Let's eliminate any social interactions to pursue maximum effectiveness, then we can finally focus on the things that matter - like programming! Beep, boop.
Quoting Nassim Taleb : "If someone is a drag on me, I cut them out. If someone lifts me up, I bring them closer. Nobody is sacred here. When the plane is going down, put the oxygen mask on your face first. Family, friends, people I love – I always try to be there for them and help. But I don’t get close to anyone bringing me down. This rule can’t be broken. Energy leaks out of you if someone is draining you. And I never owe anyone an explanation. Explaining is draining."
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/02/how-to-be-the-luckiest-...
That is incredibly selfish. Sometimes the person doing the lifting is the one being "brought down", so you're essentially depending on the fact that people are less selfish than you for this to work. Like anything taken to the extreme, this extreme individualism can only be harmful.
It also avoids the common human-behavior anti-pattern where two people remain in a mutually self destructive relationship because each is under the delusion that the other can't live without them.
There's a difference between supporting someone through their difficulty and someone who is not supporting you, whether that means (consciously or unconsciously) belittling, undermining, or dismissing you or your ideas, or just not meshing well or productively with you.
This isn't exactly a new idea. http://bible.cc/proverbs/27-17.htm
He is talking about the Noble price effect: What happens when people that earn a Nobel price that makes impossible for them to continue working in the field that made them to earn the price, they get invited to so many parties and given so many distinctions and honors and everybody wants to be with you, learn from you or be your friend.
You can help a lot of people in an individual basis this way, locally whenever you go. Those Nobel prices could make millions of people to be interested in science.
Most people can't understand how much of a problem this could be.
I have a natural tendency to prefer to be remote, anyway. But yeah my current situation, amplified by being in a very central social city like Singapore, really amplified it.
Thanks for bringing this up.