My life got a lot better after I stopped considering questions in terms of my own preferences and started considering them in terms of how they would connect me to others. I really don’t want to go out for drinks after work. But this preference is nothing compared to how much I value the friendships that come from doing it. Hiking a mountain is not in the top 100 things I want to do with my weekend. But a shared experience with a group of people is something I need deep in my soul.
Human connection is the preference that weighs many times more than all the others combined. Prioritizing my own inane sense of self rather than adopting behaviors that could enable relationships was just idiotic self-torture.
The point of the article isn’t to never do anything someone else suggests. It’s to get you out of the habit of reflexively agreeing to do other people favors out of anxiety, guilt, or a sense of obligation. If you’ve said “yes” to every request that crossed your desk, you’re probably not going to be left with much time to go out for drinks or to go climb a mountain with your friends.
What you’re describing is more of a tension between going with your immediate emotional response (feeling annoyed that you have to expend some effort) versus your values (connecting with other people; other examples might be creating something, or leaving a positive legacy). That’s actually pretty congruent with the message of this piece. People who are habitual people-pleasers tend to let their initial emotional response of guilt or anxiety win over their values. The immediate outcomes may be different (over- vs. undercommitting), but the long term outcome in both cases is feeling like you’re living a life without much meaning or purpose.
This is one of the main reasons why I prefer living in big cities. Compared to other places I've stayed, it makes it a whole lot easier to build and maintain human connections with people whose preferences and interests overlap with mine.
I also do plenty of activities I'm not really interested in for the sake of socializing. But always just adopting to whatever is most popular at a given time would be soulcrushing to me.
An interesting dichotomy between big cities vs small towns has come up and being discussed the replies to this. Interesting that it is a very North America-centric perspective.
Go to South Korea or Japan and you'll find rural villages that are more densely packed than cities of 100,000+ in USA and Canada. This density allows for shops and convenience stores to be easily accessible and walkable in every neighbourhood, which nudges towards social interaction. Rather than sprawling everywhere, neighbourhoods are built with the same density as elsewhere (with small apartments, large apartment towers, and/or multifamily housing).
On the other end, megacities like Seoul and Tokyo are really just cities of many neighbourhoods with similar density to the rural towns, with a few areas that are more densely built and populated than others (typically centered around geographical or transportation features). Most neighbourhoods in Seoul or Tokyo feel the exact same as any neighbourhoods in "second tier" cities. (In fact, many "suburbs" of Seoul are more densely packed than Seoul itself due to legacy building heights!) But the smaller towns just don't have subway access to megacity-only amenities.
I suspect that a lot of folks who enjoy North American big city living would do just as well in a smaller East Asian town (aside from cultural and language difficulties).
This is a really interesting tangent to go off on. I wonder if the reason for this is that Japan and Korea never really had a frontier the way the US did. I think the idea of a wide open wilderness, yours if you can tame it, contributes to a desire and expectation of a giant living space, all to yourself.
I don't know about Korea, but in Japan, most of society grew up around castle towns, and with the exception of post-war suburban development, those towns are still the same towns they have today, so population is distributed roughly the same way as in medieval times.
Consider that in the US you could immigrate west and the government would give you land if you set up a homestead, at least in the mid 1800's.
There's also a literature reference to I think Little House on the Prairie where the father sees another family coming into the valley and decides they need to pack up and leave.
There is a long history of US travel out west to get land and space regardless, or maybe because, of how far away from others you can get.
I have the excact opposite experience. The closer you live, the more people protect their privacy sphere around them and more often avoid real connections with people they run into, like neighbors. After we moved from living close in the city to outside the city limits, with way more space around us, we went from "hello" when meeting a neighbor to now stopping up and talking for real and taking a real interest in eachother, helping eachother out, etc.
I agree that in smaller places such interactions happen more organically. But you are still bound to who happens to live in the vicinity.
In the big city I do have less interactions with neighbors, but on the other hand, whatever my interest is and however fringe, I will find likeminded people.
I reckon it depends a lot on how far away your interests are from the norm as well as which and what part of the city you are living. The neighborhood I'm in, people do spent quite a lot of time in the corner cafes, restaurants and park and are open to make new friends, instead of just leaving the apartment to go to work.
I think it's the difference between those who look for similar people versus those who prefer complementary people.
Naturally everyone does both but in the RPG of life some rogues tend to hang out in the rogues guild in town while others want to be out in a dungeon alongside wizards and warriors.
That's funny. I grew up in a tiny town, and the gossipy busybodies just disgusted me. I literally heard a rumor about a family member before I heard the actual story from them once.
Panty-sniffing busybodies with nothing to do but mind other peoples' business are a major reason I've lived in cities since I had the option.
Again I funnily enough have the exact opposite experience.
In my experience if you live near 1000 people there are a higher risk of there being "gossipy busybodies" than if you live near 100 people or 10. In my opinion the difference is not the amount of people that talk rumors, as it is likely always around the same percentage, but that they drown out in a big city. So I guess the question is, if that is true: Do you care about the rumor or about hearing the rumor?
All it takes to ruin it is one bad neighbor. I went from party and traffic noise, people trying to threaten me to back off when I complained of noise and drugs being sold to waving to people in the neighborhood, walking our dogs together, helping out when a car is broken down, etc. It is like night and day.
This is very similar to my experience. I moved from an apartment complex in a city, where everyone was - and wanted to be - anonymous to a village, where people are way more open and genuinely interested in each other. Quality over quantity.
Stopping by for a chat, coffee or beer, joining for a walk or bicycle ride, helping out or asking for help etc is something natural here, while in the city would have to be arranged days in advance.
I don’t know about that being such an absolute. Personally, I feel pretty connected with people just being around them even if we aren’t interacting directly with one another.
It’s also fairly easy when living in a big city to know your neighborhood well enough that if you don’t want to be alone you can expect to run into one or two of a certain few people at different locations.
Like I know of I got to x,y,z coffee shop I can run into acquaintances of set X, Y, Z. If I want to grab a night cap at bar a,b,c I am run in to set A, B, C. And if I just want to be alone I can just wave and say hi.
You just succinctly described why I decided to dip out of a big city into exurbia when the pandemic started. I figured that if I'm going to be lonely, I may as well do it in nature.
Turns out that being alone in nature (as I realized in college) actually doesn't make me feel lonely. This is going to sound kinda weird, but I actually feel a sense of togetherness and belonging being near trees, dense foliage, animals. I wonder why this is? I'm sure there are millions of years of evolutionary evidence to answer my question, but it remains fascinating to me.
I've noticed this as well. Just the thought of being alone in a quiet forest with the sounds of the leaves rustling and the birds chirping, and the smell of the conifers puts me in a relaxed state of mind. I've noticed also that my mind almost reflexively anthropomorphizes the organisms around me, and I have a nebulous hypothesis as to why this is.
Consider this: those who become blind later in life often experience visual hallucinations (Charles Bonnet syndrome). It seems like there is something like a vision module in the brain which, when under-stimulated, starts producing its own content.
Maybe we have a social module as well, which, when under-stimulated by social interaction, starts hallucinating that non-human objects and organisms have human sentiments, and we feel a sense of affiliation as we might toward a human. The happy difference is that there is never a risk of negative social feedback from trees, rocks, or chipmunks, in the same way that there is a low risk of negative social feedback from very young children or kindly old ladies, toward whom I at least also tend to feel a reflexive sense of affiliation.
Thus, the feeling of togetherness we experience in nature is a result of our hallucinating social agents that never give us negative social feedback.
Moreover, exercise and the outdoors make you feel energetic and refreshed for other reasons, and when you feel good, the threshold stimulus for affiliative feeling is certainly lower.
This sounds great to me, but could you give an example of the sort of town you mean?
I am only really experienced with NYC, which due to geographic and traffic constraints, just seems difficult to dip into more than once a month.
I'm not aware of any in NA, but I have a few places staked out in Europe and Asia to potentially retire in. What I was talking about depends on efficient nationwide mass transit, which I assume is generally better in smaller countries.
If you live in or around Princeton NJ you can live in a nice college town that's about 1.5 hours from NYC by train or 50 minutes to Philadelphia by car.
I hear ya. Very well stated. I think that the reasons you just stated is why I’m having a hard time adapting after moving from the big city to the small town.
Great comment. I would add that this ties in with goal setting, which is an activity where you set the priorities for your life. If it's fitness for example you will skip the drinks and go to the gym instead. If it's money you will work on your business and so forth. You decided it's social connections, but it will be different for everyone. It's important to sit down and decide what we want out of life, imho.
>It's important to sit down and decide what we want out of life
I always get my hair up with this kind of statement. How do your goals look? Because the only goals I have are: a) not be homeless, b) not have my family die, and c) figure out how to have someone give me ten million dollars so I can stop coming to work.
People who have specific, 'work-ish' goals in their personal lives sort of weird me out. I don't know why.
Not the OP, but I tend to react this way, too. I get a mental picture of a 12 year old planning out their stepping-stone Senate campaign in exactly 23 years...
But (unless monomania happens to work for you) that's not it at all. It is just the idea that having some sort of goal helps provide some mental priors you bring to every-day decision making.
As an example, I have no issues to speak of with my body and eat pretty healthily by default. So I don't pay attention to what I eat, but I do try to not spend a ton of money on it, because I do have financial goals.
Goals don't need to be some complicated 5 Year Plan or whatever. For me, they just end up being something in the back of my mind, a North Star for small-scale decisions.
>How do your goals look? Because the only goals I have are: a) not be homeless, b) not have my family die, and c) [...]
>People who have specific, 'work-ish' goals in their personal lives sort of weird me out.
I'm genuinely confused as to what actually bothers you about "work-ish" goals.
As another example, I used to have a boring (but very high paying) business consulting job. I hated getting on an airplane every single week to write another soul-crushing MS Word report and Powerpoint presentation.
I absolutely had to get out of that type of work or I was going to go insane. Therefore, I used my free time to study web technologies and iOS/Android programming. My "goal" was to reinvent myself to do something else so I could switch to a more enjoyable job or create a startup. I'm forced to use my personal time because my day job had nothing to do with web/mobile technologies. To tie this back to the gp's comment, drinking beers after work with my colleagues at the business consulting job was not a good use of my personal time because it conflicted with how I wanted to change my life for the better.
Using your framework of "not be homeless" and living with the constraint that I don't have a rich uncle to leave me with a $10 million inheritance... what "non-workish" goal should I pursue to build a better life? Or should I just let things "just happen" to me?
EDIT to reply to: ">simple alternative: savings to take 12 months off without becoming homeless. Use the first six months to build the knowledge
Proposing an alternative training schedule doesn't address the crux of the problem I was responding to. The gp is weirded out by people having "work-ish" goals in their personal lives. Therefore, me quitting my job for a year to train my self will still be labeled as having a "work-ish" goal in my free and personal time.
Your story gives out a quick and simple alternative: "with a high paying job", I would have expected you to have enough savings to take 12 months off without becoming homeless. Use the first six months to build the knowledge it would take you years on your "free time" instead, then try applying it and earning from it.
If it fails and you need to accumulate more savings, go back to what you know you are good at for another stint before you try again.
IOW, don't just let it happen, but just try doing it instead.
(I fully understand that not everybody is in a position to do this, but you sound like you are.)
I meant that not as goals related to work things - but instead, I meant that as in specific, actionable goals in your personal life. For example - "Before October 25th I will 'x' and Before November 3rd, I will 'x' and in the end I will see 'y' return for 'z' money by December 3rd" sort of formal, timelined and official goals.
It's just weird to me to think about a strategic planning process for a home life, I guess.
Does that make sense?
I think you answered my question - your goals/sitting down and planning out your life are sort of what I do, in a way that I would argue is not super goal driven.
What has your recent experience been as these opportunities arise in the face of COVID? How does the potential for danger in even mundane social gatherings affect your decision now?
In the last 18 months I came to the same conclusion as you and started socializing more, but then COVID happened and then quarantine and while the rest of my office rushes back to doing team lunches and whatnot, I find myself hesitating. I know the value, but I recognize there's a risk.
edit: LOL someone downvoted this post. Was there something offensive in my question? Something incorrect or illogical? Did I mislead or misconstrue or say something needlessly political?
I wish there were actually opportunities in my life.
My office is still closed, I tried to have a reunion with university mates in my home country (I always meet them when I travel back to my birthplace), but 3 out of 4 of them bailed out.
I tried to reach out to other friends, but (except one or two) they are also opting out of meeting anyone for the foreseeable future.
I'd obviously try to play it safe: meet the others at a distance, wearing masks, etc.
It seems that most people who are shying away from meeting friends are those who cohabitate, which makes it even more frustrating to those of us who aren't :/
What I started doing during the 5 month lockdown in Bogotá is going for extended walks every day and convinced friends/coworkers and some dates to join. Less risk than meeting indoors and free so it is easier for those who lost their job or have reduced salary to do something.
That said, many people I would meet on a regular basis before, I haven't seen in person since it started. E.g. because they moved out of the citg for the time being or are taking care of their parents and don't want to take risk. With those we started having semi regular group videocalls just chatting to a glass of wine or beer. Not ideal but it did had the upside to connect more to people living elsewhere I interacted less with before the Pandemic.
I had a similar situation, but the reunion-esque meetup functioned adequately over slack instead. It's definitely not the same, but we figured everyone sitting 1.5 meters apart at a bar isn't the same either and also not very conducive to socializing.
I've been getting together with friends and family more the last couple/few months. Outdoors and indoors. A couple/few larger gatherings. There have been no problems.
Most of us our in our 40s and 50s - some older, some younger. We don't sneeze or cough on each other. It is assumed that someone feeling sick would stay home. Our family is more careful around gram, she's 92.
I'm personally not of the belief that covid is the end of the world. A lot of people agree with me.
I know of one person that refuses to leave the house. I understand that this person is more afraid of the virus than most people. I wouldn't want to do unnecessarily do anything to make a person who feels that way uncomfortable. But I'm also not going to live in a bubble for their peace of mind.
The rest of us feel pretty strongly that respiratory pandemics are part of life and can't be stopped by lockdowns, despite all of the fear-mongering headlines and anecdotes. Let me know when covid-19 is worse per-capita than the 1968 or 1957 flu seasons.
In the United States, 100,000 people died in the 1968 flu season, and the US population was about 200 million. There have been 200,000 COVID-19 deaths, and the US population is 328 million.
I think you should consider the actual quantified risk to you and the community.
For someone living alone for example and going to work drinks with 5 people, your risk of contracting COVID is very small. Your chance of developing serious complications from COVID is also very small. Your chance of spreading COVID to others, should you isolate once you develop symptoms, is also small.
I highly recommend you research the actual numbers from WHO, CDC, papers, etc. You might find it surprising how little risk it poses to people our age.
Multiply these all together and you will probably realise that COVID is not so concerning that you should forgo all social outings for.
And yet, 200k people in the US have died already, even with fairly extreme social distancing. Acceptable risks for the individual can translate into massive human tragedy. I have no expectation that Covid would be much more of a bad flu for me, and am not particularly worried for my own health. I socially distance for others: friends, family, and even people I don't know. Society cannot run on pure self-interest alone.
I’m not sure most of the public dialogue is framed correctly. As the parent comment stated, it’s about quantifying risk. We (humans) are generally bad at thinking about risk in statistically relevant sense.
Even before that discussion can happen we need to define what is the appropriate level of non-zero acceptable risk and how to measure it. Is it more appropriate to measure in utilitarian or absolute terms?(E.g., is the risk of death to an elderly nursing home patient equivalent to the risk of death to an otherwise healthy teenager? I.e. are ‘life-years lost’ more important than lives lost?) I don’t know the answers, but only once we understand that risk can we accurately mitigate it.
Bypassing all that is just layering assumptions upon assumptions
Worse, many of those infected in that particular group have rather alarming levels of myocarditis. Their age didn't spare them.
That doesn't mean we should be all "we're doomed", but glibly dismissing the risk isn't helpful either.
And while you personally might be at a lesser risk, everybody you interact with now inherits your risk. (Pre- and asymptomatic spread is a thing, isolation is not a panacea). So at the very least, include your contacts in your risk calculation. You want to see your parents and not risk killing them? Your bar of risk you can take is lower.
You spend your time exclusively with the same 5 people, in a lower age bracket, and none of them venture outside that bubble? Sure, your risk is much lower. But few of us are in a non-family bubble of 5 people who don't see anybody else.
Looks like a good and pertinent question to me. I’m seeing one old friend for a socially distanced outdoor walk / catch-up because I’ve decided the risk is outweighed by the duty to support people who might need it, and as the top OP says life is about connection, not just satisfying wants.
> How does the potential for danger in even mundane social gatherings affect your decision now?
I assess the risk with the same way I assessed the combined cumulative risk of the last 4-5 Flu Seasons. In that it didn't affect my behavior or choices in any way whatsoever. The problem is while I'd like to socialize and get back to normal, unelected health department officials have decided to make socialization illegal.
I used to do this. But it lead to one sided relationships where I was not equal party. I liked people more then they liked me and while I would say yes for sake of relationship, the favor was rarely returned. These relationships were contingent on me being passive and having no preference.
I was liked, but did not had real friends (as I found out later).
I think somehow somewhere there're real friends for you to find. Possibly simpler to find if you do new unusual things you didn't try before? Or maybe try a different city or country (if work allows)
Nothing overly dramatic happened. Basically people dropped out of my life whenever small change happened, because while I was pleasant to be around, I was not worth any additional effort no matter how tiny.
And I realized that I am never getting my preference. When I asked for my needs or wants, I never got it and people around me disproportionally did not liked it. They liked "yes" me, but as if me suddenly wanting something of saying no crossed unspoken lines. (I am 100% sure I was not impolite or aggressive or too pushy.)
When I wanted to do things I actually wanted to do, I needed to do them alone anyway. And since I subconsciously equated "yes" with "I care for relationship" or basically duty, I was afraid to organize things and have people not come (cause not coming stung more then it should).
> What happened after that?
Basically, I make sure that I am not "yes" person by the start of relationship to not get myself framed that way. And when I have a choice, I socialize with people who accept my right to say no or who are willing to compromise without punishing me in some way.
Paulo Freire writes of the oppressed being expected to import others in order to be included.
IMO our society could stand to demand less recognition of emotional demands of distant elites and landlords.
Americans are insanely entitled social police.
I’m all about lifting quality of life for the bottom at the expense of the top, cause let’s be real: it isn’t Elon or Gates literally conjuring those ideas and doing the work.
Somehow billions have been convinced to sign over the bulk of their value generation to people they don’t know.
Here’s a rich guy give him more money forever! is the new “belief” model.
How do I avoid adopting that belief behavior? Not meaning the literal trade, but the whole “accept that the rich are legally allowed to grift on collective effort”.
Behavior is constrained artificially for consistency. Because behavior is being managed by statistics and math is artificially constrained for consistency.
I've done the opposite. I used to do a lot of stuff I didn't want to just because it was a social norm I was afraid to break. I thought I valued the friendships so much that it was worth it but it made my life a misery.
I've realized that social relationships are simply not that important to me.
I started editing the comment before I knew it had replies. The meaning should be the same since I just elaborated on it. What was your comment referring to?
I have found the middle ground of turning down an activity I don’t like and propose something else at a different time, something both of us would enjoy.
Obviously not everything can be solved by this; but it works well for the human connections I value the most.
Very well put. I feel this is hard to convey to someone, even though it's plainly obvious when they are deep in it. You have to have those moments of really wondering what is important to get there.
So to put them together: people who say no too much are self-tortured, and people who say yes too much are tortured by others.
Learning to say yes sounds great, but you're on the path to becoming a people pleaser. And people pleasers who listen to NPR and learn to say no are now on the path to... prioritizing themselves over relationships and self-torture.
This can't be right. How do we not torture ourselves?
Human connection is the preference that weighs many times more than all the others combined. Prioritizing my own inane sense of self rather than adopting behaviors that could enable relationships was just idiotic self-torture.