I’ve recently had a discussion about ethics here in this thread, and the conclusion I’ve arrived at is that a big reason for my lack of motivation is lack of social support.
I don’t know if this is the right place to post this, nor am I fully clear on what kind of response I am expecting. I guess I would like advice and emotional support with this issue.
I have basically been in shutdown mode for the past year because I’m not getting the kind of support I need, and I have my doubts I will ever get the kind of support I need.
I am in my mid-twenties, highly intelligent and have nonconformist opinions—I also have had personal difficulties and not lived a very happy life so far. I find myself unable to connect to other people when it comes to personal stuff because most people, even well-meaning ones, can’t understand what’s going on for me. That goes for mental health professionals as well. And unfortunately people, even mental health professionals, can be surprisingly mean if I point out that their well-meaning opinions or advice aren’t working for me—which usually ends up with them going into a death spiral of self-justification and/or hurt feelings.
I doubt therapy would work for me (based on previous experiences), because of the personal connection with the therapist not working, and the information and strategies offered to be of rather mediocre quality—mostly things I already know, things that are rather obvious, things that aren’t generally true and things that don’t apply to me.
I doubt anything would actually work for me actually, except actually solving the underlying problem which is that I don’t have a support network, “tribe”, or whatever you want to call it. Or at least having a possible solution in sight.
It’s not so much about receiving support (although that’s a part of it) - I guess I would like to have something meaningful to do. Right now I have an at least partially altruistic mindset, and nothing to direct it at, because I have a hard time liking “people” at large.
I would like to have a personal connection to a person or people who I actually feel that I like—because otherwise when I feel like being doing something positive either for specific people or for the world, I don’t even have an accessible example of someone who I would want to benefit from the results of that.
So yeah. I’m not sure what to do about this, because I’m not feeling very hopeful at the moment. I find that for whatever reason even things I imagine to would be very basic (like being understood by other people) are really hard to find in reality.
...I notice I am feeling confused about this, because the particular set of experiences I just described seems to be extremely non-typical among people in general, and I’m not expecting it to be
Edit: I don’t live in the US (I feel this is worth sharing because it affects the advice/options available).
The obvious suggestion is going to (or starting) a local Less Wrong meetup. They’re a good way to meet people who can become your “tribe.”
Another option (and one that worked very well for me for quite a while) was to move most of my in-group needs online. I don’t make a strong distinction between cyberspace and meatspace friendships, so this worked out pretty well. The “bonobo rationalists” of tumblr have a skype group that has general conversation, if you need something to try out.
What is important to keep in mind is that “having a tribe,” means that most of your interactions will (and maybe should?) be trivial and banal. You need to build a rapport with the people, so that your brain will more readily accept their praise and advice.
The obvious suggestion is going to (or starting) a local Less Wrong meetup. They’re a good way to meet people who can become your “tribe.”
I agree, and I would definitely visit one if there was one nearby (note: I don’t live in the US. Edited the original post to reflect that).
As for trying to start a meetup—intuitively I feel there are several reasons why that might be problematic. And I don’t know if there are enough (or any) rationalists in my area.
Another option (and one that worked very well for me for quite a while) was to move most of my in-group needs online. I don’t make a strong distinction between cyberspace and meatspace friendships, so this worked out pretty well.
Thank you for sharing.
The “bonobo rationalists” of tumblr have a skype group that has general conversation, if you need something to try out.
Thanks for the suggestion. I believe I have found the contact information for that.
What is important to keep in mind is that “having a tribe,” means that most of your interactions will (and maybe should?) be trivial and banal. You need to build a rapport with the people, so that your brain will more readily accept their praise and advice.
I don’t know if I need that. Maybe other people need to have trivial interactions with me to see me as in-group, I don’t know.
My experience with that is that the trivial interactions are not a reliable indicator for the quality of non-trivial interactions.
...
I have a feeling that the implication here is that the way to form connections is to have a bunch of casual interactions (that’s my prior expectation for how many kinds of connections work, anyway).
Maybe that’s not really the implication, so I might be going on a tangent here… but I’d like to share this anyway.
Casual interactions work very poorly for me, and I have a feeling that that way to connect select against my particular mindset.
The problem with casual interactions (the way I see it) is that they put too much weight on similarity and agreement about relatively unimportant things.
It’s signalling “I’m similar to you in a lot of ways” as a proxy for signalling “I’m not crazy, trustworthy, have reasonable values, etc etc...”.
I think it’s kind of like using “academic achievement” as a proxy for “learning”, because trying to measure “learning” directly is too inconvenient. (I don’t know what the term here is, lost purpose?).
I’d rather have people directly tell me what they expect, so I can tell them whether I think I can live up to that—rather than having to signal that indirectly. The problem with signalling is that a lot of standard signals people are simply not true for me (and there’s dishonesty and self-deception involved in signalling because that obviously allows for stronger signals). For example, my thinking patterns are different from most people so I can’t use “yeah, I’ve had exactly the same experience” as a bonding thing.
And, generally speaking, I suspect there might not be enough self-awareness in people for me to be able to say “you know, we’re sitting here talking about X but I suspect you’re actually interested in Y. How about we talk about that directly?”. (or maybe there’s some kind of taboo against doing exactly that, I don’t know).
Casual interactions work very poorly for me, and I have a feeling that that way to connect select against my particular mindset.
I understand what you mean, but think of causal interactions as a fast, cheap filter.
Finding people you’d really like to connect to will necessary involve a lot of trial and error. You would like to minimize the costs (in time and effort) of the trials and the errors. Causal connections basically allow you to do this: you have a limited, surface contact with a person and in the majority of cases that will be enough for you to filter that person out and continue looking.
Don’t think of small talk as a way to bond—think of it as ritualized low-effort behavior one engages in while evaluating the other person.
Don’t think of small talk as a way to bond—think of it as ritualized low-effort behavior one engages in while evaluating the other person.
I was in fact referring to casual interactions as way to bond and build rapport, because a lot of people do it that way, and I also think that’s what MathiasZaman suggested (though maybe he meant it in a different way?).
Oh wait. Is that what you mean by small talk? I think my understanding of the concept just shifted.
I was thinking of small talk as “that boring thing people do when they don’t want to talk about serious stuff”. But of course I use it in the fashion that you described, and it’s actually quite fun when done that way.
A mental health professional that get’s angry at you for pointing out that some advice doesn’t work is either unskilled or is using anger as an alternative strategy to create pressure to change.
I’m myself not a mental health professional but do have quite a bit of coaching training and would never get angry at someone for him finding advice not useful. It’s not even in my reservoir of choices if I think it would be helpful.
Unfortunately I don’t think that a majority of academically trained psychologists have enough control over their own emotions to not get angry for bad reasons and go into self-justification.
I don’t know whether your state reaches depression but to the extend that it does exercise is very important. Do you do exercise?
After exercise the second highest rated intervention on curetogether is to spend time with a pet. In the absence of human interaction, a dog can fill some of that niche. It can give you the feeling that there somebody who accepts you like you are.
Otherwise find a tribe. LW meetups are good. Joining a sports team is also good.
Unfortunately I don’t think that a majority of academically trained psychologists have enough control over their own emotions to not get angry for bad reasons and go into self-justification.
In my experience that is accurate.
To be fair, as long as people stick to the psychologist-client script, and have more-or-less typical problems, they probably will get acceptable treatment.
However, pointing out that what the mental health person is doing isn’t working for me, for reasons that person doesn’t immediately recognize as valid isn’t sticking to the script. (and probably just being more intelligent than that person and having genuinely non-standard opinions isn’t sticking to the script either).
I don’t know whether your state reaches depression
That varies. To some extent, yes.
Do you do exercise?
I do regular exercise.
After exercise the second highest rated intervention on curetogether is to spend time with a pet. In the absence of human interaction, a dog can fill some of that niche. It can give you the feeling that there somebody who accepts you like you are.
That’s interesting. I think that might work for me, but I have I doubts about my ability to arrange for that to happen.
LW meetups are good
Don’t have one in my area (in responding to MathiasZaman’s comment, I edited the my original post to reflect that I’m not located in the US).
I would go if there was a meetup in my area.
Joining a sports team is also good.
Merely doing things along other people is typically not enough for me to form connections. And it doesn’t sounds interesting or fun enough to me to be worth doing for its own sake.
Why do you find it hard to meet like-minded people? Have you tried meetup.com? The only solution to not having a group of people you like is to meet more people. You’re certainly not lacking for options. It sounds like you just need a better searching method.
I like having reasonable suggestions—at the very least it’s a good idea to consider these things if I haven’t tried them before.
I don’t know why you seem to think it would be easy to find like-minded people, though. Inferential distance?
That seems to be hard by default, unless you’re living in an area with a high density of like-minded people.
Anyway, I am familiar with meetup.com. I have some meetups I could potentially participate in, though they seem to be mostly for people who want to socialize rather than specific groups for things I am interested in.
And simply meeting people at random seems like a poor way for me to try and find like-minded people. I might do that anyway for the social experience, but it seems to be a rather low return-on-investment strategy.
Random has to generally be deliberately planned for. Any kind of search is likely to be non-random, and there are multiple methods for increasing filtering even before you meet the person. A chess club will result in very different encounters than a soccer team. You could also change your culling methods when evaluating people to improve hits. It’s possible that you’re over or under filtering in casual encounters or that your search parameters are poorly tuned. Studying personality types can help with that. Still, there’s nothing better than just to increase your number of interactions.
Why do you find it hard to meet like-minded people? Have you tried meetup.com?
I do some meetup groups available nearby (though I’d have to commute for quite a bit). There’s isn’t much choice of what kind of people I can meet via meetup.com.
The base rate for people I would consider like-minded is really low, so trying to meet people randomly (or by applying a simple filter) seems like a low-value strategy.
The only solution to not having a group of people you like is to meet more people.
That doesn’t automatically imply it is optimal or even reasonable for me to try and maximize the amount of people I meet short-term.
You’re certainly not lacking for options.
I think everyone has options. That doesn’t mean that the options are viable.
I do also think it’s a good idea to go over the possible strategies I might be using.
I’m not seeing any options that I’m willing to use immediately. So I think the best thing I can do right now is simply to think more about this—and see if I can find a reasonable way around the objections to have to using these options, or if I can find new options I like better.
Based of that the most obvious moves, depending on what you are currently doing.
Universal: Take up a sport or other hobby. The clubs associated with them are a pretty ready made social network compatible with most any lifestyle. To work, this requires you to pick one you enjoy, and with a culture you do to. There is a lot of variety on offer here—Ive been (briefly) in soccer teams that were essentially an excuse to get drunk after the game, and in hiking clubs that were quasi-military in their dedication to proper planning and preparation, and once rather memorably in a cooking club that unofficially doubled as an dating mixer. (12 people. many more pairings than was at all reasonable before it imploded)
If you want to hit reboot on your life in total, sign up for university. You’re a swede, so it’s free, but before you do, go hang out. Different courses of study have very different cultures. You should be able to find one which is a match.
Next step is important. Make sure to join or create a good study group. Also combines pretty well with first option.
Final option, if you simply want structure above all else, the military will do that for you. It’s not a lifetime solution unless you make it a lifetime career, but.. giving aim to the aimless is something it has a lot of practice at.
I’ve recently had a discussion about ethics here in this thread, and the conclusion I’ve arrived at is that a big reason for my lack of motivation is lack of social support.
I don’t know if this is the right place to post this, nor am I fully clear on what kind of response I am expecting. I guess I would like advice and emotional support with this issue.
I have basically been in shutdown mode for the past year because I’m not getting the kind of support I need, and I have my doubts I will ever get the kind of support I need.
I am in my mid-twenties, highly intelligent and have nonconformist opinions—I also have had personal difficulties and not lived a very happy life so far. I find myself unable to connect to other people when it comes to personal stuff because most people, even well-meaning ones, can’t understand what’s going on for me. That goes for mental health professionals as well. And unfortunately people, even mental health professionals, can be surprisingly mean if I point out that their well-meaning opinions or advice aren’t working for me—which usually ends up with them going into a death spiral of self-justification and/or hurt feelings.
I doubt therapy would work for me (based on previous experiences), because of the personal connection with the therapist not working, and the information and strategies offered to be of rather mediocre quality—mostly things I already know, things that are rather obvious, things that aren’t generally true and things that don’t apply to me. I doubt anything would actually work for me actually, except actually solving the underlying problem which is that I don’t have a support network, “tribe”, or whatever you want to call it. Or at least having a possible solution in sight.
It’s not so much about receiving support (although that’s a part of it) - I guess I would like to have something meaningful to do. Right now I have an at least partially altruistic mindset, and nothing to direct it at, because I have a hard time liking “people” at large. I would like to have a personal connection to a person or people who I actually feel that I like—because otherwise when I feel like being doing something positive either for specific people or for the world, I don’t even have an accessible example of someone who I would want to benefit from the results of that.
So yeah. I’m not sure what to do about this, because I’m not feeling very hopeful at the moment. I find that for whatever reason even things I imagine to would be very basic (like being understood by other people) are really hard to find in reality.
...I notice I am feeling confused about this, because the particular set of experiences I just described seems to be extremely non-typical among people in general, and I’m not expecting it to be
Edit: I don’t live in the US (I feel this is worth sharing because it affects the advice/options available).
What have you already tried? What hasn’t worked in those approaches?
This is the most relevant question I think. What specific suggested strategies did you experiment with that didn’t work?
… and the only one which won’t be answered.
The obvious suggestion is going to (or starting) a local Less Wrong meetup. They’re a good way to meet people who can become your “tribe.”
Another option (and one that worked very well for me for quite a while) was to move most of my in-group needs online. I don’t make a strong distinction between cyberspace and meatspace friendships, so this worked out pretty well. The “bonobo rationalists” of tumblr have a skype group that has general conversation, if you need something to try out.
What is important to keep in mind is that “having a tribe,” means that most of your interactions will (and maybe should?) be trivial and banal. You need to build a rapport with the people, so that your brain will more readily accept their praise and advice.
I agree, and I would definitely visit one if there was one nearby (note: I don’t live in the US. Edited the original post to reflect that).
As for trying to start a meetup—intuitively I feel there are several reasons why that might be problematic. And I don’t know if there are enough (or any) rationalists in my area.
Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for the suggestion. I believe I have found the contact information for that.
I don’t know if I need that. Maybe other people need to have trivial interactions with me to see me as in-group, I don’t know. My experience with that is that the trivial interactions are not a reliable indicator for the quality of non-trivial interactions.
...
I have a feeling that the implication here is that the way to form connections is to have a bunch of casual interactions (that’s my prior expectation for how many kinds of connections work, anyway).
Maybe that’s not really the implication, so I might be going on a tangent here… but I’d like to share this anyway.
Casual interactions work very poorly for me, and I have a feeling that that way to connect select against my particular mindset.
The problem with casual interactions (the way I see it) is that they put too much weight on similarity and agreement about relatively unimportant things.
It’s signalling “I’m similar to you in a lot of ways” as a proxy for signalling “I’m not crazy, trustworthy, have reasonable values, etc etc...”.
I think it’s kind of like using “academic achievement” as a proxy for “learning”, because trying to measure “learning” directly is too inconvenient. (I don’t know what the term here is, lost purpose?).
I’d rather have people directly tell me what they expect, so I can tell them whether I think I can live up to that—rather than having to signal that indirectly. The problem with signalling is that a lot of standard signals people are simply not true for me (and there’s dishonesty and self-deception involved in signalling because that obviously allows for stronger signals). For example, my thinking patterns are different from most people so I can’t use “yeah, I’ve had exactly the same experience” as a bonding thing.
And, generally speaking, I suspect there might not be enough self-awareness in people for me to be able to say “you know, we’re sitting here talking about X but I suspect you’re actually interested in Y. How about we talk about that directly?”. (or maybe there’s some kind of taboo against doing exactly that, I don’t know).
I understand what you mean, but think of causal interactions as a fast, cheap filter.
Finding people you’d really like to connect to will necessary involve a lot of trial and error. You would like to minimize the costs (in time and effort) of the trials and the errors. Causal connections basically allow you to do this: you have a limited, surface contact with a person and in the majority of cases that will be enough for you to filter that person out and continue looking.
Don’t think of small talk as a way to bond—think of it as ritualized low-effort behavior one engages in while evaluating the other person.
I was in fact referring to casual interactions as way to bond and build rapport, because a lot of people do it that way, and I also think that’s what MathiasZaman suggested (though maybe he meant it in a different way?).
Oh wait. Is that what you mean by small talk? I think my understanding of the concept just shifted. I was thinking of small talk as “that boring thing people do when they don’t want to talk about serious stuff”. But of course I use it in the fashion that you described, and it’s actually quite fun when done that way.
If you actually want to bond, you don’t want casual interactions—you want highly emotional shared experiences.
That sounds right. Thank you for pointing out the distinction.
A mental health professional that get’s angry at you for pointing out that some advice doesn’t work is either unskilled or is using anger as an alternative strategy to create pressure to change.
I’m myself not a mental health professional but do have quite a bit of coaching training and would never get angry at someone for him finding advice not useful. It’s not even in my reservoir of choices if I think it would be helpful.
Unfortunately I don’t think that a majority of academically trained psychologists have enough control over their own emotions to not get angry for bad reasons and go into self-justification.
I don’t know whether your state reaches depression but to the extend that it does exercise is very important. Do you do exercise?
After exercise the second highest rated intervention on curetogether is to spend time with a pet. In the absence of human interaction, a dog can fill some of that niche. It can give you the feeling that there somebody who accepts you like you are.
Otherwise find a tribe. LW meetups are good. Joining a sports team is also good.
In my experience that is accurate.
To be fair, as long as people stick to the psychologist-client script, and have more-or-less typical problems, they probably will get acceptable treatment.
However, pointing out that what the mental health person is doing isn’t working for me, for reasons that person doesn’t immediately recognize as valid isn’t sticking to the script. (and probably just being more intelligent than that person and having genuinely non-standard opinions isn’t sticking to the script either).
That varies. To some extent, yes.
I do regular exercise.
That’s interesting. I think that might work for me, but I have I doubts about my ability to arrange for that to happen.
Don’t have one in my area (in responding to MathiasZaman’s comment, I edited the my original post to reflect that I’m not located in the US).
I would go if there was a meetup in my area.
Merely doing things along other people is typically not enough for me to form connections. And it doesn’t sounds interesting or fun enough to me to be worth doing for its own sake.
Why do you find it hard to meet like-minded people? Have you tried meetup.com? The only solution to not having a group of people you like is to meet more people. You’re certainly not lacking for options. It sounds like you just need a better searching method.
I like having reasonable suggestions—at the very least it’s a good idea to consider these things if I haven’t tried them before.
I don’t know why you seem to think it would be easy to find like-minded people, though. Inferential distance?
That seems to be hard by default, unless you’re living in an area with a high density of like-minded people.
Anyway, I am familiar with meetup.com. I have some meetups I could potentially participate in, though they seem to be mostly for people who want to socialize rather than specific groups for things I am interested in.
And simply meeting people at random seems like a poor way for me to try and find like-minded people. I might do that anyway for the social experience, but it seems to be a rather low return-on-investment strategy.
Random has to generally be deliberately planned for. Any kind of search is likely to be non-random, and there are multiple methods for increasing filtering even before you meet the person. A chess club will result in very different encounters than a soccer team. You could also change your culling methods when evaluating people to improve hits. It’s possible that you’re over or under filtering in casual encounters or that your search parameters are poorly tuned. Studying personality types can help with that. Still, there’s nothing better than just to increase your number of interactions.
What are you interested in?
I do some meetup groups available nearby (though I’d have to commute for quite a bit). There’s isn’t much choice of what kind of people I can meet via meetup.com.
The base rate for people I would consider like-minded is really low, so trying to meet people randomly (or by applying a simple filter) seems like a low-value strategy.
That doesn’t automatically imply it is optimal or even reasonable for me to try and maximize the amount of people I meet short-term.
I think everyone has options. That doesn’t mean that the options are viable.
I do also think it’s a good idea to go over the possible strategies I might be using.
I’m not seeing any options that I’m willing to use immediately. So I think the best thing I can do right now is simply to think more about this—and see if I can find a reasonable way around the objections to have to using these options, or if I can find new options I like better.
Where are you from?
I’m located in Sweden.
Based of that the most obvious moves, depending on what you are currently doing.
Universal: Take up a sport or other hobby. The clubs associated with them are a pretty ready made social network compatible with most any lifestyle. To work, this requires you to pick one you enjoy, and with a culture you do to. There is a lot of variety on offer here—Ive been (briefly) in soccer teams that were essentially an excuse to get drunk after the game, and in hiking clubs that were quasi-military in their dedication to proper planning and preparation, and once rather memorably in a cooking club that unofficially doubled as an dating mixer. (12 people. many more pairings than was at all reasonable before it imploded)
If you want to hit reboot on your life in total, sign up for university. You’re a swede, so it’s free, but before you do, go hang out. Different courses of study have very different cultures. You should be able to find one which is a match. Next step is important. Make sure to join or create a good study group. Also combines pretty well with first option.
Final option, if you simply want structure above all else, the military will do that for you. It’s not a lifetime solution unless you make it a lifetime career, but.. giving aim to the aimless is something it has a lot of practice at.