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
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.
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.
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
