As long as I’m demanding that LessWrong provide me with the answers to my personal problems, I find myself becoming more and more misanthropic as time goes on. I genuinely like only about five people out of everyone I’ve ever met, two of whom are family. I feel like almost everyone else is borderline homogeneous, originality seems extremely scarce and I’m bored whenever I try to talk to most people.
Context: I’m in college and not making friends. This is largely because I don’t drink or follow or play in sports, I think. I’m bad at small talk. It’s also because I’m unhappy with lots of what’s perceived as normal around here (eg the subtle dehumanization of women).
I don’t really know what to do. I believe humans are social animals and that I’d be happier with friends, but at the same time I really don’t like any of the people who I talk to here. Any social advice at all would be useful for me, and anything that deals with the specifics of my situation doubly so. Misanthropy is obviously bad, but I don’t know how to transition from my dislike of most people to becoming friends with them, nor am I positive that it’s the right thing for me to do in this situation.
I had very few (physical) friends in college and even fewer now. I find that I get enough social interaction online and with my family (I’m married). Of course everyone is different but you may not need as many friends as you currently seem to think.
If I may offer some advice: Be careful not to rationalize social anxiety with “they are homogeneous, they dehumanize women, they aren’t as original as I am, they bore me”. That’s externalizing an internal problem.
There are people of considerable intellectual caliber who have no qualms engaging in random small talk (a required skill in many career paths), and you’ll only find out who they are once you get past that barrier.
Perhaps start by actively distinguishing between “people I actively dislike” and “people who I don’t actively dislike, and am assigning the dislike label to based solely on my prior that I dislike most people”.
Also, in regard to inauthenticity, do you regard making small talk as inauthentic, even if you are saying true things? For example, is it inauthentic to pay someone a compliment if you honestly believe the compliment, but are only making it as a way to start a conversation and find out whether you like them? If yes, I suggest you taboo “inauthentic” and explain why you don’t like that approach. I suspect that exploring that label more generally may be fertile ground.
More generally, do you have a problem with people who are not bothered by inauthentic conversation, but also are happy to have authentic conversations? If so, I suggest asking whether this is an area where you should work to cultivate tolerance of tolerance.
To distinguish these people, I would ask what sorts of conversations you consider authentic (again, taboo that word!), and think about what sorts of authentic conversations are easier to start up than others, and what sorts of settings would be appropriate contexts for those conversations. To pick an example from elsewhere in the thread, gaming stores and clubs / groups might be a good one, because it’s easy to start a conversation about what types of games people enjoy and why, or to discuss strategy for a particular game. In other words: there’s an external reason that makes the authentic conversation on topic.
If you’re having trouble finding such groups, have you considered making one? Start a gaming club. Start a LW meetup. Is there an athiest group on campus already?
You say you’re becoming more misanthropic; did you use to like more people? What were those people like? Do you have an internal narrative about why you don’t like them anymore?
I used to like more people and to just be able to go up to people and talk to them.
When I was very young I was extremely outgoing. That stopped sometime during elementary school, I don’t really remember when exactly, but it was because I was naive and trusting and people would take advantage of me (stealing stuff from me, copying homework, pranks and “jokes”). I moved to a different town in middle school and was pseudo popular for a year, in that everyone was nice to me and would talk with me. I lapsed back into idealism, and then ended up having no friends again because no one really liked me, they just liked being associated with the novelty that was the new kid. High school was a gradual process wherein I became less and less popular up to the beginning of my senior year, when I began to regain ground. In college I’m isolated.
The people I like are simultaneously independent free-thinkers and compassionate. There’s tension between the two, but it produces interesting people. My favorite person in the world is my little brother who is one year younger than me, he is hilarious in a highbrow intellectual way and always able to find my blind spots and more factually knowledgeable than me, so he corrects me. (My intellectual strength is that I’m good at understanding how different concepts interact and at generating strategies for argumentation. It’s not that he totally dominates me in intellectual discussions, but that I move the discussion forward and he stops it from moving towards the wrong areas.) He shares most of my values and traits except that he’s a harder worker, simultaneously better and worse at social things, and he’s less selfish. He’s ridiculously awesome.
I like people less because social norms have grown more complicated as I grew older and I prefer authenticity, I think. Also, the less time I spend socializing, the less knowledge I have about social norms, and there’s a feedback loop. Additionally, I think many social norms are morally wrong and I’m not willing to engage in them.
I’ve read and now reread that post of yours. However, I don’t think I’ll be able to use any of the advice you give unless I’m encountering these other people often, and there’s sort of a chicken and egg situation here because I’m unable to maintain prolonged interaction with people I dislike. I also don’t think that liking the people would be sufficient to solve my problem, because other people would still dislike me unless I engaged in the kind of behavior that I hate.
There’s also a problem because, now that I think about it, I’m having a hard time identifying positive traits with anyone who I’ve been interacting with, except for the trait of humor. The primary values I’ve listed above, the ones that determine who I really like to be friends with, are values I don’t associate with anyone here (okay, technically there are two people who I would like to get to know better. That raises logistical issues related to my lack of social skill generally though. And despite those two people, it’s still bad that I don’t like more people.)
Overall, I’m frustrated that I have this strong desire to connect with people, but yet almost all of the people available for me to connect with are people who wouldn’t want to or be able connect with me and who I wouldn’t want to or be able to connect with.
My first idea is to ask your brother for advice—he probably has some friends, and if he’s good at correcting you in a way you can appreciate, he might be able to figure out what’s wrong on your end and help you fix it.
Additionally, I think many social norms are morally wrong and I’m not willing to engage in them.
Can you be more specific? Different subcultures use different social norms. There might be one compatible with you.
other people would still dislike me unless I engaged in the kind of behavior that I hate.
I think you’re underestimating human heterogeneity. The fix for this is to meet many different people, not engage in the kind of behavior you hate, and not bother hanging out with anyone who is put off after you learn that they were put off. You are not overwhelmingly likely to run out of people unless you live in the middle of nowhere. (Do you?)
I think you’re underestimating human heterogeneity. The fix for this is to meet many different people, not engage in the kind of behavior you hate, and not bother hanging out with anyone who is put off after you learn that they were put off. You are not overwhelmingly likely to run out of people unless you live in the middle of nowhere. (Do you?)
I strongly second this. The people who are like you and who you would like most likely also hate the behaviors you don’t want to engage in. By not engaging in them, you may alienate the people you dislike, but you’ll make yourself more interesting to the people you actually do want to hang out with.
I don’t know how many people do the things I’m interested in. I joined a political science club, which seems good so far. I haven’t encountered any other social things I’m interested in though. I need to get more information about what activities are going on in my area, and I should probably expand my areas of interest also.
Yay LessWrong gives me momentary confidence and hope for my social future!
Most clubs go out of their way to get more recruits, in my experience. Jugglers and Capoeiristas both like to put on demos and hand out flyers. If there’s a student center where you are they probably have info on more clubs/hangouts you can go to also.
My first idea is to ask your brother for advice—he probably has some friends, and if he’s good at correcting you in a way you can appreciate, he might be able to figure out what’s wrong on your end and help you fix it.
Interesting. I know him well enough to know that he would dislike the same people who I’m currently disliking, but I think that for whatever reason he might know more about how to find interesting and intelligent people.
As of now, he has more friends than me. We were roughly equal during high school. His social role when he’s in groups is generally to be slightly quieter than average, but then to fire off witty and sarcastic one-liners at certain times. My social role is nothing, I find it hard to function when I’m not problem-solving or analyzing. I didn’t really have friends in high school so much as people who weren’t actively rude to me and who valued my input, to be honest. I should probably figure out a gimmick and stick with it, like what my brother does, the problem is that this feels inauthentic to me. His comes to him naturally whereas I don’t really seem to have any inherent social role.
Can you be more specific? Different subcultures use different social norms. There might be one compatible with you.
Drinking and making jokes about sex. Self congratulatory behavior and bravado. Inauthenticity in general.
I’m uncertain whether everyone is really like this, or whether they’re just signaling that because they’re insecure college freshmen boys and that’s stereotypical behavior and they’re scared of being an outsider. I think it’s probably some of both insofar as they’re internalizing these norms because they find the internalization of these norms advantageous. I hope it will calm down soon if it is primarily signaling, but I don’t think that will actually happen because the underlying factors will still exist and will actually be intensified by this internalization. I expect it will wind down once there’s an external incentive to be responsible or at least to be perceived as responsible, but that will probably take at least a couple years.
This college is too small for legitimate subcultures to exist. I thought that small class sizes would be a benefit, but I never considered that it would caused increased pressure for conformity, which it seems to have done. That sucks.
I think you’re underestimating human heterogeneity. The fix for this is to meet many different people, not engage in the kind of behavior you hate, and not bother hanging out with anyone who is put off after you learn that they were put off. You are not overwhelmingly likely to run out of people unless you live in the middle of nowhere. (Do you?)
I feel as though I’m trapped on my college campus. I live in an unfamiliar city of 150,000 people. I’m unsure where else I should go to meet and interact with people my age. I don’t really enjoy anything except playing games and intellectual conversations; I should broaden my areas of interest, I suppose. I don’t know how to get involved in off-campus activities though, or how to find out about them, or whether they exist for people my age. I also tend to be very static and stagnant; one of my major flaws is that I’m reluctant to change habits. This is another part of the reason why I feel trapped.
I don’t really know how to meet new people without broadcasting desperation, either.
I only know a handful of people who I could fairly sum up as having “social roles” in the same way you describe your brother as having. This could be a deficiency on my end, or I could know weird people—or this could be an inadequate model of how social interaction works, and my bet is on the last thing.
they’re insecure college freshmen boys
Have you considered making friends with girls? There will probably be less (though still some) of the things you list among girls, depending on what you mean by “inauthenticity”. (What do you mean by “inauthenticity”?)
that will probably take at least a couple years.
Have you considered making friends with upperclassmen or socializing with professors you like? Why do your friends have to be your age?
This college is too small for legitimate subcultures to exist.
Just how small is this college? Mine had like 400 people and there were types, if not outright subcultures.
I don’t really enjoy anything except playing games
Is there a game store? Those often host gaming events.
and intellectual conversations
Do your friends need to be in-person?
I also tend to be very static and stagnant; one of my major flaws is that I’m reluctant to change habits.
This one could be a problem. Are there any known ways around or through it that are relatively easy to exploit?
I don’t really know how to meet new people without broadcasting desperation, either.
Be there to do something else too, and focus (verbally) on that thing (while striking up conversations, of course).
Have you considered making friends with girls? There will probably be less (though still some) of the things you list among girls, depending on what you mean by “inauthenticity”. (What do you mean by “inauthenticity”?)
Honestly not sure how. I’ve never really ever made friends “on purpose” with people in general. That’s probably a lot of my problem. Then there’s more issues involved when I have to deal with girls, because I have to deal with gender roles or different expectations or whatever.
I’m not intrinsically opposed to the idea. My issue is that I don’t know how to:
Become friends with people unless I interact with them a lot, and that’s not really happening.
Become friends with girls specifically, I assume the issues there with getting to know someone will be even more challenging.
You’re dealing with a social wreck here, basically.
I also don’t think girls tend to be very authentic at my age, but it’s not as though they’d be worse than the guys.
Have you considered making friends with upperclassmen or socializing with professors you like? Why do your friends have to be your age?
I don’t know how to make friends with people I don’t interact with on a more or less daily basis. My friendships have always just “happened”, I’ve never actively pursued them before.
Just how small is this college? Mine had like 400 people and there were types, if not outright subcultures.
600 in my grade, 2000 something total. Maybe I’m just wrong here and am unobservant.
Is there a game store? Those often host gaming events.
I should check for game events in my area, I guess. There’s not one on campus or anything.
Do your friends need to be in-person?
Preferably. I don’t think I could make a very good friendship via the internet.
This one could be a problem. Are there any known ways around or through it that are relatively easy to exploit?
Not sure, I need to fight it.
Be there to do something else too, and focus (verbally) on that thing (while striking up conversations, of course).
Just about everyone arrives to events in groups and I don’t know how to to strike up conversations.
So I’m getting the sense that you were only restricting the demographics of potential friends by default, which is good, since it means there’s more space to look in than you thought. Professors in particular might be good if you mostly want to have intellectual conversations! Show up to office hours, and have intellectual conversations with them!
There’s “authentic” again—what does that mean? My best guess right now is “not wrapped up in signaling” in which case—well, you’re gonna have a bad time. Humans do that. (Though I begin to suspect that you’re oversensitive to it and may be seeing more of it than there is.) But maybe you mean something else.
I don’t think I could make a very good friendship via the internet.
Why not?
I don’t know how to to strike up conversations.
Go up to someone. Ask them a question (“do you know if the food here is any good?”, “can I borrow a pen?”, “is the line for tickets?”) or pay them a compliment (“awesome t-shirt!”, [laughter at a joke they just made], “your presentation just now was fantastic, my favorite part was [x]!”) or stand near them and their group (without being followy if they try to leave) and pick up on something someone in the group says when there’s enough of a break to do it (“yeah, Communism would only work for nonhuman aliens”, “that’s funny, when I was in Japan I didn’t see any kaiju at all!”, “cool, so snakes don’t even have ears? Can they sense vibrations?”). Or the classic standby of: Stick out your hand. “Hi, I’m [chaosmosis]! What’s your name?”
The people who like drinking and sports are the most prominent in many colleges, but it doesn’t mean that they’re the only ones around.
I had the same problem as you my first year at college, and mainly solved it through three factors, in order of importance:
Making friends in math classes.
Going to a few student-organized clubs.
Blind luck.
Whatever strategy you decide, if you happen to find just one or two friends that also don’t have too many friends, you can then try everything you try together and it will be much easier. I realize this might be terribly unhelpful advice.
Most people are terrible. It’s a lot of work to sort the awesome people from the terrible people. I’ve had good luck using “gamer” “geek”, “queer”, and “kinky” as labels that tend to more reliably apply to interesting people or people I’m happy to get along with, but your mileage may vary. Every single one of my room-mates plays or used to play Magic the Gathering, for example.
Not making friends with the random people around you in college who are into drinking, sports, and dehumanizing women is, in my mind, a good sign. You shouldn’t force yourself to try and make friends with people who don’t share interests with you, or at least are interesting to talk to. Try talking to the people you see who are actively weird.
Try talking to the people you see who are actively weird.
I tried that a week ago. I now have this kid who just might be repressing some homosexuality following me around whenever he sees me (it’s the repression that I have a problem with, it manifests itself by him scaring the hell out of me and talking about obscure mythologies and creepy myths all the time, he seems to have serious psychological problems. He’s one of those kids who no one will talk to, so he gets creepier and creepier the more he’s left in isolation, and then a feedback loop happens. I talked to him out of pity and regret it).
I like the advice, in general. Are there additional filters I can apply?
Not exactly a filter, but if you make friends with a person who is awesome and who seems to have a lot of friends you should try to hang out with them as much as possible. Most of my friends end up being from friends I already had.
People who are in bands or theater tend to be fun, I like most people I’ve met who play Capoeira, Women with piercings and dyed/shaved hair tend to be more fun to talk to, and most people I’ve met who are in math programs or math graduates are awesome. As always, your mileage may vary on this sort of advice.
You said in another comment that you like gaming. Local game stores often have websites where they post information about which days of the week they encourage people to come in and play various kinds of games, from boardgames to minis to TCGS. Some even have pickup roleplaying groups you can just drop in and out of. I definitely recommend googling {Your Town’s Name} + game store, or looking at clubs run by your college. Even if your college seems too small to support subcultures they probably exist anyway.
I think it’s also helpful to look outside your immediate age group for friends. Many of my friends and most of the people I like best are several years older than me, because when I was meeting them around age 18 or whatever i found everyone around my age intolerable. Similarly, though you probably don’t want to hang around high schools you shouldn’t necessarily dismiss someone because they’re younger than you. This will probably make it harder to date though.
people around you in college who are into drinking
When I was in college, I once thought that I didn’t enjoy drinking. Turns out, I didn’t enjoy drinking with people who I was not friendly with (and I had poor social skills and thus few friends). But I really only learned that after following the equivalent of your excellent advice.
Hang on. Most people are really nice. Most put a confident facade over a good nature. Most are a bit lonely, unsure of their own value, and mainly worried about how other people see them. Most are full of interesting thoughts that they are shy to express in front of strangers. Most young people are idealistic to the point of charming naivety.
dehumanizing women
And the women. The ones being dehumanized. Who are they hanging out with? The evil dehumanizers, or the self-righteous nerds, full of anger, staring sullenly and lustfully at them from the corners?
Terrible is hyperbole. Most people, even though they’re nice, or secretly have interesting thoughts or whatever feel good stuff you say is true about them, are not going to be fun for me to hang out with.
Since when did I recommend being a lustful sullen staring cornernerd?
And the women. The ones being dehumanized. Who are they hanging out with?
You are reading a little more judgment into the post that I think is intended.
The women (and people generally) that are going to be enjoyable to spend time with are not hanging out with the hyper-masculine jocks. There’s no shame in noticing that, and picking social groups accordingly in order to try to find social companions. Particularly because the jocks are particularly poor at being reflective about their own social skills and the social skills of others.
I don’t mean this snarkily, but have you considered drinking or taking up a sport?
Low level sport (where everyone’s a bit rubbish and no-one takes it seriously) is superb fun. Obviously, you’ll be terrible at it, but if you find a club that’s short of people and loses all the time anyway you’ll probably be more welcome than you think. And just by taking part you’ll get much better at it. It might change your life.
And if you’re embedded in a society where social life revolves around alcohol you’ll miss out on a vast amount of the fun and happiness that comes with being human if you don’t join in. You don’t have to overdo it. Just try having a glass of wine with someone you like one day and see how it goes.
I am a pretty nerdy guy, but if I had to relive my life without ever drinking alcohol or playing cricket or rowing or playing rugby I just think I’d probably not want to bother. ( I am unbelievably bad at rugby. )
If it helps encourage you, for a long time I coached novice rowers for King’s College (part of the University of Cambridge). Occasionally we’d get a hopelessly non-sporty introvert turning up wanting a go. Some of these guys were so shy they could hardly speak. And they were often the people who enjoyed it the most, and became most committed and most likely to come back year after year.
I’m not going to lie to you, with one exception they never became any good. But they all became much better than they had been, and seemed to enjoy the process, and are some of the people that I most enjoyed coaching.
It helps of course that rowing is actually technically complex and I could talk to these people about how best to turn energy into momentum and how it is that a boat can balance even though its centre of gravity is above its centre of flotation and so on.
I think one of the reasons that rowing is so popular amongst the sciency types at Cambridge is that it is a sport that you can think about in terms of physics.
But it really doesn’t matter what the sport is. Just go and find a small club doing something where they have trouble getting enough people together to make a team, and where there’s someone nice who knows how to teach it, explain that you’ve not done anything like this before and ask if they could use you. Stick with it for a month, and if you really hate it give up.
One nice thing about sports is that the skills are easily measurable. Working out what to do in order to make your scores better is part of the fun. Don’t miss out. It will teach you so much about life.
I like sports, specifically basketball, which I’m decent at. But I dislike almost all sports people, who are the ones who are drinking the most and doing all of the things that I dislike. There are probably good people in intramurals activities, but I don’t want to be a teammate to the bad ones to get there.
Non-competitive (i.e. no traveling to tournaments) sports are very likely to have a different (and possibly more receptive-to-you) culture than varsity sports (or their college equivalents).
Having friends seems more or less like a prerequisite, I’m also not confident about my ability to lead a group like that. It might be a good long-term goal.
LW meetups don’t have to be large or formal events. See Starting a Less Wrong meetup is easy. You could even write in the meetup post that it’s going to be highly informal, to set expectations.
Having friends seems more or less like a prerequisite
Nope!
my ability to lead a group like that
If you can send emails to people saying “There will be a meetup on X day, with Y activity,” you’re most of the way there.
Seriously. If there’s anyone in a 100-mile radius who is interested in meetups, making them happen is not hard, and in fact is probably easier than many other social activities. You could make a post on LW to gauge interest in your geographic area :)
Seconding drethelin’s advice in general. I feel very empathetic towards your situation, and I did not like most of the people I met when I first went to college, and yet I made some serious long-term friends there.
Also, for fear of not having a “social role”, just make sure there’s something memorable about you. Like a cartoon character, have some element of style that is unique and not obviously negative—so that people can see you and think “There’s that kid with the X again”, and you blend into the background less. If X can also signal desirability to a relevant social group, all the better. Something that already seems cool to you, so it doesn’t set off your “inauthenticity” alarm. Bow tie?
You’re the hero in your own story. Don’t worry that most of the people you run into are NPCs—that’s normal. Keep looking and you’ll find the 3-5 other PCs to join your party.
As long as I’m demanding that LessWrong provide me with the answers to my personal problems, I find myself becoming more and more misanthropic as time goes on. I genuinely like only about five people out of everyone I’ve ever met, two of whom are family. I feel like almost everyone else is borderline homogeneous, originality seems extremely scarce and I’m bored whenever I try to talk to most people.
Context: I’m in college and not making friends. This is largely because I don’t drink or follow or play in sports, I think. I’m bad at small talk. It’s also because I’m unhappy with lots of what’s perceived as normal around here (eg the subtle dehumanization of women).
I don’t really know what to do. I believe humans are social animals and that I’d be happier with friends, but at the same time I really don’t like any of the people who I talk to here. Any social advice at all would be useful for me, and anything that deals with the specifics of my situation doubly so. Misanthropy is obviously bad, but I don’t know how to transition from my dislike of most people to becoming friends with them, nor am I positive that it’s the right thing for me to do in this situation.
I had very few (physical) friends in college and even fewer now. I find that I get enough social interaction online and with my family (I’m married). Of course everyone is different but you may not need as many friends as you currently seem to think.
If I may offer some advice: Be careful not to rationalize social anxiety with “they are homogeneous, they dehumanize women, they aren’t as original as I am, they bore me”. That’s externalizing an internal problem.
There are people of considerable intellectual caliber who have no qualms engaging in random small talk (a required skill in many career paths), and you’ll only find out who they are once you get past that barrier.
No simple solution, but nosce te ipsum applies.
How should I distinguish between these types of people? Is there a way that doesn’t require me making small talk with lots of people who I don’t like?
Perhaps start by actively distinguishing between “people I actively dislike” and “people who I don’t actively dislike, and am assigning the dislike label to based solely on my prior that I dislike most people”.
Also, in regard to inauthenticity, do you regard making small talk as inauthentic, even if you are saying true things? For example, is it inauthentic to pay someone a compliment if you honestly believe the compliment, but are only making it as a way to start a conversation and find out whether you like them? If yes, I suggest you taboo “inauthentic” and explain why you don’t like that approach. I suspect that exploring that label more generally may be fertile ground.
More generally, do you have a problem with people who are not bothered by inauthentic conversation, but also are happy to have authentic conversations? If so, I suggest asking whether this is an area where you should work to cultivate tolerance of tolerance.
To distinguish these people, I would ask what sorts of conversations you consider authentic (again, taboo that word!), and think about what sorts of authentic conversations are easier to start up than others, and what sorts of settings would be appropriate contexts for those conversations. To pick an example from elsewhere in the thread, gaming stores and clubs / groups might be a good one, because it’s easy to start a conversation about what types of games people enjoy and why, or to discuss strategy for a particular game. In other words: there’s an external reason that makes the authentic conversation on topic.
If you’re having trouble finding such groups, have you considered making one? Start a gaming club. Start a LW meetup. Is there an athiest group on campus already?
You need to find a (physical world) subculture to get involved in.
What are the people you like like?
You say you’re becoming more misanthropic; did you use to like more people? What were those people like? Do you have an internal narrative about why you don’t like them anymore?
On Enjoying Disagreeable Company is my post on liking people on purpose.
I used to like more people and to just be able to go up to people and talk to them.
When I was very young I was extremely outgoing. That stopped sometime during elementary school, I don’t really remember when exactly, but it was because I was naive and trusting and people would take advantage of me (stealing stuff from me, copying homework, pranks and “jokes”). I moved to a different town in middle school and was pseudo popular for a year, in that everyone was nice to me and would talk with me. I lapsed back into idealism, and then ended up having no friends again because no one really liked me, they just liked being associated with the novelty that was the new kid. High school was a gradual process wherein I became less and less popular up to the beginning of my senior year, when I began to regain ground. In college I’m isolated.
The people I like are simultaneously independent free-thinkers and compassionate. There’s tension between the two, but it produces interesting people. My favorite person in the world is my little brother who is one year younger than me, he is hilarious in a highbrow intellectual way and always able to find my blind spots and more factually knowledgeable than me, so he corrects me. (My intellectual strength is that I’m good at understanding how different concepts interact and at generating strategies for argumentation. It’s not that he totally dominates me in intellectual discussions, but that I move the discussion forward and he stops it from moving towards the wrong areas.) He shares most of my values and traits except that he’s a harder worker, simultaneously better and worse at social things, and he’s less selfish. He’s ridiculously awesome.
I like people less because social norms have grown more complicated as I grew older and I prefer authenticity, I think. Also, the less time I spend socializing, the less knowledge I have about social norms, and there’s a feedback loop. Additionally, I think many social norms are morally wrong and I’m not willing to engage in them.
I’ve read and now reread that post of yours. However, I don’t think I’ll be able to use any of the advice you give unless I’m encountering these other people often, and there’s sort of a chicken and egg situation here because I’m unable to maintain prolonged interaction with people I dislike. I also don’t think that liking the people would be sufficient to solve my problem, because other people would still dislike me unless I engaged in the kind of behavior that I hate.
There’s also a problem because, now that I think about it, I’m having a hard time identifying positive traits with anyone who I’ve been interacting with, except for the trait of humor. The primary values I’ve listed above, the ones that determine who I really like to be friends with, are values I don’t associate with anyone here (okay, technically there are two people who I would like to get to know better. That raises logistical issues related to my lack of social skill generally though. And despite those two people, it’s still bad that I don’t like more people.)
Overall, I’m frustrated that I have this strong desire to connect with people, but yet almost all of the people available for me to connect with are people who wouldn’t want to or be able connect with me and who I wouldn’t want to or be able to connect with.
My first idea is to ask your brother for advice—he probably has some friends, and if he’s good at correcting you in a way you can appreciate, he might be able to figure out what’s wrong on your end and help you fix it.
Can you be more specific? Different subcultures use different social norms. There might be one compatible with you.
I think you’re underestimating human heterogeneity. The fix for this is to meet many different people, not engage in the kind of behavior you hate, and not bother hanging out with anyone who is put off after you learn that they were put off. You are not overwhelmingly likely to run out of people unless you live in the middle of nowhere. (Do you?)
I strongly second this. The people who are like you and who you would like most likely also hate the behaviors you don’t want to engage in. By not engaging in them, you may alienate the people you dislike, but you’ll make yourself more interesting to the people you actually do want to hang out with.
I don’t know how many people do the things I’m interested in. I joined a political science club, which seems good so far. I haven’t encountered any other social things I’m interested in though. I need to get more information about what activities are going on in my area, and I should probably expand my areas of interest also.
Yay LessWrong gives me momentary confidence and hope for my social future!
Most clubs go out of their way to get more recruits, in my experience. Jugglers and Capoeiristas both like to put on demos and hand out flyers. If there’s a student center where you are they probably have info on more clubs/hangouts you can go to also.
Interesting. I know him well enough to know that he would dislike the same people who I’m currently disliking, but I think that for whatever reason he might know more about how to find interesting and intelligent people.
As of now, he has more friends than me. We were roughly equal during high school. His social role when he’s in groups is generally to be slightly quieter than average, but then to fire off witty and sarcastic one-liners at certain times. My social role is nothing, I find it hard to function when I’m not problem-solving or analyzing. I didn’t really have friends in high school so much as people who weren’t actively rude to me and who valued my input, to be honest. I should probably figure out a gimmick and stick with it, like what my brother does, the problem is that this feels inauthentic to me. His comes to him naturally whereas I don’t really seem to have any inherent social role.
Drinking and making jokes about sex. Self congratulatory behavior and bravado. Inauthenticity in general.
I’m uncertain whether everyone is really like this, or whether they’re just signaling that because they’re insecure college freshmen boys and that’s stereotypical behavior and they’re scared of being an outsider. I think it’s probably some of both insofar as they’re internalizing these norms because they find the internalization of these norms advantageous. I hope it will calm down soon if it is primarily signaling, but I don’t think that will actually happen because the underlying factors will still exist and will actually be intensified by this internalization. I expect it will wind down once there’s an external incentive to be responsible or at least to be perceived as responsible, but that will probably take at least a couple years.
This college is too small for legitimate subcultures to exist. I thought that small class sizes would be a benefit, but I never considered that it would caused increased pressure for conformity, which it seems to have done. That sucks.
I feel as though I’m trapped on my college campus. I live in an unfamiliar city of 150,000 people. I’m unsure where else I should go to meet and interact with people my age. I don’t really enjoy anything except playing games and intellectual conversations; I should broaden my areas of interest, I suppose. I don’t know how to get involved in off-campus activities though, or how to find out about them, or whether they exist for people my age. I also tend to be very static and stagnant; one of my major flaws is that I’m reluctant to change habits. This is another part of the reason why I feel trapped.
I don’t really know how to meet new people without broadcasting desperation, either.
I only know a handful of people who I could fairly sum up as having “social roles” in the same way you describe your brother as having. This could be a deficiency on my end, or I could know weird people—or this could be an inadequate model of how social interaction works, and my bet is on the last thing.
Have you considered making friends with girls? There will probably be less (though still some) of the things you list among girls, depending on what you mean by “inauthenticity”. (What do you mean by “inauthenticity”?)
Have you considered making friends with upperclassmen or socializing with professors you like? Why do your friends have to be your age?
Just how small is this college? Mine had like 400 people and there were types, if not outright subcultures.
Is there a game store? Those often host gaming events.
Do your friends need to be in-person?
This one could be a problem. Are there any known ways around or through it that are relatively easy to exploit?
Be there to do something else too, and focus (verbally) on that thing (while striking up conversations, of course).
Honestly not sure how. I’ve never really ever made friends “on purpose” with people in general. That’s probably a lot of my problem. Then there’s more issues involved when I have to deal with girls, because I have to deal with gender roles or different expectations or whatever.
I’m not intrinsically opposed to the idea. My issue is that I don’t know how to:
Become friends with people unless I interact with them a lot, and that’s not really happening.
Become friends with girls specifically, I assume the issues there with getting to know someone will be even more challenging.
You’re dealing with a social wreck here, basically.
I also don’t think girls tend to be very authentic at my age, but it’s not as though they’d be worse than the guys.
I don’t know how to make friends with people I don’t interact with on a more or less daily basis. My friendships have always just “happened”, I’ve never actively pursued them before.
600 in my grade, 2000 something total. Maybe I’m just wrong here and am unobservant.
I should check for game events in my area, I guess. There’s not one on campus or anything.
Preferably. I don’t think I could make a very good friendship via the internet.
Not sure, I need to fight it.
Just about everyone arrives to events in groups and I don’t know how to to strike up conversations.
So I’m getting the sense that you were only restricting the demographics of potential friends by default, which is good, since it means there’s more space to look in than you thought. Professors in particular might be good if you mostly want to have intellectual conversations! Show up to office hours, and have intellectual conversations with them!
There’s “authentic” again—what does that mean? My best guess right now is “not wrapped up in signaling” in which case—well, you’re gonna have a bad time. Humans do that. (Though I begin to suspect that you’re oversensitive to it and may be seeing more of it than there is.) But maybe you mean something else.
Why not?
Go up to someone. Ask them a question (“do you know if the food here is any good?”, “can I borrow a pen?”, “is the line for tickets?”) or pay them a compliment (“awesome t-shirt!”, [laughter at a joke they just made], “your presentation just now was fantastic, my favorite part was [x]!”) or stand near them and their group (without being followy if they try to leave) and pick up on something someone in the group says when there’s enough of a break to do it (“yeah, Communism would only work for nonhuman aliens”, “that’s funny, when I was in Japan I didn’t see any kaiju at all!”, “cool, so snakes don’t even have ears? Can they sense vibrations?”). Or the classic standby of: Stick out your hand. “Hi, I’m [chaosmosis]! What’s your name?”
The people who like drinking and sports are the most prominent in many colleges, but it doesn’t mean that they’re the only ones around.
I had the same problem as you my first year at college, and mainly solved it through three factors, in order of importance:
Making friends in math classes.
Going to a few student-organized clubs.
Blind luck.
Whatever strategy you decide, if you happen to find just one or two friends that also don’t have too many friends, you can then try everything you try together and it will be much easier. I realize this might be terribly unhelpful advice.
This is how I feel when parties are going on: http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-going-to-sit-quietly-in-darkened-bedroom,29831/ . There’s one going on tonight, so this is particularly apt.
Most people are terrible. It’s a lot of work to sort the awesome people from the terrible people. I’ve had good luck using “gamer” “geek”, “queer”, and “kinky” as labels that tend to more reliably apply to interesting people or people I’m happy to get along with, but your mileage may vary. Every single one of my room-mates plays or used to play Magic the Gathering, for example.
Not making friends with the random people around you in college who are into drinking, sports, and dehumanizing women is, in my mind, a good sign. You shouldn’t force yourself to try and make friends with people who don’t share interests with you, or at least are interesting to talk to. Try talking to the people you see who are actively weird.
I tried that a week ago. I now have this kid who just might be repressing some homosexuality following me around whenever he sees me (it’s the repression that I have a problem with, it manifests itself by him scaring the hell out of me and talking about obscure mythologies and creepy myths all the time, he seems to have serious psychological problems. He’s one of those kids who no one will talk to, so he gets creepier and creepier the more he’s left in isolation, and then a feedback loop happens. I talked to him out of pity and regret it).
I like the advice, in general. Are there additional filters I can apply?
Not exactly a filter, but if you make friends with a person who is awesome and who seems to have a lot of friends you should try to hang out with them as much as possible. Most of my friends end up being from friends I already had.
People who are in bands or theater tend to be fun, I like most people I’ve met who play Capoeira, Women with piercings and dyed/shaved hair tend to be more fun to talk to, and most people I’ve met who are in math programs or math graduates are awesome. As always, your mileage may vary on this sort of advice.
You said in another comment that you like gaming. Local game stores often have websites where they post information about which days of the week they encourage people to come in and play various kinds of games, from boardgames to minis to TCGS. Some even have pickup roleplaying groups you can just drop in and out of. I definitely recommend googling {Your Town’s Name} + game store, or looking at clubs run by your college. Even if your college seems too small to support subcultures they probably exist anyway.
I think it’s also helpful to look outside your immediate age group for friends. Many of my friends and most of the people I like best are several years older than me, because when I was meeting them around age 18 or whatever i found everyone around my age intolerable. Similarly, though you probably don’t want to hang around high schools you shouldn’t necessarily dismiss someone because they’re younger than you. This will probably make it harder to date though.
Friends are a much higher priority right now. Thanks for the good advice.
You’re welcome. Having gone from basically no friends to quite a few I feel like I owe it to past-mes to help em out
When I was in college, I once thought that I didn’t enjoy drinking. Turns out, I didn’t enjoy drinking with people who I was not friendly with (and I had poor social skills and thus few friends). But I really only learned that after following the equivalent of your excellent advice.
Hang on. Most people are really nice. Most put a confident facade over a good nature. Most are a bit lonely, unsure of their own value, and mainly worried about how other people see them. Most are full of interesting thoughts that they are shy to express in front of strangers. Most young people are idealistic to the point of charming naivety.
And the women. The ones being dehumanized. Who are they hanging out with? The evil dehumanizers, or the self-righteous nerds, full of anger, staring sullenly and lustfully at them from the corners?
Terrible is hyperbole. Most people, even though they’re nice, or secretly have interesting thoughts or whatever feel good stuff you say is true about them, are not going to be fun for me to hang out with.
Since when did I recommend being a lustful sullen staring cornernerd?
You are reading a little more judgment into the post that I think is intended.
The women (and people generally) that are going to be enjoyable to spend time with are not hanging out with the hyper-masculine jocks. There’s no shame in noticing that, and picking social groups accordingly in order to try to find social companions. Particularly because the jocks are particularly poor at being reflective about their own social skills and the social skills of others.
I don’t mean this snarkily, but have you considered drinking or taking up a sport?
Low level sport (where everyone’s a bit rubbish and no-one takes it seriously) is superb fun. Obviously, you’ll be terrible at it, but if you find a club that’s short of people and loses all the time anyway you’ll probably be more welcome than you think. And just by taking part you’ll get much better at it. It might change your life.
And if you’re embedded in a society where social life revolves around alcohol you’ll miss out on a vast amount of the fun and happiness that comes with being human if you don’t join in. You don’t have to overdo it. Just try having a glass of wine with someone you like one day and see how it goes.
I am a pretty nerdy guy, but if I had to relive my life without ever drinking alcohol or playing cricket or rowing or playing rugby I just think I’d probably not want to bother. ( I am unbelievably bad at rugby. )
If it helps encourage you, for a long time I coached novice rowers for King’s College (part of the University of Cambridge). Occasionally we’d get a hopelessly non-sporty introvert turning up wanting a go. Some of these guys were so shy they could hardly speak. And they were often the people who enjoyed it the most, and became most committed and most likely to come back year after year.
I’m not going to lie to you, with one exception they never became any good. But they all became much better than they had been, and seemed to enjoy the process, and are some of the people that I most enjoyed coaching.
It helps of course that rowing is actually technically complex and I could talk to these people about how best to turn energy into momentum and how it is that a boat can balance even though its centre of gravity is above its centre of flotation and so on.
I think one of the reasons that rowing is so popular amongst the sciency types at Cambridge is that it is a sport that you can think about in terms of physics.
But it really doesn’t matter what the sport is. Just go and find a small club doing something where they have trouble getting enough people together to make a team, and where there’s someone nice who knows how to teach it, explain that you’ve not done anything like this before and ask if they could use you. Stick with it for a month, and if you really hate it give up.
One nice thing about sports is that the skills are easily measurable. Working out what to do in order to make your scores better is part of the fun. Don’t miss out. It will teach you so much about life.
I like sports, specifically basketball, which I’m decent at. But I dislike almost all sports people, who are the ones who are drinking the most and doing all of the things that I dislike. There are probably good people in intramurals activities, but I don’t want to be a teammate to the bad ones to get there.
Non-competitive (i.e. no traveling to tournaments) sports are very likely to have a different (and possibly more receptive-to-you) culture than varsity sports (or their college equivalents).
I take it you don’t have a LW meetup near by. Do you think you could start one?
Having friends seems more or less like a prerequisite, I’m also not confident about my ability to lead a group like that. It might be a good long-term goal.
LW meetups don’t have to be large or formal events. See Starting a Less Wrong meetup is easy. You could even write in the meetup post that it’s going to be highly informal, to set expectations.
Nope!
If you can send emails to people saying “There will be a meetup on X day, with Y activity,” you’re most of the way there. Seriously. If there’s anyone in a 100-mile radius who is interested in meetups, making them happen is not hard, and in fact is probably easier than many other social activities. You could make a post on LW to gauge interest in your geographic area :)
Seconding drethelin’s advice in general. I feel very empathetic towards your situation, and I did not like most of the people I met when I first went to college, and yet I made some serious long-term friends there.
Also, for fear of not having a “social role”, just make sure there’s something memorable about you. Like a cartoon character, have some element of style that is unique and not obviously negative—so that people can see you and think “There’s that kid with the X again”, and you blend into the background less. If X can also signal desirability to a relevant social group, all the better. Something that already seems cool to you, so it doesn’t set off your “inauthenticity” alarm. Bow tie?
You’re the hero in your own story. Don’t worry that most of the people you run into are NPCs—that’s normal. Keep looking and you’ll find the 3-5 other PCs to join your party.