My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

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.

I really love this piece! I relate to it but it also doesn’t describe me. I’m far more intuitive than this person, though still agree that insights have driven a leveling up of how I relate to others. They were different insights, sure but the model holds.

Once my spouse and I worked for the same company and attended many of the same meetings. The opportunity to pick apart our impressions of the subtext really helped me to learn that I should listen to my gut, that everything I needed to know about how other people were feeling was already in my head and i just needed to stop doubting.

Another time I watched a rather ugly and old person have amazing romantic success with a young beautiful person. How could it be? And I realized that authentic confidence is social gold. I had to let go of my insecurities because my flaws were irrelevant in the face of authentic, confident self acceptance.

I think everyone has a different journey and different epiphanies and it is so enjoyable to hear these experiences put into words.

I have been trying to manage other people's feelings and reactions for as long as i can remember. That's a self-soothing fantasy of sorts. With this mindset, you are naturally drawn to people who need such emotional management - a realization that you can't actually manage other people's happiness was long and painful. These days I am not sure that getting people to open up by altering your presentation is a good idea. Maybe we should learn to accept that we have no insight into another and just observe them with patient curiousity? That we are fundamentally alone and isolated and the best you can hope for is a person who's values align with yours - and so you feel safe around them?

> The other day, someone told me, “I can’t imagine you ever being awkward with people.”

I was telling my therapist of several years recently about being uncomfortable with the number of new people I've had to meet recently.

He seemed surprised that I wasn't excited by it all and said something along the lines of "You seem like a very social person, that seems out of character." It struck me… am I really that good at masking that my therapist didn't realize I am absolutely terrified in near all social situations? I have zero idea how to make small talk with people I haven't known for years.

Working from home since COVID has made my social skills so much worse because I don't get the practice.

I don't have much to add to this right now other than to say this is really fantastic writing. I don't normally enjoy "my journey" kind of blog posts, but this one feels full of valuable insights, and I'm grateful to the author for sharing. It's also just nice to read something written by a skilled writer.

I recognize all of these steps, having gone through flavours of them myself. The root for me, was that I learned at a young age that to feel safe, I needed to cater to what others wanted for me. Never learning to ask myself, what I wanted. It might be the author's next step, is reconnecting with his inner-desire and finding out what he wants from the world, instead of how he wants to appear in the world.

> some people communicate in order to exchange facts, and some communicate in order to find connection.

I love this quote. Excellent and very relatable piece.

Social skills can be acquired through practice. But being an introvert, I've specifically picked my profession so that I can focus on ideas over people. Tinkering and solving problems excited me, whereas staying in touch with friends, noticing social dynamics, networking, reading people, being good at remembering everyone's birthday, etc felt tiring to me and was less appealing.

I'm at a place in my career where I'm managing more and doing less. It's a weird transition because I've spend a decade acquiring technical skill, only to discover soft skills are equally if not more important (perhaps increasingly so with AGI) .

This is one heck of a hook:

> I was one social notch above children who were so pitiable it would be rude to mock them.

I eat at Chinese restaurants where my waiter is a QR code. Please pour olive oil in my lap, hold my hands, and tell me I'm special.

Appreciate the writing and the author's fortitude in achieving their goals. While I never had friends, neither online nor in person, I cannot identify with this at all - it reads like a strange, obsessive seeking of external validation which I have never felt myself. Maybe I am just disinterested in people in general.

This Ted Talk from his wife is also very interesting:

https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/behold-my-ted-talk

The topic is agency. Which is a word I hear often used by rarely defined or described in detail.

She talks about agency as being the key to going from drug addict to CEO of a successful organization, and the specific habits that process involved.

really identify. especially with the early yearning to connect and not having the skills. Learned sooo much over the years by being brutally rejected and eventually taking stock of what happened and extracting a rule or two. but then, yeah, next phase, rules don't matter (except when they do) and change moment to moment anyway.

funny to read this here on hacker news of all places, where I let my carefully managed, almost always inhibited, childhood nerd self fly free in the comments.

OP has definitely gone beyond me in many ways, with his talk about embodiment, and being able to be so empathic that he has elicited tears of gratitude. Enviable.