Is presentation the cause of loneliness? (2017)

Relationships naturally form when people have common activities and goals. I think the problem is that outside of the office and family, that connective tissue just isn&#x27;t there anymore. You can find it, if you seek it out (various hobby meetups for instance), but anymore nobody is just automatically included. Everyone has diverse interests, which is great, but often you find you have nothing in common with your neighbours.<p>I don&#x27;t think the problem is people&#x27;s protective layers of presentation. We need those fictions when we&#x27;re learning if we can trust someone. The problem is it&#x27;s incredibly hard to form a bond with someone if you don&#x27;t have a clear &quot;why&quot;, and there&#x27;s rarely that context anymore. There are a lot of people I meet Id love to be friends with, but it&#x27;s awkward to just organise that without a social excuse sometimes. Especially because if the relationship goes poorly, if you have a common thing its easier to pull back, whereas if its just &quot;want to be friends?&quot;, if you pull back it seems more personal.

Hmm maybe I can give some advice here. The key is to just not care whether or not people are just pretending to like you. &quot;Just don&#x27;t give a fuck&quot; sounds really trite but I really think caring too much about other people&#x27;s feelings is an anti-super power. I find what really helps me is just assuming that the other person doesn&#x27;t like me, and then making a conscious decision to make the effort to make them like me. This is almost the opposite of what people say, &quot;just be confident&quot;. I think being attractive (personality) and likable is a trainable social skill, and once you do it often enough the effort becomes effortless. Of course a mind reading device to skip the presentation stuff would also be nice.

I think the inability to find a price here also has to do with value. To develop a relationship with someone requires that you offer value in the form of conversation, entertainment, etc.<p>People are most attracted to attractive people. (And by &quot;attractive&quot; I mean <i>primarily</i> personality characteristics.) Most people seem to actually have an aversion to lonely people whether conscious or subconscious. Perhaps it&#x27;s an old social defense mechanism from times in our history where it was dangerous to associate with unpopular people. You were more likely to be shunned as well and less likely to be given mating opportunities.<p>I often go out of my way to talk to the wall flowers and shy people that no one is talking to, but I&#x27;ve found by and large, they are also much harder to talk to! It&#x27;s much more work to stoke the conversation, and we all know there&#x27;s a threshold there, below which, the conversation just isn&#x27;t stable. Putting two wall flowers together has a much lower conversational success rate (which is a basic minimum hurdle to continuing any kind of social relationship) than two social people.<p>It&#x27;s a tough nut to crack, and I don&#x27;t think unknown intentions is the problem.

Judith Butler has spent a good portion of her career exploring this concept from a non tech third wave feminist view point, and I have found her work to be incredibly insightful and applicable to many discussions outside of feminism as well.<p>As a man, I have caught myself &quot;performing&quot; for other people on a regular basis. Wearing a suit to formal occasions. Shaking hands with a firm handshake. Laughing at jokes that I wouldn&#x27;t laugh at in private. Are these things &quot;me&quot;? By outlining both mentally and on paper which behaviors I do for myself and which I do for other people I have unraveled a good portion of my character. Many of the behaviors I have decided to keep, despite knowing that they are a performance for others - the difference now being that I can feel confident that my performance is rooted in active decision and authenticity with how I want the world to perceive me, rather than a simple need to please others. This is an ongoing process.

On the other hand, if nobody in the room thinks you&#x27;re cool enough to want to talk to you, the ambiguity in presentation is more a feature than a bug. You&#x27;re wishing that we could read each other&#x27;s minds, but only a subset of us would enjoy that knowledge. Please leave the rest of us space to indulge our illusions. They make some of us <i>more</i> social.

No you&#x27;re thinking too much the cause of loneliness is living alone. It 100% starts and ends at how we live in modern society. Living spaces that have shared communal spaces for essential requirements like a kitchen, dining table or a Television room will end loneliness.<p>I have no doubt about this. The problem is, people living in these communal spaces complain about the lack of privacy or ownership. People don&#x27;t know what they want even when the answer is in front of them. Humans have conflicting individualistic needs and needs for companionship as well, the dual nature of our desires actually evolved under communal living spaces so in actuality, despite the fact that you desire privacy, you&#x27;re actually healthier if you give in to the alternative desire of companionship. People do need to own things but not to the extent that communal living spaces are abandoned.<p>What people think is that we&#x27;re designed to search for this state of satisfaction even when living things aren&#x27;t actually designed to ever reach this state. There is no evolutionary advantage to a creature who is perpetually content and therefore you will never be content. That being said my theory is humans are actually designed to live in communal spaces while being a bit discontent about the lack of privacy or ownership. This is the natural state of things similar to how you have endless desires to eat greasy unhealthy junk food but your desires are not evolved to be in an environment where such food is plentiful.<p>The alternative is to give in to your capitalistic desires and be lonely. I believe this is the worse alternative from pure anecdotal experience and from the way humans lived anthropologically in the past.

Whatever floats your boat.<p>I&#x27;m pretty lonely sometimes, and I wish I was nicer sometimes, and I wish people spoke <i>my</i> language more often. These things are harder when the culture is larger, as funny as it sounds.<p>Keeping up, is just so damn hard. Staying in requires trust, and empathy.<p>There&#x27;s a sad paradox of our times. We both need to slow down and get to know each other, and we need to race to address the problems we all see plain as day.<p>Sadly, we&#x27;re DISTRACTED. And the more distracted we are, the less we address the underlying issues.<p>&lt;&#x2F;rant&gt;

My god, it&#x27;s full of scroll bars. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;KcV6v5W" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;KcV6v5W</a>

I&#x27;ve been thinking about this for a long time. About 5 years ago, me and some friends got together to build a &quot;Dating app but for people looking for friends and activity partners&quot;.<p>Fortunately, we all quit before we got in too deep. It didn&#x27;t seem like a problem that had any good solutions.<p>Today, I&#x27;m convinced that a technology solution is not the right approach. Screen addiction and various dopamine hits from social media have produced a catastrophic collapse of various IRL social institutions that traditionally facilitated opportunities to meet new people.<p>The most practical &quot;if I had a magic wand...&quot; solution that I can think of is to wave a magic wand and undo all forms of screen addictions that has destroyed our IRL social interactions.

A favorite book on this is <i>Our Internal Conflicts</i> by psychoanalyst Karen Horney.<p>Carl Rogers referred to congruence of the self, as we navigate to actualize ourselves against external introjections from parental &#x2F; authority figures and society.<p>Both Rogers and Horney had concepts of an ideal self and the anxiety when we&#x27;re strained by social pressures. The emotions are hard to articulate, and why bother, what&#x27;s to gain in vulnerability? If we dare to say our feelings, we fear others will not regard us in a positive light. Our feelings will be hurt deeply. So, we shape ourselves based on the impressions we want the audience to see, which feels safe, but leaves us inner unease. We&#x27;re not doing what we really want, we&#x27;re pleasing others.<p>Another area to dig into is True self and false self: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;True_self_and_false_self" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;True_self_and_false_self</a><p>In Social Psychology, related terms and concepts include self-monitoring, impression management (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;faculty.washington.edu&#x2F;jdb&#x2F;452&#x2F;452_chapter_07.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;faculty.washington.edu&#x2F;jdb&#x2F;452&#x2F;452_chapter_07.pdf</a>)<p>&gt; And they have good reason to: In a game theoretic way, unless they’re already inundated with social bids<p>Social Exchange Theory and CL-Alt covers this in greater detail: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smashtyn.wordpress.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;04&#x2F;24&#x2F;social-exchange-theory&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smashtyn.wordpress.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;04&#x2F;24&#x2F;social-exchange-th...</a>

What he mentions about people being superficially nice to allow for more selectiveness is very interesting. I think it’s hard to say that being direct from the get go about interest is ideal beyond that reason alone because friendship with people is something you build, not something you immediately just know you’ll have when you meet someone. If you don’t feign interest in the beginning you’ll miss out on all the people who you could have become good friends with only after a certain level of closeness.<p>While feigning interest causes people to second guess themselves, I think being direct could also do the same. If I know someone I’ve just met will tell me they don’t like me if I don’t give them a good impression I’ll be constantly trying to please them. Though I guess if you’re also trying to be highly direct things become even more complicated.<p>It seems like there are far more social dimensions to this than I’d first thought.

I&#x27;ve always thought that my chosen superpower, if I could have one, would be as to tell by looking at someone what they honestly think about me.<p>Do they think I&#x27;m cool, weird, ugly, creepy, friendly etc.<p>I would never hsve to ask if someone is only pretending to like me or put up withe because they want something out of it.<p>Life would be so much easier, meeting people would be so much easier.

This is why I love dog tails. They can&#x27;t help but show their authentic intentions

There is a budding sector of the economy now selling ‘authentic’ relating. Recycled cult indoctrination methods are easily repackaged as the solution to loneliness and lack of community.

Can we talk about why there are so many scrollbars on this page?

Isn&#x27;t the web a connection without presentation ? it works to an extent, I also think people have a need for deeper, thus presented connection.