Is presentation the cause of loneliness? (2017)
kaomorphism.com
kaomorphism.com
I don't think the problem is people's protective layers of presentation. We need those fictions when we're learning if we can trust someone. The problem is it's incredibly hard to form a bond with someone if you don't have a clear "why", and there's rarely that context anymore. There are a lot of people I meet Id love to be friends with, but it's awkward to just organise that without a social excuse sometimes. Especially because if the relationship goes poorly, if you have a common thing its easier to pull back, whereas if its just "want to be friends?", if you pull back it seems more personal.
Personally, I thought that would be enough for getting my social fix, but boy was I wrong. As I get older, I'm finding out that there is something essential about physically hanging out with a common goal, whether it's sports, hiking, boardgames, etc.
Of course common activities and goals do help. But when they are the only thing, the relationship is destined to die the moment something changes.
But people who are not lonely tend to value relationships for themselves. They organize without excuse, send each other mails for no reason about ordinary life and call each other for no reason. What they do have is values that put priority on relationship and skills to keep them. There is also mutual reciprocity to some extend with helping each other and such.
A lot of these things are low-key stigmatized in some sub-cultures. The above is wasting time, just hanging around, just being social etc. See how spending a lot of time on phone was mocked - but it was reasonable way for people who dont have common activities and goals to keep relationships. The need for at least pretend common goal and important enough topic so that we dont feel like wasting time is more of symptom then the solution. Because it prevents us to keep relationship unless it is immediately useful.
I would actually go further and say that it is high-key stigmatized. My take on this is it has a lot to do with how individualistic & market-oriented American culture (and to an extent 'western' culture) is. I spent the formative part of my youth both in a highly individualistic culture and a more communal culture and while both have their pros and cons the lack of authentic interaction or community is very much a feature of the existing (North American) culture, it is not a bug.
I'd also add that beyond shared activities or goals, there's mutual need as a basis for relationships. My grandparents were born peasant-farmers (Ireland, the 20s). They had very strong social bonds. Yes, they had institutions like church and such. But, they also just needed favours from eachother all the time. Every day a neighbor would stop by to help with something. Move sheep, fix fences, diagnose crop problems, watch kids, loan tools.
Interesting point about "*do you want to be friends" approaches. The thing is, we do exactly this for dating. It's just as awkward, we just have a social context for it. These days, we have apps for it.
That is part of it but I don't think it is all of it. Relationships form when people share membership in something like a "community", a larger group of people sharing common approach of "looking out for each other", of engaging in basic acceptance of each, common language, history and "values", to various extents.
This isn't saying that a relationship can't form between people not sharing a community but to an extent, such relationships have to expand to create the things that community naturally provides (making just "common interest" relationships a little fragile).
I mean, human beings began having relationships in terms of small bands deeply sharing an entire culture. The more developed human societies made those sorts of relationship more flexible but still fall what I'd vague call "deep commonality" but form such commonality in a "market place" is extremely difficult each person is going to feel a lack of the basic loyalty that "deep commonality" implied.
the hyper decoupling benefits costed us that
Zen. Buddhism. Sufism. Stoicism. Minimalism. Less is more.
You have to experience it to know it. The anti-thesis of science.
Science is about testing (experiencing) your hypothesis not memorizing dogma. If someone says: “gravity is a thing” then as a scientist you think through the consequences, if something doesn't align with your expectation then you design an experiment. This way you realize the truth yourself, problem is that people use the word 'science' as 'that thing that other people do to find out the truth' (where 'truth' is the thing you are supposed to believe unquestioningly since you are not a priest, sorry.. scientist).
It does cause too much inertia in some cases and it can be hard to overturn old theories, but it also makes science overall possible.
For some people, the chances are so low that the chances range in thousands, not hundreds, and then they start giving up.
Worth the effort, but not attaching overly much weight or importance to the outcome.
I have some level of social anxiety and for me rejection can be devastating for a long time. Other people I know will just move on from that rejection “no big deal”
Doing this when it comes to investing in relationships seems to decrease the sense of pressure and increase the sense of possibility and fun.
I'd say by doing the latter before the former. Make an attempt at socializing/conversation first.
If you get the vibe that the person isn't interested, you can move on to someone else, without bitterness, anger or disappointment. Just because it didn't happen with that person, doesn't mean it won't happen with the next person too.
How much is too much and how little is being plainly emotionally irresponsible?
> just assuming that the other person doesn't like me, and then making a conscious decision to make the effort to make them like me
How would you manage trying too much?
> I think being attractive (personality) and likable is a trainable social skill, and once you do it often enough the effort becomes effortless.
How about people that engage in social activities everyday and the social anxiety is always there?
> Of course a mind reading device to skip the presentation stuff would also be nice.
Even if you had such a device, would you be able to interpret what you read from someone else's mind?
I really think the problem is more complex than what you are advising here.
Don't have a definitive answer to this one, but perhaps callously I would say care more about the feelings of people who already reciprocates your attention. You are under no obligation to care about the feelings of people who don't care about yours. So when you are just starting out trying to make friends with someone, don't worry about their feelings at all, but you should feel more responsibility after you have established a trust relationship.
> How would you manage trying too much?
Just experience, even if you mess up a few times and come across as trying too hard it's ok. Really not the end of the world, people perceive that embarrassment to be more important than it is. Most people should like your effort, and for those that don't you can adjust. Sometimes those people even end up missing your effort when you stop trying.
> How about people that engage in social activities everyday and the social anxiety is always there?
It's possible that person did it too late? I know the mind is less malleable as we get into our 20s, training to operate fluently in society is typically done in middle school. I'm not a neuroscientist so I can't say with any authority, but the effort->effortless might not apply to people who start the process later in life.
> Even if you had such a device, would you be able to interpret what you read from someone else's mind?
I spend enough time thinking about my own feelings and understanding them that I think I would recognize the same in other people. I don't think other people have uniquely complex emotions and perspectives that I never experienced, but if I got a device I would probably be even more of an expert at recognizing other people's emotions. Sort of like how babies these days grow up with ipads and are more digital natives, if this device actually exists the next generation would be emotion-reading natives.
Hope my reply was useful.
Be "Agreeable", be a good person, be a good conversationalist (by learning about a wide range of things and speaking about them with curiosity and excitement instead of to show off what you know), smile and have fun, interesting, or silly things other people can join in on, be slightly curious about the person in front of you. Don't do this for them, or to make them like you, do this because you think being awesome and connected has inherent beauty and you want to be more beautiful.
Also don't give a fuck, you see, that gives you the chance to be silly and fun, if you aren't self conscious and a few other people join you, people will have fun in spite of themselves, it's like everyone of every body type wearing string bikinis in Brazil, normalize a fun free environment and people will eventually chill and realize they don't have to cover their "imperfections" and will get outside their own heads a little bit.
People are most attracted to attractive people. (And by "attractive" I mean primarily personality characteristics.) Most people seem to actually have an aversion to lonely people whether conscious or subconscious. Perhaps it's an old social defense mechanism from times in our history where it was dangerous to associate with unpopular people. You were more likely to be shunned as well and less likely to be given mating opportunities.
I often go out of my way to talk to the wall flowers and shy people that no one is talking to, but I've found by and large, they are also much harder to talk to! It's much more work to stoke the conversation, and we all know there's a threshold there, below which, the conversation just isn't stable. Putting two wall flowers together has a much lower conversational success rate (which is a basic minimum hurdle to continuing any kind of social relationship) than two social people.
It's a tough nut to crack, and I don't think unknown intentions is the problem.
I think part of the problem here is forcing everything to be viewed through the lens of market economics and trying to make every human activity a kind of market exchange. Markets are a powerful paradigm in some contexts, but they're not the end-all-be-all of human behavior.
Loneliness may be a product of marketization of social relationships, so market-thinking won't offer a path out.
A similar topic (dating on Tinder becoming a market) was covered pretty well recently by The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/02/modern-da...
Of course, the usefulness depends on how well the market concept fits the situation, but I don't feel like rejecting the idea on principle is helpful. It's similar to the idea of "you can't put a price tag on a human life", when of course we're doing that and we need to do it.
Consider the following: It doesn't accurately describe the situation and that is what people are arguing.
Not "this doesn't work, look, that model has no predictive power", just "it's not okay to think like that". To me, that's mostly just closing your eyes and wishing really hard that human reality isn't profane and cannot be (roughly) described by (relatively) simple models.
I see similar reactions in discussions about free will (or lack thereof) where some people seem to be insulted by the idea that humans aren't special and fundamentally different from animals, not just (much) smarter versions with opposable thumbs.
Instead, that person is expressing moral, ethical or emotional base for his own behavior and thinking when he objects with "you shouldn't think of humans in those terms". One does not have to be able to make full fledged philosophical theory about own behavior and behavior of chosen acquaintances in order to know that what you say does not match his experience.
And this is the case where your believes influence your experience and outcomes. And more importantly, the prevalent believe in community you are in heavily influences peoples experience and outcome. Whether you are able to express them neatly or not, whether you are able to perform well in debate or not.
My experience is: they don't think about people and their interaction at all. If you ask them why something is happening etc, i.e. get them thinking about it, they'll start to come up with explanations that sound a lot like that.
Which is fine, btw. Nobody has to think about anything if they're happy and doing well, questioning things might change that. If you're in a good place, you don't need to move. But thinking isn't really a choice, and neither are beliefs, mental models and experiences. Blaming those that weren't blessed with an intuitive access to relationships sounds a lot like blaming the poor for not being born rich or telling a depressed person to "just stop being sad".
To me, attributing these messy interpersonal connections to markets is somewhat handwave-y; it's an unfalsifiable just-so story to explain the behavior, and I think it does more harm than good to think about it on these terms. Again, I would direct you to the Atlantic article I linked above about Tinder. It makes a stronger case than I could that viewing relationships in this way ends up backfiring.
The Atlantic article (which I'm obviously not the target audience for, I find them hard to read with all their side stories and presenting n=1 anecdotes as meaningful) seems to not argue about the idea that they are markets, but rather that we shouldn't consider them as markets when we are engaged in it, i.e. if you're having a good time with A, you shouldn't wonder whether you could have had a slightly better time if you had met with B. Don't treat your friendships as you might buying a cell phone. Even business relationships have shifted in that direction, in my experience, it's a pretty recent thing to "shop around" and switch providers because you might save a few bucks.
That's a different issue though, I don't believe that's happening because economists or sociologists use market-models to analyze relationships. Tinder and the commoditization of dating, like-count-fetishizing etc are not a thing because somebody said "hey, you know how car sales work? we should manage our relationships that way". Rather, it's how humans work on a very low level and these technologies and trends are just exposing that by giving people a way to visibly act on it. This isn't new, and pointing it out doesn't cause it, neither will it vanish if we just don't mention it and pretend it's not real.
This is why you cannot use a mathematical model to model behavior that cannot be mathematically reduced. I'm extremely confused how you can claim there's any accuracy in thinking something as a testable model on something that cannot be tested as a model.
My point about "you cannot reduce it" isn't about the model, but about relationships themselves. You can't just go "look, here's the fact sheet" because it's way too complex and we don't know all the variables etc pp, but overall, in larger numbers, you can very much use models to predict general behavior. Not on an individual level, but very much so on a group level. Much like in any market, where you will always have outliers that act totally different than what your models predict, but you'll also have the bulk that behaves the way your model predicts. If they don't, your model isn't good. That's not the case for models looking at relationships as markets though.
And to put in personal observation: the same community and people who tend to talk about about relationships in transnational way, is the community that also constantly deals and writes about loneliness.
The community where people generally think that "this is not ok way to talk about humans", is a community where loneliness is less acute problem. Even if they dont have full fledged philosophy of why it is so and could not win the "who is going to destroy who with arguments" game, it leads them toward strategies and behaviors that make average person less lonely.
It's my impression as well that this is the main motive behind those reactions. I don't see why though. It's as if thinking about humans as actors in a model, or thinking about them as meat robots that aren't blessed with free will etc automatically makes you a Bond villain that want's to enslave humanity. I don't see how that follows. Understanding humans better, their behavior, reactions, emotions etc enables you to understand them, help them, make them happy, support them etc.
Re relatedness to loneliness: possibly. My personal observation is that most people who self-identify as lonely lean heavily towards intellectualism and wanting to understand things instead of emotionality and being happy with intuition. Naturally, they'd think (and write) about what they don't understand.
I don't believe you can turn that around though. Similarly to learning to read a language forces you to read a language (short of closing your eyes or looking away, you cannot escape recognizing and interpreting the characters and words that are in front of you), you can't just say "oh, so because I understand the world to function this way, I'm lonely? Cool, I'll just pick a different mental model of the world".
> My personal observation is that most people who self-identify as lonely lean heavily towards intellectualism and wanting to understand things instead of emotionality and being happy with intuition.
They are emotional too. Pretty common phenomenon about contemporary people who lean heavily towards intellectualism is that they rationalize and explain away their feelings and emotions based decisions.
What you call being happy with intuition is sometimes taking into account complexities that can not be neatly simplified.
For example, the honest truth is that they did something out of anger, fear, wish to show up, but they will go out of their way to frame action as thought out and logical. Their opinion may be actually subjective, based on sympathies and feelings, but they will spend hours constructing elaborate arguments for why the feeling was actually objective.
This makes it harder to reason about other people too and harder to understand complex reasons behind why others do what they do.
You've literally just reasoned about their behavior in a humans-arent-special way, and understanding that people do things for reasons other than what they say (or even think themselves), and that those reasons are usually pretty basic enables you to react to their actions and opinions differently.
That's another thing I've noticed: almost everybody starts to think about humans in that way once they start thinking about humans and human behavior. That's similar with the "does human life have a value" idea, where even those that shriek at the thought and claim that you it's immeasurable will usually agree that you should put children (and women) into the life-boats first (which, of course, isn't possible if it's immeasurable). To me, it just looks like they don't want to acknowledge their thoughts and intuitions, like somebody not accepting their personal desires and rationalizing it with increasingly strange explanations instead of just saying "I want ice cream". I don't believe that's a healthy approach.
This is simply not true. What I wrote has literally nothing to do with whether humans are special or not.
It is literally you who will flip and frame pretty much any verbal explanation of anything that way.
You can try to shove anything involving scarcity into the economic analysis framework. And doing so might tell you something interesting! But it frequently will say nothing about other major aspects.
Taking a strictly biological view of relationship formation is just as valid. And doing so might tell you something interesting! But...
For some reason, a lot of folks get econ brain worms and start discounting other modes of analysis. It is really too bad; economic analysis has a lot of non-obvious insight, but ends up frequently being blinkered.
What would that look like?
[1] Richard Dawkins - Selfish Gene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene)
I'm so sick of the "market" paradigm. It's seeped so deeply into every cultural value we have blinded us to many parts of life.
Everything is a market now. Every waking moment your time is on the market. Every thought you have is either contributing to "value" or worthless. Every social interaction is an exchange of value. Every relationship is "optimized." Everyone is an atomized economic actor.
This idea has completely outlived its usefulness and is like a sort of cultural grey goo that corrodes humanity from the inside out.
Sorry, rant over.
You might want to check out The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi. I'm about 3/4 of the way through, and it's been eye-opening.
Conversational ability comes with practice, and those people probably just haven't gotten enough practice yet.
Also, some people are just naturally reserved, and it takes a while for them to warm up to you and start talking more freely.
You have offered explanations for why they are difficult to engage with. This seems to miss the point. If they are lonely because they are difficult to engage with, excuses are not relevant or compassionate. What might be a solution?
Conversations however, which are almost ubiquitously a prerequisite for friendship and connection, ARE heavily transactional on a fundamental level.
I do think that it is important to consider what you look like to other people though. Are you offering them positivity, wit, humor, etc.?
Perhaps you mean that some people view relationships as zero-sum, that in any interaction someone is gaining at the other's expense. That is rather obviously incorrect, yet as a strategy serves social parasites well (so long as they remain a minority).
You’ll find me nigh impossible to engage in conversation. Because I’m actively trying not to.
But find me in a social mood and I’m the life of the party. It really depends.
A source of loneliness can be not readily finding other people who share the same deep, unique, passions and that can turn into a vicious cycle that feeds the loneliness monster.
As a man, I have caught myself "performing" for other people on a regular basis. Wearing a suit to formal occasions. Shaking hands with a firm handshake. Laughing at jokes that I wouldn't laugh at in private. Are these things "me"? By outlining both mentally and on paper which behaviors I do for myself and which I do for other people I have unraveled a good portion of my character. Many of the behaviors I have decided to keep, despite knowing that they are a performance for others - the difference now being that I can feel confident that my performance is rooted in active decision and authenticity with how I want the world to perceive me, rather than a simple need to please others. This is an ongoing process.
It felt fine initially and I enjoyed the positive attention, but eventually it became a chore. No one is funny 100% of the time, and when I started thinking more about "How can i get a laugh from these people next time", that's a sign that I need to re-evaluate what I get out of this relationship.
The feeling should be "I'd like to hang out with these people with no expectations from them or from me" but that's not always there unless you have a specific level of comfort with those people.
A good example is that most things people do to be polite are considered "behaving in a socially expected way" while interactions like a young adolescent male lowering their voice when talking to somebody they are attracted to is "performing".
Performance is common for many other interactions like dressing up and formalizing language for job interviews, "telephone voice", as well as matching posture and speaking style during interactions. Performance captures the potentially unfounded change in behavior to better a specific interaction. Many sitcoms often create comedic moments when performance for a specific interaction is not compatible with performance for another interaction, so when "worlds collide" (as in Seinfeld) the character has to either struggle with maintaining both performances, or choose one form of performance to stick with and ruin an interaction with some other situation.
I have no doubt about this. The problem is, people living in these communal spaces complain about the lack of privacy or ownership. People don't know what they want even when the answer is in front of them. Humans have conflicting individualistic needs and needs for companionship as well, the dual nature of our desires actually evolved under communal living spaces so in actuality, despite the fact that you desire privacy, you're actually healthier if you give in to the alternative desire of companionship. People do need to own things but not to the extent that communal living spaces are abandoned.
What people think is that we're designed to search for this state of satisfaction even when living things aren't actually designed to ever reach this state. There is no evolutionary advantage to a creature who is perpetually content and therefore you will never be content. That being said my theory is humans are actually designed to live in communal spaces while being a bit discontent about the lack of privacy or ownership. This is the natural state of things similar to how you have endless desires to eat greasy unhealthy junk food but your desires are not evolved to be in an environment where such food is plentiful.
The alternative is to give in to your capitalistic desires and be lonely. I believe this is the worse alternative from pure anecdotal experience and from the way humans lived anthropologically in the past.
I'm pretty lonely sometimes, and I wish I was nicer sometimes, and I wish people spoke my language more often. These things are harder when the culture is larger, as funny as it sounds.
Keeping up, is just so damn hard. Staying in requires trust, and empathy.
There's a sad paradox of our times. We both need to slow down and get to know each other, and we need to race to address the problems we all see plain as day.
Sadly, we're DISTRACTED. And the more distracted we are, the less we address the underlying issues.
</rant>
Fortunately, we all quit before we got in too deep. It didn't seem like a problem that had any good solutions.
Today, I'm convinced that a technology solution is not the right approach. Screen addiction and various dopamine hits from social media have produced a catastrophic collapse of various IRL social institutions that traditionally facilitated opportunities to meet new people.
The most practical "if I had a magic wand..." solution that I can think of is to wave a magic wand and undo all forms of screen addictions that has destroyed our IRL social interactions.
The book "Bowling Alone" documented this collapse and was written between 1995-2000, well before the advent of smartphones and social media.
While I'm not convinced a technology solution is necessarily the right approach, what you're suggesting is straight up waldenponding.
Smartphones and social media may just be the latest and most extreme manifestation of technological changes that were already underway then. Before you had smartphone screens, you had television screens, etc.
Carl Rogers referred to congruence of the self, as we navigate to actualize ourselves against external introjections from parental / authority figures and society.
Both Rogers and Horney had concepts of an ideal self and the anxiety when we're strained by social pressures. The emotions are hard to articulate, and why bother, what's to gain in vulnerability? If we dare to say our feelings, we fear others will not regard us in a positive light. Our feelings will be hurt deeply. So, we shape ourselves based on the impressions we want the audience to see, which feels safe, but leaves us inner unease. We're not doing what we really want, we're pleasing others.
Another area to dig into is True self and false self: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_self_and_false_self
In Social Psychology, related terms and concepts include self-monitoring, impression management (https://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/452/452_chapter_07.pdf)
> And they have good reason to: In a game theoretic way, unless they’re already inundated with social bids
Social Exchange Theory and CL-Alt covers this in greater detail: https://smashtyn.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/social-exchange-th...
While feigning interest causes people to second guess themselves, I think being direct could also do the same. If I know someone I’ve just met will tell me they don’t like me if I don’t give them a good impression I’ll be constantly trying to please them. Though I guess if you’re also trying to be highly direct things become even more complicated.
It seems like there are far more social dimensions to this than I’d first thought.
Do they think I'm cool, weird, ugly, creepy, friendly etc.
I would never hsve to ask if someone is only pretending to like me or put up withe because they want something out of it.
Life would be so much easier, meeting people would be so much easier.
Most of us drastically over-estimate how much other people are thinking about us.
I think 99% of the time you used this power you would find that people, know who you are, think of you as generally ok, with a slight positive association just for remembering your name, but no other significant opinions about you one way or the other.
By the time people actually develop strong opinions about you as a person, your superpower would no longer be necessary to learn what those opinions are.
Maybe a few times a year you would catch a hardcore "faker" though. So that is kind of cool.
With social networks, that went out the window. Interactions become performative, particularly among those that build up enough followers to become influences.
How many time have we seen posts like "What would you do in this situation?" with a meme image attached, or a "How's everyone doing this Monday?" type Instagram story. The poster doesn't care what the answer is, or who is answering. They just look to maximize the number of responses so their engagement score increases.