My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

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.

> I was going around dangling the possibility of emotional connection indiscriminately, ignoring the fact that it’s entirely reasonable to interpret this as flirtation.

I am still struggling to understand the way in which many people naturally form casual connections with others. In this example, a casual connection might be a hookup or a makeout session without it turning into a relationship. In another case from their article, it may be exchanging some personal stories at a house party without it turning into a four hour ordeal, or following up and developing a close, meaningful friendship. I perceive a lot of confusion here - and in my own life - about personal wants and needs being met, meeting someone else’s needs, where one’s personal boundaries lie, and how we effectively communicate them - or not.

In consent-forward spaces you get a lot of neurodivergent people using explicit verbal negotiation and agreement on everything, but this is a consent style that very much may not land well for people outside of one of those subcultures. Therapy and other trauma-informed modalities carry similar problems. It’s fine and great to develop subculture norms for the people participating in them, but it may not help them navigate the rest of the world. And yet, I’m not sure what else can be done. My social development mirrors the author’s, and I’m still unsatisfied with my results, even though I have more meaningful connections now than I used to, so this is not all without merit. It may just be the best that some people can do.

A lot of stuff "normal" people do is charm, manipulate, and game social interactions. Except because they are not conscious about it, we give them a pass. One of the characteristics of autistic-spectrum individuals is that they must make a conscious effort to achieve goals that are achieved unconsciously by most of us. If we prevent such individuals from learning all that rarely-written-down stuff consciously because it seems "distasteful" to us, then we are disadvantaging such individuals socially.

I see why you'd think this, but I disagree. In my opinion it's two sides of the same coin, and the key moral question is whether you use those skills in a moral way. I've seen both well-meaning and charismatic people and not so well-meaning charismatic people, and at the end of the day I believe that charisma is a powerful tool, but it's not fundamentally good or bad.

Social interactions have always felt like a game whose rules I don't intuitively understand, and I've always envied people like my wife who handle it much more naturally and fluidly. The same way that I'm comfortable and capable in analytical settings, they navigate social settings with just as much finesse. I've personally spent a big chunk of my adult life trying to learn to navigate social interactions more comfortably and more intuitively, so I can see some parallels with what the author writes about. (For the record, I'm neurotypical, just awkward.)

For most people I don't think it's about charming, manipulating, or gaming social interactions, I think it's about wanting to make connections and friends because that leads to being happier.

Many people hear music and can put together some moves without thinking about it, others have to deconstruct, learn, and rebuild... it's still dancing either way.

the person was so bad in thing, and had to build relevant part of the brain manually. that part you got automagically.

there is no difference except awarness. over time he will loose awarness too.

That’s all the same thing. What is being friends with people other than essentially manipulating them into liking you by being likable and a good friend?

What’s important is why you’re doing it.

It's pretty much in the title of the book already: it's an ironic title because "influence people" sounds like a shady goal to have, but the book is fully focused on self improvement without ulterior motives. It makes constant reference to authenticity, for instance.

Just because something can be used for nefarious purposes doesn't mean that it shouldn't be studied or learned.

> There are two reactions that one could have to the previous section. “Wow, that’s cool, how he developed the ability to create a lot of deep connections in this lonely world.” And: “that is a weird and creepy thing to want, sounds kind of vampiric.” I believe that both reactions are correct in some proportion.

> Here is the thing about going around the world in a state of emotional openness and presence. Many people are hungry for that kind of attention. They might dream of getting it from a parent, or a mentor, or a lover, but might never receive it. Maybe never in their lives. And if you just walk up and give it to them, for free — but you aren’t actually interested in a deep relationship — then they might, rightfully, feel manipulated, or at least confused. You are writing them emotional checks you can’t cash.

This post actually kind of blows my mind.

Of course, in many ways making friends is all much easier than either I or the author was making it out to be. But I suspect we were both burdened with some unrealized oddities, and, unable to directly identify or compensate for them, sought other, more elaborate ways to fit in.

It's okay to dazzle people though. I'm not sure you have to make it a core part of your personality but like, maybe as a hobby, a little razzledazzle here and there.

I was terrible at this stuff until I learned how to do it, working in a customer facing tech support call centre.

I knew a guy that was such a f-up but he was so easy to get along with he just floated his way to upper mgmt anywhere he went. Then inevitable got fired and simply floated his way to upper mgmt at the next company. Meanwhile many highly effective tech people get held back on promotions for being "too realistic"(usually pronounced as "negative") at least thats my life experience.

You can gain a lot from the article and see it as both manipulative, or as insights for working through your own social anxieties. You could bring both attitudes to the article. And one of those is obviously healthier than the other.

My own view is that it's about giving generously to other people without expecting anything in return. People are surprisingly reluctant to do this, but if you do, most people will like you. What are you supposed to give? Well it can be just about anything, time, attention, compliments, money, ideas, a shoulder to cry on, you name it. But probably the most powerful thing if we're talking about building social relationships is to give them your personality. Think of it like there is a big empty jar out there which represents the social environment and we're all wired to not want it to be empty, well go and fill it up with your personality, provide examples of who you are instead of standing off in a corner silently and going unnoticed. Instead of being forgotten you'll be remembered, many will like you, some will love you and some will hate you, the ones who respond most positively are the ones you make an effort to engage with in the future.

Sasha starts figuring this out when he starts working at the fancy restaurant with waiters who would do really odd stuff and it would work. The best waiters were for the most part just displaying a lot of personality. Working at restaurants might have skewed his perspective a bit because when you work as a waiter you're putting on a performance, the goal is to do a job, entertain, get compliments and get tips, beyond the food this is why people go to a nice restaurant. Being authentic and building lasting relationships is secondary to performing a commercial service at a restaurant, but not in real life (and perhaps not at the highest levels of certain commercial services for that matter, the line starts to blur). I think he's realized all this by the end of the article.

And that is part of the problem, because the underlying reason why people connect when you do the mentioned things is that these are usually signs that you are in fact an empathic person, that can put themselves in their shoes and thus care to some degree about how things will pan out for them, meaning they may think they can open up to you, etc. This is in a stark contrast with the phrasing of "playing their game" that frames this type of behavior as a superfluous, silly endavour, when in fact it might be the polar opposite:

In a society of social apes (humans) one of the biggest danger to your and your kins life, bodily autonomy, freedom has historically always been other humans. Meaning that judging the intentions of others is not some silly game, but a survival mechanism of existential importance. And not only that, many people derive a lot of ehat makes their lifes worth living from these feelings of mutual understanding and empathy.

So to most empathic people the idea that a seemingly empathic person could feel nothing at all underneath and potentially sell them down the river is something tingling a gutural fear. Many media depiction of evil serial killers will play on that exact fear (among others).

Master conmen, manipulators, cult leaders (so generally horrible people) are all good at understanding the internal processes (thoughts and feelings) of their victims. This understanding is also essential for true empathy, the way it is applied is very different. If a hacker finds a weak point in a system they can exploit it for their own gain, or they can deal with it in a way benifiting all. The skill of understanding the internals is one thing, the skill of understanding what these internals mean and what are the right actions to derive from that knowledge is something else entirely.

That being said, I think the personal journey the author is on is certainly one that may benefit both them and the people around them. I can just imagine how hard parsing all the complexity of human behavior must be if you can't feel it yourself. This is already hard for people who can, as countless cultural artifacts from all of humanities history proof.

That's why the title is "My six stages of learning to be a socially normal person" and not "My story of being a perfectly socially normal person from the day I was born".

When you're learning social skills because you don't have them naturally, it usually starts with "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".

So I'm not sure what your point is. That this sounds calculated and mechanistic? It is. That's explicitly said there in the article. And the progression of the author's stages is towards doing less of that.

I guess is also about if you care about the other person or you are just pretending, unfortunately in my opinion there is no way to know, because some people are really good at pretending to care, and even supporting you with a hidden score tracking board, basically they are investing.

And then there are people that really care about you and because they know they can't do anything or don't know what to say, they won't reach to you.

I guess we are only left with our instinct and that is something that you learn to calibrate with time.

There is surely nothing wrong with being charming.

The "manipulate, and game", just per dictionary, would mean in this context something close to "control or influence unscrupulously". What social norms exactly do you see broken/bent by the OP? Because I see none.

Are you trying to influence this comment section unscrupulously?

Which the author says are stages he grew out of. He's not saying that those things are what connecting with people is actually about.

So I’d bet it’s not that you’re masking that terror when you’re with your therapist, but that it isn’t present.

it's kind of like farting in public. you know you did, and you think everyone noticed, but in reality most didn't

Forget small talk.

Listen-- really listen --and engage with open ears. When it's your turn to talk, offer up an anecdote in reply if it's on topic or take the opportunity to pivot to a related topic you're passionate about. If you do the latter: do. not. info-dump. Give them a chance to play the game I just described to you from their side.

Need a cold opener? Get the party going with something you anticipate the majority of the people there would remember.

--

You: "Hey, does anybody remember the Blizzard of '96?"

Them: "Yeah! I remember they closed down all of Route 9!"

You: "Hell yeah they did. My family pulled me down the highway on a snow tube. I've gone tubing every year since. Any tubers here?"

Them: "No, but I love snowboarding."

You: "Nice. I was briefly obsessed with snowboarding after playing 1080 on the N64, but I was always too chicken-shit to try it. Where do you go snowboarding?"

Them: "Vermont. Where do you go tubing?"

You: "I used to do it over near that big hill by the library. Ever see that?"

--

Arm yourself with personal stories to make situations like this easier. People would rather interact with the guy always telling stories than the visibly-uncomfortable one sitting in the corner.

Opposite for me.. I apply my social efforts to a smaller subset of work demands on my time and social interface, and so I have more energy for gregariousness after work, on my terms, etc.

> I am absolutely terrified in near all social situations

It is different for me, I'm absolutely confident in near all social situations, but there is a catch, I actively avoid social situations which make me terrified, and I'm pretty good at it.

> I have zero idea how to make small talk with people I haven't known for years.

I have never bothered to get the idea of a small talk. I hate it from my teens, I hate to dig in my mind for something I can say when there is nothing to say. Or to voice opinions about things I don't care (and "i don't care about your TV-series, I never watch them" doesn't count as a socially acceptable opinion). So I just avoid such situations overall. Generally if you avoid talking with people tet-a-tete you don't need to talk small. You can just look like you are listening, why calculating ways to leave the place without offending anyone.

Most people love talking about themselves and things they like to do. If you can keep them doing that, they'll remember fondly the "great conversation" you had.

Fair warning: It won't get you past the third or fourth interaction, at which point you probably actually need to have something in common, but it's an easy way to get through parties.

I’ve learned that’s its best if I play the role of a social person, but it’s just playing a role.

I don’t think anyone but a handful of my closest loved ones really grasp how very close I have always been to running away to live as a hermit in a cabin in the woods.

Or is your therapist attempting to bootstrap a self-fulfilling prophecy, i.e. when you feel socially overwhelmed, you'd remember that they praised you for being social, and the warm fuzzies of being praised would make you feel less overwhelmed?

You know, as the grand maxim of software engineering goes, "whatever works" lmao

Here's a trick, it sounds stupid but it works like magic.

Just talk about mundane things that are physically present. Mention the color of the wallpaper. Mention the painting on the wall. Talk about how noisy the room is, or about the food on the plate in front of you. Literally act like you're an image classifier tasked with outputting a text summary of the scene you find yourself in...

If you're the cerebral type like I am, you'll feel afraid these topics will bore the other person. But surprisingly, they don't, if the other person is neurotypical.

Non-weird people are really weird.

Other my journey posts are look at me with only enough subject matter to disguise it.

This post is about sharing knowledge, the others are about sharing experiences.

Or in other words, becoming the landfill of negative energy of the world.

As someone who used to be that person for over a decade, having people endlessly confiding their relationship/health/mental/work/legal/family/gender issues will over time completely wreck your sanity. Because when you're that someone, people will not just tell you the light stuff, but also some really heavyweight and/or deeply fucked up things.

• Of course it's very strange; that's why he wrote about it — the point is to convey what is not obvious.

• Of course it's risky, but that's the point of much of the author's journey of social ease, at least the initial stages up to that point. If you're willing to take the risk of coming off <…>, or of an angry reaction, you open yourself up to a wider range of experiences / social interactions. Probably much of the interaction was non-verbal and even the author's paragraph cannot capture exactly what went on.

Not everyone needs to take such risks of course, but the author consciously chose to “install” social skill, and has shared their experience.

Trees for the blunt, the g's for the front

I found a way to get piece of mind for years

And left the hell alone, turn a deaf ear to the cellular phone

Send me a letter, or better, we could see each other in real life

Just so you could feel me like a steel knife

At least so you could see the white of they eyes

Bright with surprise, once they finish spitting lies

Associates, is your boys, your girls, ______s, _____s, homies

Close, but really don't know me

Mom, dad, comrade, peeps, brothers, sisters, duns, dunnies

Some come around when they need some money

Others make us laugh like the Sunday funnies

Fam be around whether you paid or bummy

You could either ignore this advice, or take it from me

Be too nice and people take you for a dummy

So nowadays he ain't so friendly"

- Deep Friend Frenz DOOM

i can sort of relate. ive been told by my family that i dont like people much. im also confident in conversation and social situations. i think the latter is true because i feel no pressure to perform and naturally seek novelty to entertain myself

if you've never felt it, why are you mentioning it? why are you so focused on it?

A useful psychoanalytic rubric is "there is no negation in the unconscious mind". Negation is a conscious mind idea, the unconscious mind just thinks of things, it doesn't think of something and claim it's not thinking of it.

so, rephrasing what you wrote in the unconscious sense, "obsessive seeking of external validation which I have felt myself": yes, you have identified something, identified with something, interesting, about other people and about yourself. If you are aware that you are not seeking external validation, but also aware when other people do, you have to ask yourself...

if your complaint about this argument is along the line of "no fair, i can't escape from this!", you're getting the point.

Either way, I did learn my lesson, and I'm now much more comfortable with myself and not seeking validation or connection from others so much.

Like his wife bluntly telling him many women had crushes on him and it must be coming from something he was doing.

He could have went different directions with that information. And chose the direction that was best for his marriage.

If you want to do engineering, or play music, or be a professional chef, you don't need these skills.

If you want to be in sales, or a working actor, or manage a high-end restaurant, or be a professional interviewer, then these skills become pretty important.

I'm aware that if such people stop fake caring then they will stop caring altogether. Well good, stop gaming yourself to life advantages please that you shouldn't have. Of course it's harder to actually care about things compared to fake caring. It's harder to be an actually good person vs faking being good and it's probably far less rewarding for most to only be getting what they should be getting in life. Luckily most people are not that good at being fake because like you said, it still takes effort. But people who do it all their life no longer feel that effort and this is how you end up with lifelong fake people.

In general we will never get people to stop faking and lying their way to advantages in life so what decent people are left with is to develop an even harder armor that fake people can't get through with these strategies. It's sad but that's what life seems to be: You have to find people who aren't just here play and beat you like you're a videogame or for a darker analogy play you like you are an asset and they are a CIA agent.

People should not dish out that advice so carelessly and wantenly.

For what it's worth: She has something of a history in the professional poker world of being a less than reliable narrator. To be fair, the fallout during her time in the poker world overlapped with her admitted drug addiction problem. However, from what I recall from that era I'd suggest taking some of her stories with a grain of salt.

She is very good at storytelling and charming people, though. There is probably a lot of value in studying how she delivers messages, puts spin on the past, and charms audiences.

I was in my early 30s and I could go out dance basically any day of the week except Monday and Tuesday.

Yes. Your ability to do so largely depends on the dance. Good luck dancing Viennese Waltz, when you both try to look somewhere else than to your left. For other dances like Quickstep, it is only important, that the woman looks to the left, the man isn't all that important. Then there are dances, where it doesn't matter, so you might as well look at your partner.

Gives real narcissist vibes.

There are only two types of ppl: "the wrong kind of crazy" and "the right kind of crazy". Why would I want to connect with the wrong type of crazy? Ok, I don't work as a waiter.

What's that cure?

Though, research shows that autistic people among themselves do have empathy. So it’s not as if they don’t but it’s because they tend to communicate differently. It’s called the double empathy problem, if I recall correctly.

Not every closed-in and awkward person is lacking empathy.

"Just be yourself" is only good advice for people whose 'self' is acceptable and well-functioning.

I'm going to commit suicide. I've known this for the last 15 years. It'll probably be another 10 years before I'll die, but I know my end is half laying down with a 1.5 inch nylon strap tied cinched on my neck and a tree trunk in the dead of night so that no one will be able to find me in time. The reason I haven't is because I'm taking of elderly relatives, but they are the only reason I'm still here.

That's the real me. The one that looks forward to dying even though there doesn't seem to be any reason why I want to die.

I wonder how many in this thread would be utterly horrified by this vs accepting of this.

Also, he says:

> In essence, I became an example of obnoxious precocity, a heartfelt young wordcel.

So it doesn't sound like disagrees with you either way.

Or not being able to connect with most people?

The peice is relatable to me at least. A great many of the lessons were something that I also arrived at through deliberate practice. Though the paths we both took are radically different, the main ideas are universal and the resulting destinations are similar.

I can't list all of the times when someone has shared that they didn't mean to "share all that" because it happens often enough that it's become countless.

As mentioned elsewhere, it illuminates the spectrum of interpersonal and social intelligence where it becomes impossible to not notice how some people repeatedly, and perhaps even compulsively are their own impediment to personal connection.

At first it might feel like "these people don't like me cause of how much better I am than them", or "these people don't like me, well fuck them, I don't need anybody".

People have all kinds of excuses they tell themselves to feel better about the needs they can't satisfy.