From a socially anxious goblin to a socialized goblin
Dear Friend,
This post is about my social anti-goblinification journey. I am not a social butterfly, but I am content. Here are some bits of what happened.
Motivation briefly…
At some point, I figured this out:
It doesn’t matter how smart you are, the odds of thriving alone are low… Being able to socialize comfortably became a necessity for me.
You can do only so much with this single meat machine of yours, and with the limited hours in the day.
You as an operator have limited ability to execute things. A 5th grader can have this realization, yet many still insist on playing life in solo mode (including me for very long time).
Self-learning vs. talking with people -learning
I like this distinction between learning/doing alone vs. talking with people:
Conversations are much more dynamic and branch in a better approximation of what is practically valuable in life. Here’s a short audio clip on that:
I think talking to people can offer solutions better because:
They have more accurate access to information about you (verbal and non-verbal) than you could write to search engines
They live in a similar environment or life situation
The random associations they make in their brain to your input can be wildly unpredictable but still related (with the goal of the response being useful to you)
Getting rid of inhibition and anxiety
I used to think consciously about whether to crack a joke or not — all the time. Even some minor silly jokes.
I used to laugh and smile excessively when I met new friends (for validation). Very inauthentic.
These come from childhood. I fixed my biggest ones, which took ages. I’ll probably never get rid of all the bad models. Here’s some chattering about that:
Hard to wrap the anti-goblinification journey, because so many of these mental constructs are subliminal (difficult to verbalize).
The turning points (mothers of all nuggets)
Organisms migrate only under stress. All big changes require a meaningful trigger for you to really want change. My triggers and motivations for change were:
Relationship (biologically and emotionally very high impact)
Realization: that to thrive I need to be able to socialize better
All the evidence of how relationships with people are the single biggest thing for a happy life
It sucks because such triggers are out of our control. You really need to become dissatisfied with your current paradigm to be able to make a change.
To anyone struggling with socializing, I hope you find your way. Those that don’t, be grateful, I think it’s such an essential part of life to be content with such a stupidly natural thing as socializing with people.
Niko