As a kid I liked to build stuff (little catapults, modify nerf guns, sling shots, etc). I entered a lot of those projects with the mindset of “I’ll make this toy and then I can play with it forever and never be bored again!” When I would make the thing and get bored with it, I would be surprised and mildly upset, then forget about it and move to another thing. Now I think that when I was imagining the glorious cool toy future, I was actually imagining a having a bunch of friends to play with (didn’t live around many other kids).
When I got to middle school and highschool and spent more time around other kids, the idea of “That person’s talks like they’re cool but they aren’t.” When I got into sub-cultures centering around a skill or activity (magic) I experienced the more concentrated form, “That person acts like they’re good at magic, but couldn’t do a show to save their life.”
I got the message, “To fit in, you have to really be about the thing. No half assing it. No posing.”
Why, historically, have I gotten so worried when my interests shift? I’m not yet at a point in my life where there are that many logistical constraints (I’ve switched majors three times in three years without a hitch). I think it’s because in the back of my head I expect every possible group or social scene to say, “We only want you if you’re all about doing XYZ all the time.” And when I’m super excited about XYZ, it’s fine. But when I feel like “Yeah, I need a break” I get nervous.
Yeah, there is a hard underlying problem of “How to not let your culture become meaningless”, but I think my extra-problem is that I gravitated towards the groups that defined themselves by “We put in lots of time mastering this specific hard skill and applying it.” Though I expect it to be the case that for the rest of my life I want to have thoughtful engaging discussion with intellectually honest people (a piece of what I want from less wrong), I feel less reason to be sure that I’ll want to spend a large fraction of my time and life working on a specific skill/domain, like magic, or distributed systems.
Years ago, I wrote fiction, and dreamed about writing a novel (I was only able to write short stories). I assumed I liked writing per se. But I was hanging out regularly with a group of fiction fans… and when later a conflict happened between me and them, so that I stopped meeting them completely, I found out I had no desire left to write fiction anymore. So, seems like this was actually about impressing specific people.
I got the message, “To fit in, you have to really be about the thing. No half assing it. No posing.”
I suspect this is only a part of the story. There are various ways to fit in a group. For example, if you are attractive or highly socially skilled, people will forgive you being mediocre at the thing. But if you are not, and you still want to get to the center of attention, then you have to achieve the extreme levels of the thing.
Noticing an internal dynamic.
As a kid I liked to build stuff (little catapults, modify nerf guns, sling shots, etc). I entered a lot of those projects with the mindset of “I’ll make this toy and then I can play with it forever and never be bored again!” When I would make the thing and get bored with it, I would be surprised and mildly upset, then forget about it and move to another thing. Now I think that when I was imagining the glorious cool toy future, I was actually imagining a having a bunch of friends to play with (didn’t live around many other kids).
When I got to middle school and highschool and spent more time around other kids, the idea of “That person’s talks like they’re cool but they aren’t.” When I got into sub-cultures centering around a skill or activity (magic) I experienced the more concentrated form, “That person acts like they’re good at magic, but couldn’t do a show to save their life.”
I got the message, “To fit in, you have to really be about the thing. No half assing it. No posing.”
Why, historically, have I gotten so worried when my interests shift? I’m not yet at a point in my life where there are that many logistical constraints (I’ve switched majors three times in three years without a hitch). I think it’s because in the back of my head I expect every possible group or social scene to say, “We only want you if you’re all about doing XYZ all the time.” And when I’m super excited about XYZ, it’s fine. But when I feel like “Yeah, I need a break” I get nervous.
Yeah, there is a hard underlying problem of “How to not let your culture become meaningless”, but I think my extra-problem is that I gravitated towards the groups that defined themselves by “We put in lots of time mastering this specific hard skill and applying it.” Though I expect it to be the case that for the rest of my life I want to have thoughtful engaging discussion with intellectually honest people (a piece of what I want from less wrong), I feel less reason to be sure that I’ll want to spend a large fraction of my time and life working on a specific skill/domain, like magic, or distributed systems.
Years ago, I wrote fiction, and dreamed about writing a novel (I was only able to write short stories). I assumed I liked writing per se. But I was hanging out regularly with a group of fiction fans… and when later a conflict happened between me and them, so that I stopped meeting them completely, I found out I had no desire left to write fiction anymore. So, seems like this was actually about impressing specific people.
I suspect this is only a part of the story. There are various ways to fit in a group. For example, if you are attractive or highly socially skilled, people will forgive you being mediocre at the thing. But if you are not, and you still want to get to the center of attention, then you have to achieve the extreme levels of the thing.