Comment by urban_strike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by urban_strike | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, I've been trying to wrap my head around this recently. I always get a bit irked by the inevitable comments confidently asserting things like "humans are social animals, if you think you don't need tight social connections you're just hurting yourself". And then pointing to these results averaged out over the entire population as "proof".

It seems like there's got to be some statistical fallacy being made, like asserting "all humans need visual stimulation to survive" and then all the blind people on earth shrug at the data and realize they're not human I guess? On average it's true, "all humans" would go crazy if deprived of their sight, but it turns out some people do it just fine and can have rich, human lives.

I wonder if it's just when people live very social lives, the idea of deriving satisfaction in life internally, to be able to self regulate and maintain a health sense of identity without frequent input from others, is just too alien to consider. To not dislike people, or lack social skills, but just be as disinterested in socializing as I am in starting a coin collection. Or maybe all that is just extremely uncommon and experiences like mine are just a true rounding error.

I think it is like the way getting married is statistically more healthy.

Friends and a partner act like a small life coach. I am sure many unhealthy habits are correlated with being left entirely to your own devices. I know I would go to the doctor more if I had a partner coaching/bugging me that I go more.

We are the outliers. If everyone was wired like me, the concept of a dinner party would simply not exist and Facebook would look like this.

If it helps you understand the other side - very many people, and I consider myself one of them, went through a long part of life without realizing that "humans are social animals". In my case I was very unhappy for a very long time until I realized that socialization was the missing ingredient. Worse, I didn't even realize I was unhappy, and I had persuaded myself I was fine.

When you have this sort of a revelation, it's difficult to hold it in. You want to shout it from the rooftops. You want to grab every single person you can find who has a life remotely like yours years ago when you were unhappy, and save them, in the same way that you yourself needed saving.

I try not to do this any more because I understand it's annoying, and the message is unlikely to successfully transmit anyways. But I suspect this is the phenomenon you are observing.

For me it was the opposite. Once I realized that I don't have to say yes to everything or socialize unless I want to, no matter how seldom, I became much happier.

Thanks, that does help to see it as good faith advice. I'd be totally on board with a framing like "If you're alone and unhappy or dissatisfied in life, social connection could likely be the missing piece." Though it seems even that often follows up with "If you _think_ you're content being alone, you just don't know what you're missing", similar to how parents talk about how their lives changed after having kids. Which is fine and could be true for pretty much everyone, I just hate that it's stated in a way that's unfalsifiable. That if you think differently you're just fooling yourself, and you'll change your mind once you do it.

I've found a lot of those assertions about how to live a "great" life (often based on societal averages about life expectancy) don't fit my actual subjective experience, and I had to spend years doing all the "right things" in life and wondering why it wasn't fulfilling for me. Similar to the sibling comment, it's been liberating to stop taking that type of advice as applicable to me, but that means it jumps out at me everywhere now, hah.

Oh, and for what it's worth, I'm approaching my 40's, have had partners, lived with them for years, good relationship with family, never been burned or damaged socially. Those things just still never seemed as central or necessary to me as they apparently are for others.

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