psychological or physical discomfort for others, and it feels strange to me to characterize this as “providing a resource”. When you add the set of nebulously non-resource things we can give to each other – words, safety, thoughtful gestures, potential to actualize – to the idea of resource, I honestly cannot think of a good word for the combination of everything we can give. Perhaps I'll think up a better word for it one day, but as of now, I can only call it “giving” as opposed to “giving resources”.

There's another big reason that I think the framing of “giving resources” is quite flawed. When we thinking of the idea of giving resources, we think of zero-sum transfers of assets where both sides value that resource equally. In some of the most important acts of kindness, this mental image is just not true.

To someone who is homeless in Winter, a blanket means much more than another item in the closet. To someone who's looking to escape an abusive family, small gestures of giving and trust can mean more than the world. Using Heinrich maneuver takes little time but could save a life. Giving a child a dime so that they could buy their favorite candy could mean a long-term faith in the generosity of others.

What I'm recognizing now is that even when you don't feel safe enough to give a lot yet, a significant amount of possible kindness arises when you notice that there are opportunities where your contribution makes a large difference in someone else's lives. These types of situations are not very common, which means that following social norms will generally cause you to ignore these opportunities to give without thinking too much about why. But if you can get past that psychological barrier, then you open up the opportunity to not only make a huge difference in someone else's world, but to create a new norm of kindness and thoughtfulness for those around you. I think this is part of what makes kindness so inspirational.

One of my hopes is that in this new year, I'll be able to recognize and give more in this type of situation.

— Categorized under: #social, #psychology, #kindness, #interactions

(Mostly a brain dump of recent thoughts about social experiences.)

Over the past few months I've had success becoming more emotionally self-aware. Applying the same type of learning methodology to social experiences though feels quite daunting.

One of the main challenges here is that even adding a single person makes the experience vastly more complicated. Think of the difference between playing basketball or soccer by yourself vs. playing soccer with other people, and the difference in complexity becomes immediately obvious. In a social interaction, not only do you need a certain degree of self-awareness, but you need to interact based on the emotional state of the other person, the predispositions of the other person, the nature of the relationship, the context of the situation, what the other person knows about you, and each person's interests as well.

Each new person brings an entire copy of these already-numerous variables to track, and I think that's why for the longest time I found hanging out with more than one person to be extremely exhausting. It felt impossible to track what was important for everyone and to satisfy all of them at the same time. It seems like with lots of recent practice, I'm feel much comfortable in group settings. More recently I've been thinking about how to make better social experiences, whether it's in a one-on-one setting or in a group.

Part of the reason is that it strikes me that there isn't really that much time to hang out with people. Unless I co-reside with someone, even for close friends I will probably only hang out with them 100 times or so in the rest of my life. And for other friends, perhaps a few dozen or less than a dozen times total. After that, each of us will get busy and move on with our own lives.

Part of it too is that it seems like such a waste for a hangout to be kind of lukewarm, when so many great experiences are possible out there. A lifespan is pretty short however you look at it, and it seems like we should make every effort to have hangouts be positive, memorable ones.

Finally, I think I'm just kind of interested in experience design in general. From psychological and design perspectives, the problem of “how to make a hangout fun” is really interesting. It's something that I find myself gravitate towards thinking about.

There might be some confidence component to my motivation too. I recently took an interesting study that suggests that I like people more so than my confidence in leading a social interaction. This seems largely true, and I'd like the two to be more on par with each other.

But again, the skill tree of social intelligence is quite daunting. Unlike emotional intelligence, the amount of variables at play feel exponential rather than linear in scale.

To make it manageable, I think I'll probably have to scope my learning. For example, there are various special social interactions like negotiations, difficult conversations, competitions, and courtship. I think I should kind of ignore those for now and focus on making normal hangout-type interactions better.

Thinking about these types of interactions, one particularly interesting part is that I think the vast majority of really positive experiences can be categorized, here are some examples:

• Deep conversations
• Funny bantering
• Spontaneous adventures

I think that this type of experience are monotonically good in that the more an interaction approach that direction, the better that interaction becomes. There's no “uncanny valley” of deep conversations or funny bantering – the deeper the conversation, the funnier the bantering, the better.

Some of these categories require another person (deep conversations), while others can be experienced on one's own (spontaneous adventures). Some of these I feel comfortable with (again, deep conversations), while others I don't have much experience in (yet again, spontaneous adventures). Overall, those that I feel comfortable or can be experienced on one's own are easier to learn, while the ones that require other people or I feel uncomfortable with will be more challenging to learn.

Moving forward, I feel like a good approach is probably to work on one or two at a time. Perhaps becoming more comfortable with certain categories on my own for one, while experimenting with social settings for another.

Anyways, here are the current categorizations I have in mind.

I feel comfortable with, and can be experienced on one's own: – Safety and comfort – Overcoming hardships – Very aesthetic experiences – Becoming better at a skill – Creating something new – Creating a sense of hero's journey

I'm not very familiar with, and can be experienced on one's own: – Spontaneous, fun experiences – Feeling new emotions – Play for its own sake

I have some degree of comfort, but cannot be experienced on one's own: – Deep conversations – Validation and acceptance – Fun bantering

Others that seem out there or really challenging: – Intimacy – Laughing until your stomach hurts – Performing something together (doesn't have to be music, could be any form of performance)

They seem like an okay place to start, but feel free to reach out if I miss anything significant. I'm actually pretty excited to dig into a lot of these more.

— Categorized under: #irl, #social, #communications, #emotions, #streamofconsciousness

In a random walk the other day, I realized that the typical fashionability of bisexuals and the typical social awkwardness of neurodiverse people are actually quite related.

One of the important facets of social skills is to understand how people will react to what you do. We implicitly use this skill to avoid doing awkward or offending things. Neurotypical people have an advantage on this because they can use themselves to simulate how most people will react to the situation. On the other hand, neurodivergent people will struggle because they could only learn this from observing how others react to the situation. This has the further effect of making socializing much more painful to neurodivergent people, further reducing their opportunities to get feedback.

The generally-higher fashion skills of bisexual (and gay) people serves as an illustration of the opposite phenomenon. Because these people are attracted to people of their own sex, they are often immediately able to use their own emotional responses to simulate how attractive they will be to others of their sex. This is something that heterosexuals don't have easy access to. Unless there is a way to tap into increasing their own attraction to their own sex, the best that they can do is to either run simulations from other pictures of attractive people of their sex they have seen, or to have friends who are attracted to their sex give tips for them.
In productivity literature, there are a lot of verbiage on how important having an immediate feedback mechanism is. Thinking about examples like those in my life, the salience of that type of mechanism suddenly becomes amazingly clear.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #productivity, #social, #fashion

One of the social flaws I have often is coming across as a know-it-all.

For some reason, I seem to need to think and process things on a much higher time period than other people. I estimate that I spend an average 1-2 hours a day just thinking random subjects, and as a result, I have a really strong need to try to formulate those thoughts into words. It gets to the point that whenever a conversation touches on a related subject, I tend to describe all my thoughts on it at once, which comes off as overwhelming and pretty self-centered.

Well, I think it's self-centered anyways – I suspect that vanity can sometimes play a role in me saying too much, too.

How does one go about resolving something like that? An ideal version is to find someone who is very similar in terms of the need to elucidate ideas, and has a lot of similar interests. I'll be on the lookout, though I suspect that it might be hard to come by.

In some other ways, I've come to realize that blogs are a way for me to remove that excess energy too. And blogging more often is likely a good alternative, if I could work out a balance between time-investment and quality of communication.

In the short term, I would say – expect a bit more blog posts to come in in the future.

— Categorized under: #irl, #social, #communications

Thinking about friends who don't mature as fast, a common trait seem to be defensiveness.

Defensiveness is a particularly pernicious problem because by virtue of a person being defensive, others are less likely to give them feedback.

It's almost always easier to maintain a so-so relationship with someone who is defensive, rather than endangering the friendship through constructive feedback. Over time, barring exceptional circumstances, the defensive person will continue to miss out on opportunities to grow and find themselves surrounded by shallow friendships.

The same principles apply to work. A person who is hostile to feedback will lock themselves out of working relationships and opportunities to grow.

My takeaway from this is to prioritize fixing my defensiveness over most other negative traits I might perceive in myself. This way, I can pave the way for meaningful relationships and personal growth in the future.

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Categorized under: #social, #psychology