Comment on do you think freewill truly exists?
ameancow@lemmy.world 6 days agoOh I get it, I understand better than most, it’s why I make a pest of myself in these posts about the benefits of just talking to people.
It’s fine if you don’t like talking to strangers or making eye contact if you’re fine with your present social life. I am usually ragging on people about this because we’re also having some pretty serious issues with loneliness right now. And you don’t get from lonely to less-lonely by avoiding the things that make you uncomfortable.
I was non-verbal for a period as a child, deeply introverted, only recently diagnosed as on the spectrum though, particularly because when I was a child there was no real understanding of autism, so when taken to a doctor they just X-rayed my brain. I learned to adapt/mask but it took a long time for me to push through social discomfort and I also thought myself like many of the people in these posts who seem absolutely spiteful against people who try to strike up conversations with strangers. Again, it’s understandable if talking is uncomfortable for people, particularly if they are on the spectrum, but we need to understand that social avoidance is an obstacle to overcome, not an identity to cherish.
Pushing through discomfort talking to people and actively making an effort to be open, to go ahead and babble nonsense, to stop being afraid of bothering people with my own autistic spiels or niche bullshit, I actually started to “get it” and understand how the game is played and from there only had strings of successes both personally and professionally. Meteoric at times.
It still took some effort, but took me until middle-age to unlock this skill-tree to even start trying to work on it, and I strongly feel like I could have had a much, much better life if I made that effort sooner, and if even one other person reading this sighs and says “Okay I’ll try speaking up at the next meeting” then I’ve done some good because I know their lives will improve if they stick to it.
wpb@lemmy.world 5 days ago
It’s great that it worked out for you, and I’m happy for you, but we don’t need to force everyone to fit the same mould.
ameancow@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I really think that a huge issue we’ve been having since the dawn of the internet is the perplexing effect that seems to impact a large portion of the population, where when they see someone suggest something, they take it as “being forced” and I cannot understand it. I can only assume that we grew up in very different environments and a lot of people aren’t really aware of their own agency.
wpb@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Ah my bad, I thought you were complaining about people not wanting to engage in small talk, and I thought you were suggesting that people should just suck it up and talk about the weather even if they don’t want to. I’m a bad communicator, and I sometimes misread stuff like that.
ameancow@lemmy.world 5 days ago
my suggestion is that if you’re lacking in social contact, or even if you just want to open up more opportunities in either social life or professional, don’t “suck it up” and pretend, but learn to understand and appreciate how socializing works by engaging in it like a game, learning what’s actually happening in “small talk” and how to make people feel comfortable with you and gaining emotional intelligence, empathy; qualities that most people look for in friends and romantic partners.
This is a severely neglected field of understanding for a lot of younger men right now and I don’t think we should be making whole communities that provide validation for people avoiding the discomfort and instead we should treat it like exercise and diet. We don’t exercise and diet because it feels good, we do it because the results are worthwhile. We tell people struggling with it “Just stick with it, it gets easier” and we treat that like good advice.
And again, it wouldn’t be such an issue if there wasn’t such a massive problem right now with social isolation. It’s a message of public health, not social conformity. If you’re happy as things are, nobody is forcing you to do anything, but if you battle depressive episodes or are lacking in relationships, if you don’t feel like you have people to talk to, if you’ve never had someone give you comfort and support and you would like that, well the good news is you can have that. You can have people in your actual, real life who care about you, which can then open up more opportunities. But it takes exercise.