Reading comments like this make me feel far better about my relative lack of social life. The things people who have it must go through… I think would rather be confined to my family (thankfully I am married to an intelligent woman) than to have to bite my tongue and not tell idiots that they are idi… well, at least telling them that they are wrong.
Is it a useful model that the enjoyment of having larger social circles comes at the price of frequent tongue-biting and being polite when you feel like doing a dramatic facepalm?
Kind of. Its possible to cultivate a large network of high quality friends but it requires sifting through a large number of low quality non-friends, sometimes people whose low quality is not apparent until a significant investment has been made or a significant amount of friend entanglement has occurred. And you can’t alienate the people you aren’t sure of or already decided you don’t want to promote to good friend status, because then you lose access to their networks and network affects can no longer continually refresh your friend pool and increase your friend quality. Still, I can easily think of 15 high quality friends off the top of my head because I’ve been continually sifting, and that number continues to grow.
I’ve enlarged my social circles, or the set of circles I can comfortably move in, and didn’t end up on that model. I think I originally felt that way a lot, and I worked on the “feeling like doing a dramatic facepalm” by reflecting on it in light of my values. When dramatic face palms aren’t going to accomplish anything good, I examine why I have that feeling and usually I find out it’s because my political brain is engaged even when this isn’t a situation where I’ll get good outcomes from political-style conversation. You can potentially change your feelings so that other responses that you value become natural.
A warning though, it took me a long time to learn how to do this in a manner that didn’t make me feel conflicted. There’s always the danger of “I was nice to the person even after they said X” priming you in a bad way. You could also do even worse than before in terms of your values, simply because you’re inexperienced with the non-facepalm response and do it badly. I think it was worth it for me, but depending on your situation it might be dangerous to mess with.
Reading comments like this make me feel far better about my relative lack of social life. The things people who have it must go through… I think would rather be confined to my family (thankfully I am married to an intelligent woman) than to have to bite my tongue and not tell idiots that they are idi… well, at least telling them that they are wrong.
Is it a useful model that the enjoyment of having larger social circles comes at the price of frequent tongue-biting and being polite when you feel like doing a dramatic facepalm?
Kind of. Its possible to cultivate a large network of high quality friends but it requires sifting through a large number of low quality non-friends, sometimes people whose low quality is not apparent until a significant investment has been made or a significant amount of friend entanglement has occurred. And you can’t alienate the people you aren’t sure of or already decided you don’t want to promote to good friend status, because then you lose access to their networks and network affects can no longer continually refresh your friend pool and increase your friend quality. Still, I can easily think of 15 high quality friends off the top of my head because I’ve been continually sifting, and that number continues to grow.
I’ve enlarged my social circles, or the set of circles I can comfortably move in, and didn’t end up on that model. I think I originally felt that way a lot, and I worked on the “feeling like doing a dramatic facepalm” by reflecting on it in light of my values. When dramatic face palms aren’t going to accomplish anything good, I examine why I have that feeling and usually I find out it’s because my political brain is engaged even when this isn’t a situation where I’ll get good outcomes from political-style conversation. You can potentially change your feelings so that other responses that you value become natural.
A warning though, it took me a long time to learn how to do this in a manner that didn’t make me feel conflicted. There’s always the danger of “I was nice to the person even after they said X” priming you in a bad way. You could also do even worse than before in terms of your values, simply because you’re inexperienced with the non-facepalm response and do it badly. I think it was worth it for me, but depending on your situation it might be dangerous to mess with.