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Comment by forgotmypw | Hacker News Reader

What is so horrible about awkwardness?

I've witnessed people talk about it like it's the plague.

It's just a bit of discomfort, and then you move on.

The point of social interactions is to connect with someone. If most of an interaction is awkward, you're not connecting. At that rate, you're just wasting time, and might as well do something alone.

In the context of TFA, connecting is about filling a need for social interaction. That cannot be filled by awkwardness.

If it's business or there's some other ulterior motive: sure.

I think the OP's motive here is to offer interaction to the other person who might be lonely. Not to make the OP feel good while not wasting time.

Yeah but the beginning of any relationship with anyone who's in any way different from you, is going to be awkward. If you push through that, you start to learn and get better at relating to that person, and they do the same. If you cut it off prematurely because it's awkward, then you just created the self-fulfilling prophecy that the entire relationship was awkward.

Awkwardness is due to lack of social graces, and communication skills. Perhaps one can train on these in the absence of other, live humans--read, for example, "How to Work a Room," or "The Fine Art of Smalltalk"--but ultimately, one must learn to navigate awkwardness.

In fact, I might go so far as to argue that the "connection" you're talking about is generated only by _resolving awkwardness_. Where there's none to resolve, there's no connection to be made. Relationships worn smooth by years of resolution aren't valuable in the same way.

You can effortfully apply all the social graces and make correct small talk, and still come away from an interaction thinking, “that was excruciating.” These situations can be even more awkward than when someone actually commits a faux pas.

I do phone befriending with AgeUK. Yes it’s awkward to begin with for them and you. But you might be the only person they get to speak to that week. Tough it out. It gets better.

You're talking about a group of people who has, statistically speaking at least, a lot more early life experience with awkwardness.

Many of us took the wrong lesson. Being clever, we learned to route around awkwardness instead of driving through it. This creates a whole other set of problems that are just as bad but easier to dismiss. Like not having deep connections with many people.

I wouldn't say there's something horrible about it. But if you're trying to invite someone to something, if there's social awkwardness, I think it usually means that they don't want to come, but they also don't know how to say no in a nice way because what kind of a weird person rejects generosity? Ignore the second part of that sentence, the focus should be on the first part, that it means they probably aren't interested in coming, and most likely also not interested in reciprocating the generosity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism

It's not a bit if you have social anxiety.

I have social anxiety, and the prospect of awkwardness is sooooo much worse than the actual experience.

The prospect is positively crippling, but once I manage to push through that, things tend to work out. And when they don't it's not that bad. Then, next time, the prospect is again crippling, though perhaps a bit less.

Small steps.

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