Being picked last in playground kickball hurts. That doesn't change when you trade a playground for an office.
Social acceptance is a human need, like thirst, hunger, and safety. People will kill for acceptance.
Social acceptance is a human need, like thirst, hunger, and safety. People will kill for acceptance.
"It's that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves."
~Junot Diaz
When I left graduate school, I came home for three years with no one that I could have the kind of intellectual connection with I had at college. It was like I was speaking a foreign language to my family and coworkers. Of course, I could go on the internet and talk about my computer stuff, but it's not the same when you are with people you trust your understanding of your knowledge with.
It's scary, and I'm still clinging to my own sense of self, even though I don't get to know whether it's still there, every single day. But I won't be marginal.
Your family, friends and coworkers are what is real in your life. I know it's probably not your fault, but graduate school has this nasty effect of absorbing every bit of mental "energy" from the students. Your connection to the rest of your life gets starved and your identity becomes whatever you research.
Then, if you don't happen to be from the very lucky who get tenure, you get thrown to the wolves into a world that cannot and will not understand you. I could tell you of the time that I almost cry in my first (grossly overqualified) job because I could not figure out how to use the damned phone.
I am not telling you to leave behind whatever is you found in graduate school. You can always make a special place for it in your life. But the way forward is to make your life broader, by nurturing aspects and relationships that have been neglected so far (or creating new connections if some of the older ones got broken beyond repair).
At the end, you will become a happier and more interesting human being! :)
Not necessarily. One can suck at, or dislike kickball and shine somewhere else. Similarly, I think a lot of people get little reward or satisfaction from their job but get "social acceptance" from their side activities (e.g. sport, music, video games...).
The lack of social acceptance, in this context, is related to the desire to play and not being accepted, more than the success at playing. The fact that you are in the the group to participate in kickball, means you, on some level, want/need to play kickball. (You could like kickball or are being forced to play it. In this context, the reason doesn't matter.)
> but get "social acceptance" from their side activities
You can fulfill the generic need elsewhere (like eating fish, instead of hamburger, to satiate your hunger). And, different sources of interactions have different psychological rewards, based on how you view yourself. If you admire self-starter entrepreneur types, do self-starter entrepreneur type things, and, as a result, are treated/seen as, and thus accepted as, a self-starter entrepreneur type. A greater feeling of acceptance and self-confidence is inevitable.
But, to bring it back to my example, you were trying to play kickball, for whatever reason, and they didn't want you to play kickball with them.