Find Your 2%Ers (2023)
joyarbitrage.substack.com
joyarbitrage.substack.com
Remember that Narcissus wasn't falling in love with himself. He fell in love with the appearance of himself, with the extension of himself. McLuhan wrote quite a bit about how we love to see ourselves reflected outside of ourself. Be careful that your condition for a valuable acquaintance isn't just a desire to use others as a pleasing reflection of yourself (this applies to relationships as well as these "2% people")
But then a few years back, we had a sendoff for a colleague, a bunch of us got together, and right across from me, or adjacent, was another colleague who was sci fi fan. We had discussed some series before in office, and this was an opportunity to continue. Bit by bit our conversation went deep, and at one point of time I recall a pointed comment from the host (the person who organized the sendoff), hey what happened to kshacker :) because I think we were talking loud and non-stop. And I realized that too, it was an unusual setup.
Since then, I left the team, that dude left the company, so I havent seen him for a few years, this was definitely pre-covid, but this discussion somehow made me think of a 2% moment, if not a 2%er.
Why for me? I think you two having another conversation would make the world a more wonderful place as I suspect you 2 will be enjoying each other's conversation. The thought of that makes me happy.
> This is from a few years back, but etched in my memory. I am an introvert in social situations. I can present to a room, sorta, and I can manage public speech with some prep, but I just listen when there is a party going on. No talk, no intervention on jokes, just listen. My brain just works too slow to butt in to people's conversation, and over time you get the tag of introvert or whatever. I can understand conversation well, but I need an extra second to respond and that does not fit into most conversations.
I have this too. I've trained myself to lower my filter. The unfortunate thing is that when I'm in conversations, I'm a lot dumber than I normally in. The fortunate thing is: I talk to a lot more people now.
That's OK. Everyone takes time finding their groove. There used to be days where I did not engage in any conversation until the afternoon, and so my speech always felt rusty. Now I'm at a point in my life where I'm having a chat at 6am, and that sort of thing continues throughout the day. But boy oh boy am I not very interesting to talk to for that first hour.
Anyways, I think most extroverts don't really care that someone appears a little jagged in conversation. They simply benefit from having a conversation.
My sister has a million friends and used to host parties all the time, and invited me often. One day she said "people always love it when you come", and I was a bit surprised by that. I asked how so, and she said "you're so good at making people feel seen".
I didn't do it consciously I think, but I realized I would find people who were quiet and start talking to them. If I got the vibe they wanted to be left alone then I'd move on, but most of the time that was not the case. I'd ask about what they studied or worked with, or hobbies, as I do like to discover new things.
She since got kids so not so many parties anymore, but I got reminded of this a couple of years ago when I was at a wedding for a family member.
We're in Norway and another family member had gotten a US girlfriend who was there. As the evening wore on I went over and started talking. Her work was interesting and in contrast to what I knew from Norway, she lived in Nevada and I'd been to Las Vegas once so we talked about the contrast of that city vs the rest and so on. A couple of hours flew past and we were the last to go.
As we were about to leave she gave me a big hug and almost teary eyed said "thank you, you have no idea how good it was to just talk".
Again I was surprised, but she told me that she'd been with the groom's family for a week and nobody had really just talked with her besides her boyfriend.
So yeah, introvert, socially awkward me at it again it seemed.
“Be a 2%er”
Don’t drain energy from the people you interact with. Gas them up. Be an active listener. Give more than you take. Contribute meaningfully to a strong relationship. Etc…many ways to possibly interpret this
People are compatible or they are not, largely.
Still, not everyone's cup of tea, trying to be another person's 2%er.
You'll have all three in your life, but you really gotta make sure you have enough positive-positive people to counter-balance the others.
In truth, it's not quite so straight forward, and in the real world people occupy different roles with different people at different times. Maybe your role with some people is always to build them up, but you need to rely on others to get through things yourself. At any given time, most relationships are pretty one way, but over time things might balance out - maybe your role is always to provide support for someone, but in turn there's someone in your life who does the same for you and overall it balances out in your life.
The cynical position is to cut out the relationships you see as draining in your life, and while you absolutely should do that if you don't have the strength to do that and maintain your own wellbeing, even if you aren't directly benefitting from a seemingly one-way relationship, often other people will see how you treat them and want to spend more time with you, even if that relationship is primarily energy flowing to you.
The concept only works when you look at it from one side. If you swap the perspective to the other person, you're the negative-negative person in your example.
> In truth, it's not quite so straight forward, and in the real world people occupy different roles with different people at different times. Maybe your role with some people is always to build them up, but you need to rely on others to get through things yourself. At any given time, most relationships are pretty one way, but over time things might balance out - maybe your role is always to provide support for someone, but in turn there's someone in your life who does the same for you and overall it balances out in your life.
Yes, like most conceptual frameworks, it has limits and shouldn't be taken literally. However, the framework isn't intended to be used for identifying negative-negative relationships and terminating all of them. It's more for gaining a holistic understanding of how energy is being spent/gained in your relationships so you can better understand why you may be feeling burnt out.
> The cynical position is to cut out the relationships you see as draining in your life, and while you absolutely should do that if you don't have the strength to do that and maintain your own wellbeing, even if you aren't directly benefitting from a seemingly one-way relationship, often other people will see how you treat them and want to spend more time with you, even if that relationship is primarily energy flowing to you.
I wouldn't classify the negative-negative people as a "bad relationship." In relationships we often choose to spend energy in a way that reflects our own beliefs/worldview. For example, I have several negative-negative relationships in my community work where I know for a fact people are "abusing" my energy. However, I find it a worthy cause to put energy into, and I have enough positive relationships to support it.
1. You decide (or usually you're told) that you're "introverted" like it's some kind of fundamental, inherent characteristic because you weren't keen on a social obligation of some kind;
2. This label doesn't seem to fit because there are certain people you like but at the same time, just going to work drains you such that you need the entire time until the next day just to recover. So you come up with or are introduced to the concept of a "social battery";
3. Even the social battery model eventually becomes insufficient and it's then you land on introversion of being somewhere on the autism spectrum and what you view as a social battery is really just "masking".
So the 2% people here are, more likely than not, just the people you don't need to mask with.
Let me give you an example: you want to eat ice cream but, for whatever reason, you want to use a tiny spoon. Even a teaspoon seems wrong. If you're with someone you'll get one of two reactions: they'll help you find a suitable spoon without question or they'll ask you why you need a tiny spoon, regardless of whether or not they help you.
This problem with the latter is it's exhausting. You don't want to questioned for every little decision you make. You may know the answer or you may not. Either way, you don't want to have to defend that decision.
So instead you suppress your "idiosynchracies" because you've mentally played out how that conversation goes and you've probably ruminated on the conversation and, from experience, you know you won't feel great. You may even feel under attack. You will try and avoid that feeling, regardless of how you feel about the person.
This is masking. And it's exhausting. The person may not realize they're doing that to you. You may not realize that. You might just feel that something is wrong or even that you're just on alert more than you want to be.
There's a concept here called "radical acceptance" where someone will just accept these quirks without question. These are your 2% people.
at the end of the day, i think what makes someone a 2%er for them is whether that person knows when to accept without judgement and when to engage with curiosity.
If you're only accepting 1 in 50 people into your circle and you're a self-described introvert, how can you possibly judge how dense your "2%ers" are after only 5 days in a city? At that rate you'd have to judge 10 people a day for all 5 days to even expect better than even odds of finding a person you sort into the accepted bucket. Even if you met 100 people—20 per day—your odds are still only 86% of finding one 2%er. And if you're meeting that many new people per day while in Miami, I question whether you actually gave any one of them enough time to decide if they're a fit.
And I think this points to a larger problem with this whole concept: my "2%ers" are, as a rule, people I've already spent a lot of time with, and the causality there seems to go both ways. The more time I spend with someone the better I know them and generally the less energy it costs to be with them. On the flip side, I've never met someone who I feel energized being with after just one meeting.
If you go through life trying to swipe left and right on people with only brief interactions, you're going to find many fewer opportunities to click with people than if you go into each interaction actually wanting to make this one work.
like if you spent all day with people you had a LOT in common, would an introvert relax and be "more extroverted". Not only subject matter, but maybe social compatibility, like polite conversation style?
I wonder if there could be communities for introverts that would make them more relaxed.
I’m not sure sticking a bunch of like-minded introverts in a room would help. In fact, for me, I know it doesn’t.
Personal experience says yes.
That’s a kind and equitable thought, but I daresay there’s significant overlap between each person’s 2%ers. Some people are just really pleasant to be around—to almost everyone. Others, not so much.
When I was studying: a few people loved me, a larger group hated me and an even larger group felt indifferent. Why focus on the indifferent group and the group that hates you?
Just flow where the energy is.
I'm not saying you don't need social, but it sounds dubious to "seek out as many of these people as possible". Just one or two would do.
I always used to say about my wife in the early days: "being with you feels like being by myself" (meant as a compliment)
Now it's time to move on because your lives are incompatible despite being a person you used to enjoy hanging out with.
First of all, everyone gets drained from social interaction. That's how our species behaves.
Second, the real definition of introvertism and extravertism relates to one's focus - on internal thoughts or the outside world respectively.
Lastly, most of the population is neither in any significant capacity.
Interestingly, an actual extravert is drained comparatively more from social interactions, as to the introvert it doesn't even occur to care about drama.