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My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

(sashachapin.substack.com)
631 points eatitraw | 3 comments | 15 Nov 25 13:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.736s | source
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Aurornis ◴[17 Nov 25 20:24 UTC] No.45957863[source]▶
This post wasn't what I was expecting from the "socially normal" title. While there is a lot of self-reflection and growth in this piece, a lot of the points felt more like learning how to charm, manipulate, and game social interactions.

Look at the first two subheadings:

> 1: Connecting with people is about being a dazzling person

> 2: Connecting with people is about playing their game

The post felt like a rollercoaster between using tricks to charm and manipulate, and periods of genuinely trying to learn how to be friends with people.

I don't want to disparage the author as this is a personal journey piece and I appreciate them sharing it. However this did leave me slightly uneasy, almost calling back to earlier days of the internet when advice about "social skills" often meant reductively thinking about other people, assuming you can mind-read them to deconstruct their mindset (the section about identifying people who feel underpraised, insecure, nervous,) and then leverage that to charm them (referred to as "dancing to the music" in this post).

Maybe the takeaway I'd try to give is to read this as an interesting peek into someone's mind, but not necessarily great advice for anyone else's situation or a healthy way to view relationships.

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1. niam ◴[17 Nov 25 20:59 UTC] No.45958210[source]▶
If the limit of someone's behavior winds up making everyone happier-off, I don't understand why I ought to care. In that sense, calling it "manipulative" seems either inappropriate or not very useful.

At least with something like adultery, there's a pretty obvious ill consequence of someone finding out what's going on behind the scenes. But if I looked behind the curtains of someone like OP and found out that the reason they're so charming is because they thought about people a bunch: I couldn't be burdened to care.

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2. Aurornis ◴[18 Nov 25 02:31 UTC] No.45960760[source]▶
> If the limit of someone's behavior winds up making everyone happier-off, I don't understand why I ought to care.

I guess I don’t believe this behavior actually leaves the targets better off.

Doing a lot of experiments where you feign connections and openness with other people is going to leave a lot of the targets feeling unhappy when they realize they were tricked into opening up to someone who was just using them as a target for their experiments.

Take, for example, the section of the post where he talks about getting someone to open up into “cathartic sobbing” but displays zero interest in the person’s problems, only wonder about how he managed to trigger that through yet another technique.

My takeaway was distinctly different about the net effects of these social connection experiments. It was fine in the context of waiting tables where everyone knows the interaction is temporary and transactional, but the parts where it expanded into mind-reading people’s weaknesses and insecurities and then leveraging that into “connections” that he later laments not actually wanting.

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3. intended ◴[18 Nov 25 05:39 UTC] No.45961750[source]▶
The assumption is that it’s feigned. Frankly you do not develop these skills to this degree if you are inauthentic.

Even the “zen openness” bit is mimicry of people whose vibe they liked, and they were surprised by the results.