My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

This post wasn't what I was expecting from the "socially normal" title. While there is a lot of self-reflection and growth in this piece, a lot of the points felt more like learning how to charm, manipulate, and game social interactions.

Look at the first two subheadings:

> 1: Connecting with people is about being a dazzling person

> 2: Connecting with people is about playing their game

The post felt like a rollercoaster between using tricks to charm and manipulate, and periods of genuinely trying to learn how to be friends with people.

I don't want to disparage the author as this is a personal journey piece and I appreciate them sharing it. However this did leave me slightly uneasy, almost calling back to earlier days of the internet when advice about "social skills" often meant reductively thinking about other people, assuming you can mind-read them to deconstruct their mindset (the section about identifying people who feel underpraised, insecure, nervous,) and then leverage that to charm them (referred to as "dancing to the music" in this post).

Maybe the takeaway I'd try to give is to read this as an interesting peek into someone's mind, but not necessarily great advice for anyone else's situation or a healthy way to view relationships.

I really love this piece! I relate to it but it also doesn’t describe me. I’m far more intuitive than this person, though still agree that insights have driven a leveling up of how I relate to others. They were different insights, sure but the model holds.

Once my spouse and I worked for the same company and attended many of the same meetings. The opportunity to pick apart our impressions of the subtext really helped me to learn that I should listen to my gut, that everything I needed to know about how other people were feeling was already in my head and i just needed to stop doubting.

Another time I watched a rather ugly and old person have amazing romantic success with a young beautiful person. How could it be? And I realized that authentic confidence is social gold. I had to let go of my insecurities because my flaws were irrelevant in the face of authentic, confident self acceptance.

I think everyone has a different journey and different epiphanies and it is so enjoyable to hear these experiences put into words.

> The other day, someone told me, “I can’t imagine you ever being awkward with people.”

I was telling my therapist of several years recently about being uncomfortable with the number of new people I've had to meet recently.

He seemed surprised that I wasn't excited by it all and said something along the lines of "You seem like a very social person, that seems out of character." It struck me… am I really that good at masking that my therapist didn't realize I am absolutely terrified in near all social situations? I have zero idea how to make small talk with people I haven't known for years.

Working from home since COVID has made my social skills so much worse because I don't get the practice.

Incredible wisdom here. I can only speculate that the author is right about the later stages since I'm nowhere close to that sort of thing.

Overall this piece reminds me of reading writeups from pickup artists who sort of ascended beyond the game, like they practiced so many social skills that they can see through every situation and lose interest in it all.

I recognize all of these steps, having gone through flavours of them myself. The root for me, was that I learned at a young age that to feel safe, I needed to cater to what others wanted for me. Never learning to ask myself, what I wanted. It might be the author's next step, is reconnecting with his inner-desire and finding out what he wants from the world, instead of how he wants to appear in the world.

I have been trying to manage other people's feelings and reactions for as long as i can remember. That's a self-soothing fantasy of sorts. With this mindset, you are naturally drawn to people who need such emotional management - a realization that you can't actually manage other people's happiness was long and painful. These days I am not sure that getting people to open up by altering your presentation is a good idea. Maybe we should learn to accept that we have no insight into another and just observe them with patient curiousity? That we are fundamentally alone and isolated and the best you can hope for is a person who's values align with yours - and so you feel safe around them?

I don't have much to add to this right now other than to say this is really fantastic writing. I don't normally enjoy "my journey" kind of blog posts, but this one feels full of valuable insights, and I'm grateful to the author for sharing. It's also just nice to read something written by a skilled writer.

The bit about him spilling olive oil onto someone's dress then playing it off with a flirtatious joke seems very strange to me. Maybe it's just my upbringing but trying to pull off a joke like that in a tense situation seems very risky. I would be worried about coming off unserious, indifferent, and sleazy while also stoking an even angrier reaction from the person.

One hazard of being a programmer is that sitting alone in a room alone with a computer for 10 years can turn you into a weird dude.

Lately I have taken steps to re-learn how to be social. I am doing a lot of social dances, like Salsa, Swing, Bachata. I think partner dance is good training for body language. Also good training for presence, as when you really start dancing, you stop thinking; conversely when are thinking too much you will stiffen up and choke. There are a surprising number of PHDs and other very cerebral people in my local dance scene.

One thing I have learned is that being good at dancing and being fun to dance with are orthogonal. You can be technically quite bad and people will still want to dance with you if you have good eye contact, smile, laugh at your mistakes, tell little jokes, complements, etc.

Conversely there are some people that are really technically good but not that much fun to dance with because they grimace and look away and don't match your energy.

Of course the best is when you find a partner that is both fun and technically good, and this is what I ascribe to become.

The downside of dances is that I don't get a lot of practice at talking, I guess this is something you could learn to do at bars but I don't drink and so have not found really good place to practice a lot of talking.

I try to get the guys from my jujitsu gym to come dance, these are big bad dudes who could really mess you up in fight, but they are all scared to dance with the girls. You will be scared your first few times for sure. Personally, I tend to be nervous in direct proportion to the beauty of my partner, which can be a problem because women that dance tend to be above average in that respect.

Most dances have a 1 hour lesson at the beginning and then social dance after. The lesson part is easy, you just follow the instructions and the teacher will have you rotate partners so you get to meet most of the girls. I tell my guy friends, just come for the lesson part and then if you get too nervous you can sneak out early.

I eat at Chinese restaurants where my waiter is a QR code. Please pour olive oil in my lap, hold my hands, and tell me I'm special.

Please go to a therapist.

Appreciate the writing and the author's fortitude in achieving their goals. While I never had friends, neither online nor in person, I cannot identify with this at all - it reads like a strange, obsessive seeking of external validation which I have never felt myself. Maybe I am just disinterested in people in general.

This is one heck of a hook:

> I was one social notch above children who were so pitiable it would be rude to mock them.

I wish I had the drive to do as much work as the author has. Instead I will live more or less where I am now, stably in social mediocrity, perpetually somewhat impedance mismatched with the people around me.

This sounds like a ton of work to learn and by the end it sounds more like a curse than a super power. To be so above people in terms of social intelligence must be horrible. It sounds like the Author views interactions on a completely different level.

I dont have any offensive social strategy so its hard for me to dictate making friends but passively I do quite well by just projecting an authentic version of myself.

> some people communicate in order to exchange facts, and some communicate in order to find connection.

I love this quote. Excellent and very relatable piece.

Social skills can be acquired through practice. But being an introvert, I've specifically picked my profession so that I can focus on ideas over people. Tinkering and solving problems excited me, whereas staying in touch with friends, noticing social dynamics, networking, reading people, being good at remembering everyone's birthday, etc felt tiring to me and was less appealing.

I'm at a place in my career where I'm managing more and doing less. It's a weird transition because I've spend a decade acquiring technical skill, only to discover soft skills are equally if not more important (perhaps increasingly so with AGI) .

really identify. especially with the early yearning to connect and not having the skills. Learned sooo much over the years by being brutally rejected and eventually taking stock of what happened and extracting a rule or two. but then, yeah, next phase, rules don't matter (except when they do) and change moment to moment anyway.

funny to read this here on hacker news of all places, where I let my carefully managed, almost always inhibited, childhood nerd self fly free in the comments.

OP has definitely gone beyond me in many ways, with his talk about embodiment, and being able to be so empathic that he has elicited tears of gratitude. Enviable.

It took me decades to learn to be a socially normal-ish person. Some of us are just good at computers and not so good at people. But that was in the geekosphere - university, then a tech job. Working as a bartender/waiter is certainly jumping in at the deep end, and accelerates the process.

That was a delightful read.

The last part resonates with me, early on I realised that listening to people was the easy ticket to connection.

But like the author, a lot of the time I was not emotionally available for that connection and I have definitely caused some pain and confusion.

This Ted Talk from his wife is also very interesting:

https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/behold-my-ted-talk

The topic is agency. Which is a word I hear often used by rarely defined or described in detail.

She talks about agency as being the key to going from drug addict to CEO of a successful organization, and the specific habits that process involved.

"Socially normal" these days seems to be more like "spends most time at home, scopes out gym on regular basis for potential likeminded people, struggles to ask other people about themselves, flakes if given a rare invite to something"

well they're not normal

but they are getting to the place that "normal" people end up, I think. It seems to be the case that no amount of being in your head is a substitute for just not being in your head in the first place.

Honestly I think lesson 7 is nobody's normal. All the things the author's noted about interacting with other people - see how weird and rare it was and how long it took to recognize it? See how often it's on your plate to be the one to go zen mode to figure out how to dance with someone? The author isn't normal, they're now skilled. Before, they weren't normal, because they noticed they weren't skilled. Most people don't.

Why do we need to be normal anyway? Why can't we just be unique?

The laye stages sound like psychopathy. The whole thing sounds on the one hand very useful and great for shy people but also very one dimensional. Did he make any friends?

I was diagnosed short-bus autistic in elementary school twice.

But I also have Williams Syndrome, which gave me empathy and a fondness for people and their stories.

So while I was bullied mercilessly I also had friends. Deep, lifelong friends I still have today.

I’m “on the spectrum,” but I had no idea, until I was in my forties. I just assumed (as did most folks), that I was “eccentric” (or “weird,” for the not inconsiderable number of people that didn’t like me).

Once I did find out, it wasn’t really a huge revelation, as I was already well on my way towards learning to compensate.

I know that the popular outlook, is that folks use “neurodivergent” diagnoses to excuse (and not address) bad social behavior, but that certainly wasn’t the case for me. It was just another data point.

If we’re jerks, then no one will cut us any slack; regardless of a diagnosis. It’s still incumbent upon us, to address the issue.

In my case, I’ve spent my entire adult life in an organization that forces us to work intimately with others, seek out and interact with many types of people, and to look at ourselves, in a harsh, realistic manner.

That naturally encouraged me to address my social issues, regardless of the causes. Eventually, it also forced me to find the cause, but by then, the cure was already under way.

Retitle the blog article to

"I'm Autistic and this is how I learned to mask"

Must be exhausting to have to explicitly learn all that.

> I was probably the most severely bullied kid at my school.

> I was demonstrating my erudition

Those two things might have been linked. I wasn't there, but I'm suspicious.

Fortunately the author learns better by the end of the article, but it stuck out to me because LLMs have made people suspicious of five dollar words like delve so to use the word erudition in this day and age is a choice.

Wow, I can’t get past the first couple of paragraphs.

> I’ve tried so hard to learn how to connect with people. It’s all I ever wanted, for so long.

Are there really people like this? HN is probably the wrong place to ask this question, but this is so far outside of my bubble that I just cannot relate. Some people feel like this, for real?