Leave a Trace
jakeworth.com
jakeworth.com
Go to your professor's office hours, learn the names of your neighbors, become a regular at the local sandwich shop and shoot the breeze with staff, ask the people you're waiting in line alongside if they have any good jokes.
Don't be fooled that social media and conspicuous consumption are the best paths to community.
The last thing I want to do when out in public is be stuck talking with strangers.
You don't do it because you like it. You do it because if you don't, then you'll be worse off years later.
This feels hyperbolic. While I would agree that community and remaining connected are very important to overall health, I don’t feel like making a habit of talking to strangers is a prerequisite.
But if you practise that skill, you will then also be able to pick up a conversation with people you do find interesting.
In my experience, it is not.
I'm "on the spectrum." In my case, it has been a net positive, because it afforded me the career that I have, but it has made interpersonal relationships difficult.
I have also spent my entire adult life, in a community that forces us to have fairly intimate interpersonal relationships (a program of personal Recovery).
It has been exhausting (you'll always find me in the kitchen at parties), but it has also been seriously therapeutic.
These days, it's almost unnoticeable. Definitely still there (ask my wife), but most folks never have a clue.
It's like telling a gay man that he just needs to try dating more women.
There's nothing wrong with being an introvert. It's not really a choice in the first place.
Not at all what I'm saying. You don't get cured by exercise either. You're never "done" exercising. It's just a thing you do, in order to have a long term better life.
I don't like talking to strangers. It still tastes like medicine. I have no expectation that I'll ever like it. But I still have to take my medicine, or I'll be worse off long term.
And like being sore if you've not exercised in a while, the aversion to being social is stronger after taking a "solitude vacation". But you can't not do it.
So yeah, you completely misunderstood.
Well, that's on you. Especially since I also added "Or getting exercise" and another clarifying paragraph after that.
> For me, being social is tiring and uncomfortable
Exactly my point. "But I don't wanna!". Yeah. That's why i compare it with taking your yucky tasting medicine, or exercising.
> I don't see a benefit.
Pearls before swine, I suppose. Shrug.
You’re still making introversion out to be something that you should work at to compensate or fix, because not doing so would be unhealthy.
E.g. you exercise because if you don’t, you risk disease, cancer, and a host of other physical issues.
There’s nothing unhealthy about never striking up conversations with strangers.
There are more natural and organic ways to meet and interact with people you don’t know (many have been covered in other comments).
But striking up conversations with random strangers in public shouldn’t be equated with exercise.
Not fix. You just to hold your nose and do anyway, with no expectations if your experience of it ever changing.
Compensate? Not the way I think you mean it, no. Say you hate exercising or brushing your teeth. Ok. Nothing wrong with that. That's not good or bad. But you still have to do it.
Now, am I saying that only the social interaction with random strangers, that only inane smalltalk does it? Of course not.
Then learn not just how to start, but also how to end a conversation. I hated having to do small talk with people - until I learned that I had not to. I now can share something interesting - and then go back to minding my buisness. (If the other person is deaf on their end - strong signals to end a conversation are looking away, turning the body away, opening up ones laptop ... (or put out the damn phone) or put on earphones)
I know no one who tries striking up a conversation with strangers, and I feel like the majority of strangers would be annoyed/uncomfortable with this.
E.g.
- Frequenting the same restaurants/stores (HT earlier sibling comment)
- Joining clubs/communities/churches
- Parents of kids’ friends
- Networking: Friends of family / family of friends / friends of friends
- Workplace (obviously)
I feel like this is how friendships/relationships happen more organically vs. the OP’s suggestion of talking to “someone waiting in line”.
Sometimes, I work against this and start conversations.
Rarely people are annoyed. Too often, they seem happy someone breaks their shell, they just don't want to be that person who takes the first step.
Every time I see a new person I still feel the same.
Make a joke yourself, if you're feeling funny. But be warned... a stranger once asked me why I was going on a trip. I was visiting my dad who was presently in surgery for cancer that would go on to end his life. I was too emotional to answer with anything but the truth. I certainly wasn't going to respond well to humor.
This is the risk of striking up conversations with strangers. You have no idea what their mood, concerns, or troubles might be. So please be prepared for a less-than-pleasant subject to talk about if you insist on intruding on someone else's thoughts.
Although, the hardest part for me is the interaction with the neighbors, simply because it's not an easy relationship to sever if things go sideways. Still good to know the name of the crazy neighbor, I suppose.
If you don’t have any comment box it’s hard to give you any feedback.
"Why is nobody calling to invite me to parties", says man who unplugged his phone.
Edit: Ok, I'm old. For younger people, pretend I said "turned off his phone".
This reminds me of a friend of mine who in a B2B setting contacted a potential vendor by filling in a form, with his email and phone number as contact details. Instead of emailing or calling back, this vendor continued the conversation by tracking down my friend on LinkedIn and messaging him there! They already had the email and phone number from their form.
I'm also not super impressed by the consulting gig's "Johnny Holton" reference talking about Jake's "engineering excellence". A google search says Johnny Holton is an American hand egg player.
If I were a potential client going in cold then this would not fill me with confidence in his attention to detail.
I put my email address on these things. All spammers already have it anyway. I get some feedback.
Or a normal web form with a captcha will create minimal spam. Certainly sufficient for someone not famous.
Or you can have a google form. Either with or without google verifying the senders email address.
It works for static sites, you just need to embed their script, and spam and moderation would be handled by GitHub.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48508069
In contrast, people go to blogs to find opinions, and traces of opinions of others are usually adding, not subtracting. One can say whole HN is a sandbox for sharing opinions, therefore "untouched" posts with no comments and low points are less attractive.
But the worst part of hiking was seeing brightly-colored bags of dog shit right next to the trail, so I guess overall I’m ok with a general “leave no trace” rule. Then again, someone inconsiderate enough to do that wouldn’t care if there was a rule against it, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But this was good advice years ago too. The average Facebook or Youtube comment section feels like it's full of empty drones, repeated and predictable comments that don't actually add much. HN comments are a breath of fresh air in that regard. Reddit can be to some degree, as long as you filter out the predictable kneejerk reactions and "I also choose this guy's dead wife" meme comments.
If the page had a comment box, would have done it there.
But what really makes a trace valuable? Internet growth has proven that scaling traces does not really grow value to the same extent.
> Leaving something adds a little humanity to the internet. > It helped you, so it’s likely a useful idea > You now have a profile you can access that collects the things you found noteworthyWhere there's some detail that's causing them problems, and they would not hit it unless they were actually making use of the project in a productive way. It's sort of the ultimate proof of the work I did being useful for somebody and a genuine motivator to resolve that issue for them too.
> The more an article would benefit from photos, the less likely it’ll have them.
-- Waterluvian's Law
I did that, once, and got an expletive-filled rant about ungrateful, entitled shits (meaning Yours Troolie), in response.
These days, I just quietly slip out the back, and close the door behind me.
i find it hilarious how no one has "left a trace" in this post's comment section yet.
on the other hand, i think having to register an account on an unknown service (i don't know what will Discus do with my data) just to leave a comment is something the average reader (including myself) will not do; this being the exception, not the norm. in fact, i used a throwaway email for creating this account.
but i can also see how hard it would be to moderate an account-less comment section.
~~so, i will invite anyone who reads my comment to, instead of only replying here, forwarding any replies to any of my contact methods available on my website: https://jotalea.com.ar/~~ ignore this part, i do read HN often, so i will likely see the replies.
These days, I find myself questioning for whom am I leaving a trace for? What kinds of humans or entities? Do I care about the kinds of entities who will inhabit the future? Or will their value system be so different to my own that I'd prefer not to have anything to do with them.
Beyond human nature itself, I take issue with the trend of how human nature seems to be changing over time; for the worse.
How's your reasoning there? You only want to be nice to people who have earned it? This sounds a bit too close to the "you have to EARN my respect", which is a hallmark of somebody nobody wants to be around.
You can only control your own actions. If your "good deeds" are conditional or transactional, then that very much diminishes their goodness.
If you pay attention, you will notice that this is how the vast majority of people operate.
To me, that's transactional. Having fixed core values and expecting other people to share certain core values is not transactional, it's genuine. These are the kinds of relationships which don't require constant maintenance; you can not talk with the person for years and then resume the friendship like no time has passed, no matter how your situations have changed. If you can change your values based on the latest social trends, then you have no values. The friendship is held together by mutual material benefits; that's transactional.
I have no genuine interest in being friends with people who don't have core values. Because then I'd know I'm only in it for the money, and that's a lot of work and stress for me. Maybe second nature to some people. But I'm no good actor. To me it's work.
My view of humanity is most people are actors and most people lie to themselves constantly.
To me, true altruism is selfish. If helping people makes you feel good, then you're an altruist.
If helping others doesn't make you feel good innately but you do it all for others then I think there is some self-deception at play. Maybe it's a status or self-image thing? Because being an altruist is higher status and you want to see yourself as high status? I think you can always trace it back to a selfish motive at some level.
Denying the selfish root of altruism can lead to hypocrisy because there is a dissonance between who the individual really is in their natural state and who they want to believe themselves to be. They have to constantly work to be who they aspire to be; it's not second nature to them and they will frequently fall short whenever it slips their mind or when they occasionally give in to natural impulses. Good on them for trying I guess. Better than not trying at all. But they're not an altruist.
I believe Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" backs me up on this point. Altruism is a either a kin-selection process or a reciprocal (transactional) process.
A lot of people would disagree (and IMHO, Dawkins is a grade-A asshole)
I think because I felt a stronger sense that other people were my kin.
Now I feel like I don't belong, I feel that I am different and I don't know how to interpret other people's appreciation because they probably don't feel it the way I do when I appreciate something. I feel more exploited than appreciated.
Part of me is wondering if some people who used my open source projects thought to themselves "What a sucker... Working for free so I can monetize his work." And getting some kick out of that. There's a fundamental difference of values there. It didn't occur to me that this is the lens through which a lot of people view the world.
> First, it’s positive and affirming in the aggregate. Despite its scale, the internet can be a lonely place. Most creators create in a vacuum. ... Leaving something adds a little humanity to the internet.
I think I'll try better to re-establish this habit.
But also, plenty of public places like museums, restaurants - at least where I live - have a "guest book" where you can leave a message. I like to believe other visitors and the staff have a leaf through those every once in a while.
Glad I left a trace.
"A stranger is wrong on the internet!" xkcd#386