This came up at yesterday’s London meetup: activities for keeping oneself relatable to other human beings.
We were dissecting motives behind goals, and one of mine was maintaining interests that other people could relate to. I have more pedestrian interests, but they’re the first to get dropped when my time is constrained (which it usually is), so if I end up meeting someone out in the wild, all I have to talk about is stuff like natural language parsing, utilitarian population ethics and patterns of conspicuous consumption.
Discussing it in a smaller group later, it turns out I’m not the only person who does this. It makes sense that insular, scholarly people of a sort found on LW may frequently find themselves withdrawn from common cultural ground with other people, so I thought I’d kick off a discussion on the subject.
What do you do to keep yourself relatable to other people?
EDIT: Just to clarify, this isn’t a request for advice on how to talk to people. Please don’t interpret it as such.
Richard Feynman was a theoretician as well as a ‘people person’; if you read his writings about his experiences with people it really illustrates quite well how he managed to do it.
One tactic that he employed was simply being mysterious. He knew few people could relate to a University professor and that many would feel intimidated by that, so when in the company of laypeople he never even brought it up. They would ask him what he did and he would say, “I can’t say.” If pressed, he would say something vague like, “I work at the University.” Done properly, it’s playful and coy, and even though people might think you’re a bit weird, they definitely won’t consider you unrelatable.
In my opinion there’s no need to concern yourself with activities that you don’t like, as very few people are really actually interested in your interests. Whenever the topic of your interests comes up, just steer the conversation towards their life and their interests. You’ll be speaking 10% of the time yet you’ll appear like a brilliant conversationalist. If they ask you if you’ve read a particular book or heard a particular artist, just say no (but don’t sound harsh or bored). You’ll seem ‘indie’ and mysterious, and people like that. In practice, though, as one gets older, people rarely ask about these things.
It’s a common mistake that I’ve seen often in intellectual people. They assume they have to keep up with popular media so that they can have conversations. That is not true at all.
While this seems like reasonable advice, I’m not sure it’s universally good advice. Richard Feynman seemed to enjoy a level of charm many of us couldn’t hope to possess. He also had a wide selection of esoteric interests unrelated to his field.
I would also claim that there’s value in simply maintaining such an interest. During particularly insular periods where I’m absorbed in less accessible work, I find myself starting to exhibit “aspie” characteristics, losing verbal fluency and becoming socially insensitive. It’s not just about having things to talk about, but maintaining my own faculties for relating to people.
Whenever the topic of your interests comes up, just steer the conversation towards their life and their interests. You’ll be speaking 10% of the time yet you’ll appear like a brilliant conversationalist.
If everyone in the conversation is employing this method, then chances are higher that the others actually want to hear about your esoteric topics. If you pause early and give them a chance to talk about themselves (or for them to press for more), that’ll keep you synched up with what they want.
I was thinking more like two people each trying to get the other person to do that, like people at a door getting jammed saying “After you,” “After you,” etc.
All the times this has happened to me, one person would come up with a Schelling-pointy reason why the other person’s recent life was more interesting (e.g. they had just come back from a trip abroad or something).
I have never actually seen this happen, and I use that method all the time. I don’t have an explanation for why, since I rarely think about problems I don’t have.
I use the recaplets on Television without Pity to keep up with the basic plot and cliffhangers of tv shows I don’t watch, but most of my friends do. That way I don’t drop out of conversations just because they’re talking about True Blood.
Note: the only problem this strategy has caused for me is that my now-bf assumed I was a GoT fan (instead of having read the books and TWOP’d the show recaps), invited me over to watch, and assumed I turned him down because I wasn’t interested in him instead of being indifferent to the show. We sorted it out eventually.
Is there something similar, but for sports? I usually get lost when conversation turns to the local sports team. I couldn’t find anything with a quick google, but I’m probably not using the right search terms.
For a general overview of what’s going on in the baseball world, this is pretty good place to start. There are also pleanty of blogs devoted to individual teams, though I’m not really in a position to make recommendations, unless you happen to be looking for a San Francisco Giants blog, in which case I highly reccomend this blog. Can’t really help with other sports.
Haven’t the foggiest. I don’t really have friends who talk about sports. I read The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker so I end up really well informed on a couple narrow sports things that get features. And then my dad and brother rib me for knowing nothing about football, but everything about the Manning dynasty.
What do you do to keep yourself relatable to other people?
Well, I maintain pedestrian interests, but I consider it a failure condition to not attempt to participate in them. Comparably bad to going off my diet.
Downside: This is sometimes frustrating. I like Gaming and I like Game X, but sometimes I will think “I’m only playing Game X right now so I have something to talk about in the Car with Friend X.” or Alternatively, I sometimes play a game and then think “But no one other than me cares about this game, so playing it feels inefficient.”
Also, some of the other people who share pedestrian interests with me will work to prevent me from dropping them. For instance, if Game Y is a pedestrian interest, and my wife wants me to play Game Y with her, that doesn’t just get dropped regardless of how busy I am.
Downside: This does sometimes result in me feeling overworked (I will plan events in Game Y as I am passing out in Bed. Again, this seems efficiency related.)
Also, I spend a fair amount of time trying to help various friends/family members directly. So I frequently have that conversational topic of “How is that problem we discussed earlier going?”
Downside: This this boosts my stress level again, because it increases the number of things I’m worrying about.
Finally, I have relatability notes on my phone for my wife that pop up on a semi-frequent basis. I also have these reminders on some of the helping people I’m doing, or even reminders for better advice on Game Y.
Downside: I’m really beginning to hate my phones “You have a reminder!” noise. Also, sometimes the reminders are depressing. I have a reminder “Spend time hanging out with your best friend” that has been unchecked for more than a month.
Potential Silver Lining: That being said, sometimes the reminder is encouraging: It’s nice to be told “Make time for yourself.” and realize “Why yes, I am doing that right now. Ahhhh.”
Note: I’m positive this isn’t advice, because after looking at it posted altogether, my conclusion is not “Other people should do this.” but “I have a problem and this is why I’m on anti-anxiety meds.”
Obvious options are consuming popular culture, e.g. popular TV shows, music, or sports. There’s a lot of good TV out there these days so it shouldn’t be hard to get hooked on at least one show you can talk to a lot of people about (Game of Thrones?).
If you really insist on the “you do” part, I don’t do anything with this explicit goal. I just talk.
A while ago I heared from Jim Rohn that even if you don’t have had a near death experience everyone has something interesting to talk about.
At the time I said to myself, hey I do have an experience that sort of qualifies as a near death experience. I had 5 days of artificial coma with some strange paranormal experience after waking up out of it.
At the time I still had a hard time conversing with people even through I had experiences that qualified as interesting. I just lacked the skill to talk about them.
I don’t think that relating to other people is primarily a question of the content of conversation.
It’s about emotions. It’s about empathy. It’s about getting out of your head.
Instead of spending time in an activity that you could tell other people about, spend more time actually talking to people and practice relating on an emotional level.
Alternatively, I just read about a veep who was told at management training to start by asking about people’s families, and then talk about business matters. As a result, the people who thought she was cold and disliked them switched to thinking she was friendly and caring.
It’s about emotions. It’s about empathy. It’s about getting out of your head.
Instead of spending time in an activity that you could tell other people about, spend more time actually talking to people and practice relating on an emotional level.
This seems very platitude-y. In practise there presumably needs to be some sort of context for “relating on an emotional level”. You’re unlikely to walk up to someone and start talking about all these awesome emotions you’ve been having.
To clarify, this isn’t some problem I need solving. It’s an observation that if I lock myself up in a room for a month watching maths lectures and writing essays on neoclassical expenditure theories, it becomes harder to engage socially with people.
if I lock myself up in a room for a month watching maths lectures and writing essays on neoclassical expenditure theories, it becomes harder to engage socially with people.
This seems very platitude-y. In practise there presumably needs to be some sort of context for “relating on an emotional level”. You’re unlikely to walk up to someone and start talking about all these awesome emotions you’ve been having.
It doesn’t need much context. If someone asks you “How are you?” you can reasonable answer how you experienced yesterday something that made you feel XYZ.
Intelligent people have a tendency to overcomplicated it. A lot of small talk that happens between normal people doesn’t have much content.
To clarify, this isn’t some problem I need solving. It’s an observation that if I lock myself up in a room for a month watching maths lectures and writing essays on neoclassical expenditure theories, it becomes harder to engage socially with people.
It doesn’t help if you catch up with popular culture while you are looked up in your room. The problem is being locked up in a room and being socially isolated instead of the specific content that you consume.
Instead of spending 2 hours locked up in your room to catch up with popular culture spends that time going out and talk to people.
I think that the advice is well suited to your situation. I suspect that you don’t realize this because you spend so much time isolating yourself from people to study math.
I think it’s great that so many people here are extremely intellegent, but one can hardly expect to relate very well to most people when one spends most of their time studying extremely obscure subjects alone while they sit down and barely move. That’s pretty much the antithesis of what normal people enjoy.
Balance intellectual activities with specifically non-intellectual activities that are not based around the passive consumption of media. Actually get out into the world, move your body in new ways, interact with a variety of people, seek novel experiences, travel around to new places far away and try to find new aspects of the area where you live. Basically just do the opposite of limiting your physical mobility and emotional expressiveness in order to focus on logical thinking about intangible intellectual subjects.
Watching TV is not an intellectual activity in any real sense. Most TV stimulates the senses and evokes emotions in the viewer through storylines and such. This is obviously very different from studying mathematics seriously.
Would it surprise you to learn I’d recently spent two weeks swing dancing in a pop-up shanty-town in rural Sweden? That I clock up around thirty miles a week on foot in one of the world’s largest metropolitan conurbations? That I nearly joined a travelling circus school a few years ago? That I’ve given solo vocal performances on stage for six nights a week in front of hundreds of people?
With respect, you have no knowledge of my “situation”. Please don’t presume to offer me advice on the basis of whatever assumptions you’ve incorrectly conjured up.
Those all sound like some pretty awesome activities!
My question to you, with respect, is this: why not just reduce the amount of hours per day you spend on serious, solitary intellectual work and fill the balance with externally oriented, social activities till you find a maintainable balance of sociability vs. studying?
Maybe I’m misinterpreting you, but it seems you’re essentially saying that when you (temporarily) hyper focus on solitary, intellectual activities you (temporarily) encounter more difficulty in conversations. This doesn’t surprise me and it seems evident that the only real solution is to find the right balance for you and accept the inherent trade offs.
My question to you, with respect, is this: why not just reduce the amount of hours per day you spend on serious, solitary intellectual work and fill the balance with externally oriented, social activities till you find a maintainable balance of sociability vs. studying?
It’s not like I have some slider on my desktop, with “sit in a box, autistically rocking back and forth, counting numbers” at one end, and “rakishly sample the epicurean delights of the world” at the other. I have time and work and study commitments. I have externally-imposed scheduling. I have inscrutable internal motivation levels that need to be contended with.
It’s a case of resource management, and occasionally when managing those resources I’ll have to focus on one area to the exclusion of another. That’s fine. It’s not something there’s a “solution” to. It’s a condition all moderately busy people have to operate under.
Would it surprise you to learn I’d recently spent two weeks swing dancing in a pop-up shanty-town in rural Sweden? That I clock up around thirty miles a week on foot in one of the world’s largest metropolitan conurbations? That I nearly joined a travelling circus school a few years ago? That I’ve given solo vocal performances on stage for six nights a week in front of hundreds of people?
Those sound like pretty good topics for conversations with people.
To a degree. Swing dancing in Sweden is a fairly unusual way to spend your summer holiday.
I think you and I have had exchanges about “optimising for awesomeness” in the past. In some ways, having “awesome” talents or hobbies or experiences is no more relatable than having insular and nerdy ones. It’s just cooler.
What? I’m under the impression that there are a much larger number of people who enjoy hearing me talk about trips around Europe or exams while drunk than about models of ultra-high-energy cosmic ray propagation.
I think we’re talking at crossed purposes here. Relatability isn’t popularity. If I wrestled a Bengal tiger into submission and rode it across the subcontinent, I’m sure a lot of people would want to hear me talk about that. But unless they’d also ridden across India on a subdued tiger, it wouldn’t foster a sense of empathy, kinship or mutual understanding.
It doesn’t need much context. If someone asks you “How are you?” you can reasonable answer how you experienced yesterday something that made you feel XYZ.
Intelligent people have a tendency to overcomplicated it. A lot of small talk that happens between normal people doesn’t have much content.
I’m under the impression that that often doesn’t work very well with most males—I find it relatively hard to emotionally relate with them unless we have something in particular to talk about. (Then again, biased sample, yadda yadda yadda.)
One strategy: Take insular, scholarly interest in a broadly popular subject. For example, I’m interested in APBRmetrics and associated theoretical questions about the sport of basketball. One nice plus to this hobby is that it also leaves me with pretty up-to-date non-technical knowledge about NBA and college basketball.
I seldom watch TV and know very little of contemporary popular culture, and most of my conversations are about my experiences in meatspace (travels abroad, stuff I do with friends, etc.), my plans for the future, asking the other person about their experiences in meatspace and plans for the future, and (for people who appreciate it) physics.
But why do you want to keep yourself relatable to (arbitrary) people, rather than looking for people you’re already relatable to, anyway?
This came up at yesterday’s London meetup: activities for keeping oneself relatable to other human beings.
We were dissecting motives behind goals, and one of mine was maintaining interests that other people could relate to. I have more pedestrian interests, but they’re the first to get dropped when my time is constrained (which it usually is), so if I end up meeting someone out in the wild, all I have to talk about is stuff like natural language parsing, utilitarian population ethics and patterns of conspicuous consumption.
Discussing it in a smaller group later, it turns out I’m not the only person who does this. It makes sense that insular, scholarly people of a sort found on LW may frequently find themselves withdrawn from common cultural ground with other people, so I thought I’d kick off a discussion on the subject.
What do you do to keep yourself relatable to other people?
EDIT: Just to clarify, this isn’t a request for advice on how to talk to people. Please don’t interpret it as such.
Richard Feynman was a theoretician as well as a ‘people person’; if you read his writings about his experiences with people it really illustrates quite well how he managed to do it.
One tactic that he employed was simply being mysterious. He knew few people could relate to a University professor and that many would feel intimidated by that, so when in the company of laypeople he never even brought it up. They would ask him what he did and he would say, “I can’t say.” If pressed, he would say something vague like, “I work at the University.” Done properly, it’s playful and coy, and even though people might think you’re a bit weird, they definitely won’t consider you unrelatable.
In my opinion there’s no need to concern yourself with activities that you don’t like, as very few people are really actually interested in your interests. Whenever the topic of your interests comes up, just steer the conversation towards their life and their interests. You’ll be speaking 10% of the time yet you’ll appear like a brilliant conversationalist. If they ask you if you’ve read a particular book or heard a particular artist, just say no (but don’t sound harsh or bored). You’ll seem ‘indie’ and mysterious, and people like that. In practice, though, as one gets older, people rarely ask about these things.
It’s a common mistake that I’ve seen often in intellectual people. They assume they have to keep up with popular media so that they can have conversations. That is not true at all.
While this seems like reasonable advice, I’m not sure it’s universally good advice. Richard Feynman seemed to enjoy a level of charm many of us couldn’t hope to possess. He also had a wide selection of esoteric interests unrelated to his field.
I would also claim that there’s value in simply maintaining such an interest. During particularly insular periods where I’m absorbed in less accessible work, I find myself starting to exhibit “aspie” characteristics, losing verbal fluency and becoming socially insensitive. It’s not just about having things to talk about, but maintaining my own faculties for relating to people.
This works.
What happens when both people employ that method?
If everyone in the conversation is employing this method, then chances are higher that the others actually want to hear about your esoteric topics. If you pause early and give them a chance to talk about themselves (or for them to press for more), that’ll keep you synched up with what they want.
People talking to each other about their lives and their interests! Success!
I was thinking more like two people each trying to get the other person to do that, like people at a door getting jammed saying “After you,” “After you,” etc.
All the times this has happened to me, one person would come up with a Schelling-pointy reason why the other person’s recent life was more interesting (e.g. they had just come back from a trip abroad or something).
I have never actually seen this happen, and I use that method all the time. I don’t have an explanation for why, since I rarely think about problems I don’t have.
I use the recaplets on Television without Pity to keep up with the basic plot and cliffhangers of tv shows I don’t watch, but most of my friends do. That way I don’t drop out of conversations just because they’re talking about True Blood.
Note: the only problem this strategy has caused for me is that my now-bf assumed I was a GoT fan (instead of having read the books and TWOP’d the show recaps), invited me over to watch, and assumed I turned him down because I wasn’t interested in him instead of being indifferent to the show. We sorted it out eventually.
Is there something similar, but for sports? I usually get lost when conversation turns to the local sports team. I couldn’t find anything with a quick google, but I’m probably not using the right search terms.
For a general overview of what’s going on in the baseball world, this is pretty good place to start. There are also pleanty of blogs devoted to individual teams, though I’m not really in a position to make recommendations, unless you happen to be looking for a San Francisco Giants blog, in which case I highly reccomend this blog. Can’t really help with other sports.
Haven’t the foggiest. I don’t really have friends who talk about sports. I read The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker so I end up really well informed on a couple narrow sports things that get features. And then my dad and brother rib me for knowing nothing about football, but everything about the Manning dynasty.
Well, I maintain pedestrian interests, but I consider it a failure condition to not attempt to participate in them. Comparably bad to going off my diet.
Downside: This is sometimes frustrating. I like Gaming and I like Game X, but sometimes I will think “I’m only playing Game X right now so I have something to talk about in the Car with Friend X.” or Alternatively, I sometimes play a game and then think “But no one other than me cares about this game, so playing it feels inefficient.”
Also, some of the other people who share pedestrian interests with me will work to prevent me from dropping them. For instance, if Game Y is a pedestrian interest, and my wife wants me to play Game Y with her, that doesn’t just get dropped regardless of how busy I am.
Downside: This does sometimes result in me feeling overworked (I will plan events in Game Y as I am passing out in Bed. Again, this seems efficiency related.)
Also, I spend a fair amount of time trying to help various friends/family members directly. So I frequently have that conversational topic of “How is that problem we discussed earlier going?”
Downside: This this boosts my stress level again, because it increases the number of things I’m worrying about.
Finally, I have relatability notes on my phone for my wife that pop up on a semi-frequent basis. I also have these reminders on some of the helping people I’m doing, or even reminders for better advice on Game Y.
Downside: I’m really beginning to hate my phones “You have a reminder!” noise. Also, sometimes the reminders are depressing. I have a reminder “Spend time hanging out with your best friend” that has been unchecked for more than a month.
Potential Silver Lining: That being said, sometimes the reminder is encouraging: It’s nice to be told “Make time for yourself.” and realize “Why yes, I am doing that right now. Ahhhh.”
Note: I’m positive this isn’t advice, because after looking at it posted altogether, my conclusion is not “Other people should do this.” but “I have a problem and this is why I’m on anti-anxiety meds.”
Obvious options are consuming popular culture, e.g. popular TV shows, music, or sports. There’s a lot of good TV out there these days so it shouldn’t be hard to get hooked on at least one show you can talk to a lot of people about (Game of Thrones?).
If you really insist on the “you do” part, I don’t do anything with this explicit goal. I just talk.
A while ago I heared from Jim Rohn that even if you don’t have had a near death experience everyone has something interesting to talk about. At the time I said to myself, hey I do have an experience that sort of qualifies as a near death experience. I had 5 days of artificial coma with some strange paranormal experience after waking up out of it.
At the time I still had a hard time conversing with people even through I had experiences that qualified as interesting. I just lacked the skill to talk about them.
I don’t think that relating to other people is primarily a question of the content of conversation.
It’s about emotions. It’s about empathy. It’s about getting out of your head.
Instead of spending time in an activity that you could tell other people about, spend more time actually talking to people and practice relating on an emotional level.
Alternatively, I just read about a veep who was told at management training to start by asking about people’s families, and then talk about business matters. As a result, the people who thought she was cold and disliked them switched to thinking she was friendly and caring.
This seems very platitude-y. In practise there presumably needs to be some sort of context for “relating on an emotional level”. You’re unlikely to walk up to someone and start talking about all these awesome emotions you’ve been having.
To clarify, this isn’t some problem I need solving. It’s an observation that if I lock myself up in a room for a month watching maths lectures and writing essays on neoclassical expenditure theories, it becomes harder to engage socially with people.
Don’t do that then!
It doesn’t need much context. If someone asks you “How are you?” you can reasonable answer how you experienced yesterday something that made you feel XYZ.
Intelligent people have a tendency to overcomplicated it. A lot of small talk that happens between normal people doesn’t have much content.
It doesn’t help if you catch up with popular culture while you are looked up in your room. The problem is being locked up in a room and being socially isolated instead of the specific content that you consume.
Instead of spending 2 hours locked up in your room to catch up with popular culture spends that time going out and talk to people.
I’ve downvoted this for being bad advice that I explicitly requested you refrain from giving.
I think that the advice is well suited to your situation. I suspect that you don’t realize this because you spend so much time isolating yourself from people to study math.
I think it’s great that so many people here are extremely intellegent, but one can hardly expect to relate very well to most people when one spends most of their time studying extremely obscure subjects alone while they sit down and barely move. That’s pretty much the antithesis of what normal people enjoy.
Balance intellectual activities with specifically non-intellectual activities that are not based around the passive consumption of media. Actually get out into the world, move your body in new ways, interact with a variety of people, seek novel experiences, travel around to new places far away and try to find new aspects of the area where you live. Basically just do the opposite of limiting your physical mobility and emotional expressiveness in order to focus on logical thinking about intangible intellectual subjects.
You know there’s a huge fraction of the people in the developed world who willingly spend a sizeable fraction of their waking time watching TV, right?
Watching TV is not an intellectual activity in any real sense. Most TV stimulates the senses and evokes emotions in the viewer through storylines and such. This is obviously very different from studying mathematics seriously.
Would it surprise you to learn I’d recently spent two weeks swing dancing in a pop-up shanty-town in rural Sweden? That I clock up around thirty miles a week on foot in one of the world’s largest metropolitan conurbations? That I nearly joined a travelling circus school a few years ago? That I’ve given solo vocal performances on stage for six nights a week in front of hundreds of people?
With respect, you have no knowledge of my “situation”. Please don’t presume to offer me advice on the basis of whatever assumptions you’ve incorrectly conjured up.
Those all sound like some pretty awesome activities!
My question to you, with respect, is this: why not just reduce the amount of hours per day you spend on serious, solitary intellectual work and fill the balance with externally oriented, social activities till you find a maintainable balance of sociability vs. studying?
Maybe I’m misinterpreting you, but it seems you’re essentially saying that when you (temporarily) hyper focus on solitary, intellectual activities you (temporarily) encounter more difficulty in conversations. This doesn’t surprise me and it seems evident that the only real solution is to find the right balance for you and accept the inherent trade offs.
It’s not like I have some slider on my desktop, with “sit in a box, autistically rocking back and forth, counting numbers” at one end, and “rakishly sample the epicurean delights of the world” at the other. I have time and work and study commitments. I have externally-imposed scheduling. I have inscrutable internal motivation levels that need to be contended with.
It’s a case of resource management, and occasionally when managing those resources I’ll have to focus on one area to the exclusion of another. That’s fine. It’s not something there’s a “solution” to. It’s a condition all moderately busy people have to operate under.
For certain people that’s not an option (“phdcomics is a documentary”—shminux).
Those sound like pretty good topics for conversations with people.
To a degree. Swing dancing in Sweden is a fairly unusual way to spend your summer holiday.
I think you and I have had exchanges about “optimising for awesomeness” in the past. In some ways, having “awesome” talents or hobbies or experiences is no more relatable than having insular and nerdy ones. It’s just cooler.
What? I’m under the impression that there are a much larger number of people who enjoy hearing me talk about trips around Europe or exams while drunk than about models of ultra-high-energy cosmic ray propagation.
I think we’re talking at crossed purposes here. Relatability isn’t popularity. If I wrestled a Bengal tiger into submission and rode it across the subcontinent, I’m sure a lot of people would want to hear me talk about that. But unless they’d also ridden across India on a subdued tiger, it wouldn’t foster a sense of empathy, kinship or mutual understanding.
I’m under the impression that that often doesn’t work very well with most males—I find it relatively hard to emotionally relate with them unless we have something in particular to talk about. (Then again, biased sample, yadda yadda yadda.)
One strategy: Take insular, scholarly interest in a broadly popular subject. For example, I’m interested in APBRmetrics and associated theoretical questions about the sport of basketball. One nice plus to this hobby is that it also leaves me with pretty up-to-date non-technical knowledge about NBA and college basketball.
I have a simmilar interest in SABRmetrics, and baseball.
I seldom watch TV and know very little of contemporary popular culture, and most of my conversations are about my experiences in meatspace (travels abroad, stuff I do with friends, etc.), my plans for the future, asking the other person about their experiences in meatspace and plans for the future, and (for people who appreciate it) physics.
But why do you want to keep yourself relatable to (arbitrary) people, rather than looking for people you’re already relatable to, anyway?
Because the overwhelming majority of people are arbitrary people. Any given person I meet is, almost definitively, going to be an arbitrary person.
Depends on where you meet them.