this also makes it harder for people to be open about their limitations
I have been in *multiple* friend circles where someone got much more emotionally open/involved in others’ lives to degrees they would have preferred not to because expressing a lack of desire for closeness is stigmatized
And I think this leads a lot of people to “get political” about their personal lives - and again, this definitely includes me - because the idea of just openly sharing about your personal life because you think you’re cool and your life is interesting is pathologized
Like, some people are not people people
I wish anyone other than like two others of you on this website watched For All Mankind, because it has a couple characters who kind of exist to make this point. Some people get almost no emotional reward from most socializing
That’s obviously not me, but there’s a lot of folks who are like that
The kind of people who aren’t on here or if they are it’s to post photos of their Warhammer minis or doll collection or photos of t bf eir car they work on
Or people who really do just love their job
And a lot of those people end up feeling pressure to form close personal friendships and relationships with people in their lives because the expression of a lack of interest in friendship, with a person in particular or in general, is treated as fundamentally *unkind* rather than a neutral fact
The adjacent principle, that you can just not like people even if they're not oppressive or predatory, has come up, and I think they're both really important. It's fine to wish someone well and not care about their kids or their car or whatever...
...and it's even fine to think that Russell from accounting is a grating know-it-all who should eat a hornet, even if he's not A Bad Person (tm). You don't have to construct an entire narrative to justify "ugh, *them*?"
For a very long time my fear/recognition that I am that grating person to many people led me to engage in… idk, normalizing the idea that it’s good to make the idea of who you do or don’t like a moral question
My recognition that *I don’t want to be friends with people who I grate on* came later
Like, I am pretty sure I have come off as socially needy in a way that has led people to socialize with me out of pity
And I really regret that because it makes trusting my real friends harder
To be clear, I know I have this baseline assumption (that Being Nice Is Being Good, the Geek Social Fallacies etc) worse than most people because of my history of my parents treating me being bullied as a crisis as a child but I think in general society encourages dishonest kindness
Again going back to my admiration for the shape of Ayn Rand’s ideas coupled with rejection of her politics, I think what a lot of people who don’t see any redeeming value in Rand missed is that condemnation of pity can spawn not (only) from contempt for the pitied but also wishing not to be pitied
I think some people appreciate pity?I can see how it has some social value if it stops you from getting murdered or actually does motivate people to support aid to people in need(I am not sure it’s super effective at that)
But experiencing it truly sucks, above and beyond the thing being pitied for
OMG yes.
It's also why I am truly uneasy with the idea of marriage: if someone isn't into me, I want him to leave. I don't want him to stay because he feels obligated to. I don't even want him to *try* and stay. I want to know someone's there because he's into me, and won't be if that stops.
Oooh, yes. I am 100% Full Eowyn about that.
I tend to feel like every extraordinarily shitty person has at least one good idea, and Rand's may have been that one.
I think Rand's mistake was thinking "it sucks to be on the wrong end of pity" and conflating that with "so screw the unfortunate" rather than "so maybe have systems to help out so it feels less personal," and also being a shitty person.
Right. I still find value in her books though, because unlike most folks I’ve talked to, I actually do find her protagonists broadly interesting and to some degree relatable
Which is a thing that would allow people to make certain adverse judgments about my character, which is valid!
It absolutely does! And conflates not being interested in/liked by everyone with being universally interesting/likeable, which means that a) rejection of the "you are Swiss, I want Limberger" type feels more personal than it is and b) everyone feels awkward saying that.
The point where I realized I'm not everyone's cup of tea was good. It doesn't even mean they're bad people! Sometimes it's more about attitude than anything of substance. Not everyone will like you, but I do.
Yeah it’s great, like the moment when high school proverbially ends is the moment when you stop wanting the things you wanted in high school, which is harder than it feels like for me at least
Like for me this literally was like a switch flipping in my brain, pretty recently
There was a point in my late 20s where I was the center of a Bullshit Scandal, and I felt really bad for a long time.
And then a friend was like, look, if you keep dressing and flirting and generally acting like you do, people are going to believe this sort of thing. Doesn't mean you should stop.
