I hadn’t heard the word countersignaling before, but it matches something I had observed many years ago.
My closest groups of friends always make so much fun of each other. We make negative comments about the worst traits about each other, the things that we are most self-conscious about… yet every time my friends make fun of me for something I worry about, I actually feel better and more comfortable with myself.
When I thought about why, I realized it’s because of the hidden message behind the ridicule of my longtime friends; they are telling me, “we are keenly aware of the worst qualities about you, and we love you and want to spend time with you anyway.”
There is comfort in knowing you don’t have to hide your flaws to be accepted and loved.
I wish I could find the original source on this, but I remember reading a tweet or blog that I thought had a really good metaphor for this kind of "male friend ribbing."
The metaphor went something like this: men making fun of each other are actuall y showing that they understand their friends deeply, because they know how to stab without hitting an organ.
That is - in order to make fun of someone without actually hurting them, you have to know which kinds of topics not to touch for any given friend. You skip the "your mom" joke for the friend with parent issues, and so on.
On the other hand, though, I have very often see my fellow enginerd types badly misread this dynamic. I've seen guys come onto an established team where some mutual teasing has evolved, then fall flat when they try to emulate that it - because they haven't yet earned the depth of relationship that makes it OK.
It kind of reminds me of another "nerd social fallacy" I've often observed, which I guess I'd name: "I can't be a bully." I think a lot of times people who've grown up dealing with bullying don't realize when they've become one. Sometimes the mutual teasing degrades into one guy just being a dick to the other.
Only some kind of men behave like that. I had many friends growing up and we never did that sort of thing, and it always put me off to see people who did.
Yeah I think in America it's a pretty distinctly East Coast thing. I grew up in Southern California and had to travel a lot for work, and it was super obvious when I traveled to the East Coast and went out drinking with coworkers that I didn't have those banter/shit-talking muscles trained, because nobody in my circles social circles ever really treated each other that way.
They never directed any of it at me because they were emotionally intelligent people, but even so, I did find it kind of annoying and off-putting - it was just a legitimate cultural difference.
By definition, if you don't like to experience it; don't like to witness it, it's not 'ribbing': it's bullying. It's crucial that the person being ribbed is part of the joke, and should be obvious.
It's very common for people to engage in the bullying, thinking that they are just ribbing; perhaps, never having experienced the safety that is required for ribbing.
There's also the common experience of a bully who always retreats to the defense of "I'm just ribbing you, why are you so defensive?" anytime they're challenged. Making the victim feel like they're the problem.
This is the case for so many things, though. Some people try to be funny but aren’t. Some people think they know how to drive safely but can’t. Some people think they are great programmers but aren’t.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t funny people, or safe drivers, or great programmers. It also doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to KNOW you are funny, safe, or great at something.
It is a bit of a paradox, though, that right and wrong people can be equally certain.
If you cause a car wreck, you failed at driving. It doesn't necessarily make you a bad driver in and of itself - everybody makes mistakes - but if you also refuse to acknowledge and own your error then that certainly suggests a lack of competence.
If you ship code that blows up in production, you failed at programming. It doesn't necessarily make you a bad programmer in and of itself - everybody makes mistakes - but if you also refuse to acknowledge and own your error then that certainly suggests a lack of competence.
If you tell a joke that lands disastrously, you failed at comedy. It doesn't necessarily make you a bad comedian in and of itself - everybody makes mistakes - but if you also refuse to acknowledge and own your error then that certainly suggests a lack of competence.
I still don't understand why, for many people, that last point is so much harder to understand than the first two.
I mostly agree but I think the nuance with comedy is that there can be a mismatch in audiences, sometimes the others participating are not the intended audience, but are instead used as props. In that case it could be successful comedy independently of if they enjoyed it. Whether or not that’s ethical in a given situation is a separate question.
I think sometimes you get a mismatch between the audience the person thinks they have, and the audience they actually have.
For example, if you make a public post on social media, your actual audience is effectively the whole world. If you wanted a smaller audience, you should not have chosen a public post on social media as your venue.
I have many friends who I don’t do this with, because I know they don’t like it and it doesn’t work with them. I show my friendship to them by understanding the type of person they are and knowing that friendly ribbing is not for them.
Would you mind being friends with someone like me? Or do you feel like engaging in that behavior at all, even if not directed at you, is enough to make you not want to be friends with them?
Aww, that was sweet, the opposite of bullying or ribbing. I guess for some people it's too sweet for their taste/culture/personality, they're more used to the "mean kind of nice". I prefer the straight up kind of nice, like this, where I don't have to be on my feet for getting attacked. Writing this out, I see similarities with "play fighting" among cats or dogs.
Not the person you asked, but I think it comes down to past experiences/family environment/etc. Theres poking fun at someone to signal "i like you anyway"... that is real. There's also people who cross the line with their words, and use "i was just joking" as an excuse to be cruel.
If someone has experienced a lot of the later, it makes sense that they don't really trust the former.
Not OP. It's not about the words or the intentions, it's about the fact that we can talk about anything in the world, do any activity together, and you want to do something I'm not comfortable with.
That said, I understand relationships are about give and take. I couldn't be in a romantic relationship like this, but I'll indulge my friends or my cousins. I have a friend who engages in "countersignaling" often. Our connection is generally worth the uncomfortableness, but sometimes it is unbearable.
With age Ive found myself much more comfortable with folks "being mean, but in a friendly way" as they intend it. When I was younger though, I never understood why folks didn't instead just "say the nice part." Like, if your friends are always glad you join them even if you're always late, making fun of you for being late with a big smile can still feel pretty bad for you. Much better to say "hey please don't be late" and also "we really enjoy you spending time with us."
With age Ive come to see that for reasons I don't understand, lots of folks have a massive aversion to saying clearly the things they appreciate about the people around them directly. Eh, their loss.
I think there's a bit more to it than that. Being mean in a friendly way is sort of a sport, for some people finding a good quip is about the mental challenge of wordsmithing. It's easy, and not all that creative, to say "don't be late" and also with certain people can come across more negatively than just jokingly berating them, believe it or not. It sounds more serious. Something like, "glad you made it, Leland! We were just posting a GoFundMe to buy you a watch." Said in the right way with people you are very familiar with keeps a lighter tone, and less like I'm actually upset (even if I may be.) Not that I'd ever say something like that in a professional setting or to people I'm not actually strong friends with; those people just get a "glad you made it, Leland!"
It's also sort of the same reason shows like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia are funny. When you're jokingly mean to a friend, you're being a bit of a caricature, an exaggeration. That's part of the fun of it, too. And why it can get a point across while keeping it light.
It's two different kinds of logic. The stereotypically male way makes sense to me: you take the weapons that could be used against someone and make them harmless. If you're fat, your friends call you fat, and you're like, hey, they know I'm fat, it's established that I'm fat, and they're my friends anyway! Being fat is fine! It takes all the fear out of it.
In my perception, the stereotypically female way is, if you're fat, nobody calls you fat. They're careful using the word around you. They might even tell you you're not fat. To me, that makes it seem like the friendship depends on the obvious lie that you're not fat, which makes it seem inevitable that it's going to end. One day they're going to make some acknowledgment of the evident truth that you're fat, and that's your signal that they're done with you and the friendship is over. To me, it feels like the truth is being kept in reserve for the day when they're going to shank you with it.
That's my (male) perspective. I'd rather have friends who acknowledge the truth about me and make me feel okay about it than friends who act like the truth about me isn't compatible with friendship and inclusion.
On an intellectual level, I get the (stereotypically) female perspective, too -- I get that it doesn't seem friendly to constantly remind someone of their shortcomings, and that a friend group should give someone an escape from oppressive social perceptions. But that doesn't resonate with me as much emotionally.
Eh... if you're fat, and your friends call you fat, they mean it. You're fat.
They just don't mean for it to hurt, and that's the wholesome part. Every time they call you fat, they're showing you that it's okay with them that you're fat.
If you're fat, and your friends tell you you're not fat, then to me that implies that the truth is too awful to say, but for your sake they'll pretend you're a different person. Which to me seems like it really underscores that it's not actually okay to be the way you are.
Recently a lady was telling me that she wasn't taken seriously. When a male colleague proposed something that she proposed years ago, people suddenly accepted it, she said. I explained her about 'implicit pecking order' in company culture and 'he is taller'. Then she said "yeah i'm short". Then I said yes but you are perfect the way you are, and I think she appreciated that.
There's bias in _every_ company, every culture even. The bias is towards age, race, height, beauty, weight, as well as gender. I live in one of the most inclusive countries in the world and work for a very inclusive company. Still, pecking order and biases exist. I think it is human nature and maybe it is fine even.
there are so many potential confounders in that story that might influence why the proposal was accepted. maybe his co-worker just proposed it too early and no one was ready for it?
I have seen men say nasty things they absolutely meant and bond by bullying other people. That dynamic is actually very common among men. You literally see it in male only social groups (such as army or prison) where bullying someone is how guys show in group membership.
You also see men say nice things they dont mean ... frequently to a women they then badmount or mock behind their backs.
I haven't looked at this topic this way, but now this really does make sense! I remember a lady asking me once how tall I am. I'm rather tall and in fact I don't like being asked that, since it is obvious that I am tall and the actual number does not matter. I responded with my height and immediately asked: what is your weight? Wrong question. In my male brain it was an equal kind of question. In the female brain totally not.
Probably because it's a completely unrelated question. Height and weight are only similar in that they're both descriptors of something physical. That's... pretty much it. Height is basically immutable. More of it is not bad. Less of it is not bad. It's not particularly reflective of lifestyle outside of simply not being malnourished. It's just... there.
Weight, obviously, is nothing like this. It absolutely comes off like you're trying to be snarky.
Same goes for how men are comforting each other by acknowledging flaws/mistakes/situation to try to help move on.
Which is very different on how women comfort each other.
It's a stereotype that women are directly mean to other women more than men are mean to other men. No idea if there is any data to back that up, only that it's a commonly repeated meme.
There's also culture at play. I don't know if men affectionately dissing their friends is universal but there's plenty of related things like:
In Japanese culture you don't brag about co-workers or family to outsiders. Outsiders you treat with respect. Insiders you don't. The fact that you don't get the more polite treatment is proof that you're an insider. It's a common scene in stories where someone asks to stop being treated like an outsider by specifically asking for the less polite language. You can also watch the ribbing man to man, man to woman, woman to man, woman to woman. I don't know if there is data on which is more common.
the stereotype is also that when men don't like each other they'll just get into a fight once and move on whereas when women don't like each other they'll tear each other down in extended social and psychological campaigns
yes, but of course the "pecking order" is more complicated than that. oftentimes the victor (the "alpha") gains respect for his (defeated) opponent for having the balls to challenge him and is thereby far more liable to include him in matters of importance
fighters tend to respect fighters if they fight a clean fight
It may be common in many places, but it is also a great filtering mechanism for envy. People who belittle others for fun feel a need to project some kind of social status above others. It’s toxic behavior because it can grow.
I seek out the social groups where people try to help eachother and where most of the conversation is towards pushing a common goal or helping each other’s pursuits. That way someone saying something negative is a signal, and the negative can be addressed. You can only move fast and in the right direction with clear signaling. If the signal is diluted by people with low self esteem who would rather belittle those who do than do the doing, then you need to clear the signal.
I know both kinds of people, men, women and kids. Its a thing that is nurtured across generations and different for each family and not that much gender-specific.
There's a fine line between teasing, which can build up a person, and degradation designed to destroy self esteem. It's also easy to dismiss that degradation as "I'm just teasing. You're too sensitive. "
I don’t find it very gendered, my sister and I used to do this often, like young wolf pups, we’d jostle and play for the upper hand.
I have women friends who will play like this with me. It can reveal insights that neither of us were clear on without the other bringing it to light.
Of course it can be one sided too, and it turns into bullying. I think context matters and even if you’re being bullied, it’s still revealing if you are able to see beyond the emotion. You’re not your looks, your body, your mind, your bank account, your friend group, etc… Your worth is beyond these things. I hope you find that someday!
> it can be one sided too, and it turns into bullying
That's pretty insightful. I've had some friends I would tease and some I would never tease. People are different and relationships change over time. There's no one way to be with everybody all the time.
I think that's because when women do it, they are usually being intentionally cruel. Any woman will tell you how cruel teenage girls are to each other.
I would point out that male on male bullying absolutely exists. Sometimes were sever one. It also frequently involves mocking the other guy and no it is not friendly.
Sometimes those women are actually making very accurate observation about relationships of involved guys.
It is not exactly rare when "it was just a joke" is entirely dishonest and when went on was actually attempt to put down another guy.
That's astute. I was always uncomfortable with this kind of joking. I felt threatened. The real reason was that I didn't have a good comeback.
Let's say my nose was large, and a friend jokes about it. I need to say something back. And I could not think of anything. A low stakes situation becomes higher stakes than it needs to be.
So on their side they see me struggle and probably feel bad, so they don't do it again. But then we are just friends not best friends.
I don’t know if I have a clear answer to how I learned and practiced this. Probably a lot of simple exposure and observation. The important thing is the friendship comes first; I never make an insult joke to someone I don’t know well. I build a friendship first, then test out the waters with small jokes.
I also always start and focus on myself; I make jokes at my own expense often. A big part of my personality is a strange juxtaposition of bravado and self deprecation. I will joke about how amazing I am and how much of a failure I am at the same time.
It seems to work? I think people like me, generally? I don’t know man, I just wing it! I have no idea what I am doing, but I am also pretty great at not knowing what I am doing.
I've identified two approaches to this situation. One is to take the insult graciously, as though it's feedback:
"Careful: you could put someone's eye out with that!"
"Oh! Thanks for the reminder." (adjust the position of your head, as appropriate for your extremely large and dangerous nose)
---
The other is to take whatever they said, and exaggerate it. This produces really good comebacks. (It's important to insist upon this point, regardless of any evidence you might receive to the contrary.)
"Careful: you could put someone's eye out with that!"
"Oh, could I? Well, your entire face is bad."
If they respond with another insult, repeat the same strategy. They'll notice what you're doing after the second or third attempt, and then it will turn from "this person's bad at comebacks" into "this person's (pretending to be) bad at comebacks and it's funny".
"My face is bad? Is that the best you could come up with?"
"Your face is so bad that it makes everyone else's faces bad, too."
"But… that means your face is also bad."
"And whose fault is that? It's your fault. Specifically, the fault of your face. Which is bad."
"Still means you've got a big nose."
"Well you've got a small nose."
"No I don't. We've got the same sized noses."
"Thus invalidating your previous aspersion that my nose is unusually large. Who's bad at comebacks now?"
"Still you."
---
There's a third approach, if the insult is disguised as faux-concern: pretend you're taking it seriously, while exaggerating the characteristic they're concerned about.
"Hey, you having trouble seeing past that, mate?"
"Oh, no, it's alright: most of my vision is unobstructed." / "I've got some tape in my bag if I need it." / "It's no worse than binoculars."
In case anyone is out of the loop, these are both lines from an eminently quotable Seinfeld episode (The Comeback, S8E13) that perfectly encapsulates the concept of l'esprit d'escalier, which I’m not sure has a direct English translation in common terms, but is a sort of loan word in my parlance, but I’ll admit I have studied French in secondary school.
> L'esprit de l'escalier or l'esprit d'escalier (lit. 'staircase wit') is a French term used in English for the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late.
Now that Curb Your Enthusiasm has wrapped, I could go for a rewatch of Seinfeld, as I can’t think of a better coda to Curb than a return to the roots from which Larry David’s own show sprang.
Hope springs eternal, and both Seinfeld and Curb are wry reminders that every silver lining has its cloud. I’ll take the rain.
> Oh, could I? Well, your entire face is bad."
> If they respond with another insult
I seriously doubt they will. “Your entire face is bad” sounds like lashing out from a place of hurt. Typical response would probably be a confused or disgusted look followed by a change of topic.
There are not a lot of people who could pull this kind of response off without coming off extremely weird or like assholes. And none of the people who could pull this off successfully are asking for comeback advice on Hacker News.
> “Your entire face is bad” sounds like lashing out from a place of hurt.
Childlore isn't well documented online, but in my part of the world, "your face" was the orphan-friendly equivalent of "your mom". It is well-understood to be an extremely bad comeback in the circles I frequent: I've not known anyone to misunderstand it. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
Yeah but also no. This feels a like bit like “just be charismatic”. Someone asking how to respond to this sort of playful insult is unlikely to pull this off in any natural way.
I would think a better response for someone who does not know how to naturally respond to these sorts of playful insults would be to just absorb it goodnaturedly. “Haha, yep. I get this big nose from my dad.” Instead of continuing banter that is awkward, end it in a friendly way and move on.
dpark's caveat (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45467182) applies here as well: there's a big difference between "fuck off" and "fuck off", and someone inexperienced in such conversations probably won't hit the right tone. (Especially if they've just come out of "oh no I can't think of a comeback" and are a bit stressed.)
when i dont have a comeback i simply say, "oh no ive been owned" or something similar. the toxic male environment social equivalent of brushing yourself off and standing back up. lets them get whatever they needed from the exchange but also signals theyre not going to get a big reaction from you if they happen to be 100% bully
Can I float an adjacent idea? It collapses the anxiety by simply forcing the thing your anxious about to be over. I've definitely had the experience you're describing where someone likes me despite something I'm insecure about. I've also had the experience where someone dislikes me precisely because of something I'm insecure about and tells me as much to my face. Both are better than not knowing.
I think this varies a lot depending on the person and the relationship. When I was younger, I couldn't put up with ribbing at all. I always took it as bullying. I still think very negatively of some of the people I was "friends" with at the time due to that.
On the other hand, I have ~3 friends I made as an adult that I have been talking to very frequently (with some, daily), for a decade or so, and there, any level of ribbing is fine.
I don't think it's about us knowing each other's worst qualities and being fine with it, as a lot of our banter is on things we can't change about ourselves. I think it's just a matter of trust.
The book Impro treats extensively of what it calls "status games", in the context of building believable, natural scenes of dialog for the stage (or other dramatic purposes) and as a framework for making improvisation interesting.
The author muses that the situation of feeling safe playing status games with another person—that is, treating them only as games, not as serious and with real status in play—is perhaps the definition of what friendship is.
This could include trading barbs, taking turns playing the bully and the victim, trading playing "high" and "low" roles, jokey one-upsmanship, that kind of thing. Stuff you don't do with non-friends because there's too much risk of being taken seriously, and too much risk of losing actual status or of hurting someone else's status for-real when you didn't intend to.
OMG. The section (and one central page) in that book about status is one of the most insightful and meaningful things I have ever read in my entire life!
Once you recognize status transactions ... they are absolutely everywhere, in every single interaction.
I once worked at a place where we all called each other “NERD.” One time a person outside the IT circle turned to us in the cafeteria and shouted, “What's up, NERDS?” There was complete silence in the room. I guess only a nerd can call another nerd a nerd.
It's a game that allies play in order to prepare for enemies.
When played with allies, it connects you to each other and lets you put your guard down (which is perverse to those that don't get it).
The same game played with an enemy teaches you to deflect rather than internalize bad-faith insults and teaches you to use wit and words to stand up for yourself, keeping your dignity without violence.
...
Also it's a demonstration of equality.
e.g. you can't play the game with your boss or your son, but you can play it with your brother and your peers.
My friend group from my school did the same thing, but I've always hated this pattern. Because of exactly this behavior, after finishing school I've decided to intentionally drop some contacts.
Maybe I've interpreted it as "I'm better than you, because you're doing X. I'm mentioning this over and over again, because it makes me feel better."
True. Back in the day, the mates and I would greet each other by saying, "Hey, fuck you." Then, "No, fuck you.". You can kinda guess it eventually ping pongs louder and funnier. We kind of had to stop when other innocent people would pop in and ask if everything is "ok".
That may be an interpretation. Another is that many have difficulty regulating their feelings, and “venting” the discomfort in this semi-controlled manner is a socially acceptable release because it invites others to do the same to you, and you all minimize the risk of catastrophic attacks under tension.
Yes! I’ve noticed that when people struggle to manage their emotions, it often comes out in a kind of jabbing or teasing way. It’s usually not really about the other person, it’s more a reflection of their own insecurities. For example, the guy jabbing his friend for being short is probably not that tall himself and may feel insecure about it deep down. There could be some unprocessed feelings around it. The genuinely tall person usually couldn’t care less. The thought of making that jab doesn’t really even surface lol
This seems fairly culture-dependent, from my experience.
For instance, I've noticed a distinct difference in how sarcasm is received in the Northeast US vs the West Coast. What you described feels more Northeast-y to me (I'm sure it varies by other segments and sub-sub-cultures, too).
There's the saying: "If an Irish person calls you 'asshole,' it means they think you're a friend. If they call you 'friend' it means they think you're an asshole."
Ha that's funny. I'm from the Midwest and found my dry/sarcastic humor tended to confuse people on the West Coast. A lot of people tended to take me completely seriously when I was obviously joking.
I always chalked that up to being around people that were new to the country and hadn't yet wrapped their head around the latest fashionable American cynicism. Generally takes a few decades to kick in, but when it does it's usually worth the wait (see Kumail Ali Nanjiani).
Yeah, I don't know about that. I had many people in my life (including close friends and relatives) who continued to be abusive "it's just fun teasing" even after I asked them to stop.
They are no longer in my life. I don't miss them even a little bit!
> My closest groups of friends always make so much fun of each other. We make negative comments about the worst traits about each other
That sounds terrible. A candid conversation about our flaws is one thing. IME 'friends' who most often mock each other are just trying to elevate their status in the group, by pushing others down.
The problem with using clinical phrases to describe normal behavior is demonstrated in this post. "Social anxiety" has a specific clinical meaning that is not covered by this post. The post is actually discussing a very natural and rational nervousness that normal people have in social situations. The post is providing a way of thinking about that nervousness that can help reduce it, for the nervous person's benefit, and it's great if that works, but it's not addressing social anxiety.
Social anxiety is a condition that cannot be thought away, you cannot rationalize social anxiety nor can it be represented as a cost/benefit analysis of risk of being disliked vs. reward of being liked. You can feel socially anxious without having social anxiety. You can be depressed without having depression. You will be depressed after your beloved pet dies. You will be socially anxious walking into a room full of people you haven't met before.
I agree with you as a general rule. But this is actually pretty close to how Social Anxiety is defined. It's about the fear of being negatively evaluated or embarrassed.
I think what this blog post is getting at is describing for people the difference between fear of negative evaluation and positive desire to be liked.
One thing the post misses is that sometimes these are learned behaviors that come from a lifetime of experience being disliked for no obvious reason. For example, sometimes outgoing autistic children develop social anxiety after their peers reject them repeatedly.
> sometimes outgoing autistic children develop social anxiety after their peers reject them repeatedly.
As a middle-aged woman who can't figure out what the benefits would be that would outweigh the costs of pursuing formal diagnosis at this stage, I related a lot harder to that line than I wanted to.
I've always been extraverted. I always do fine in new interactions, because I'm chronically interested in anything I don't already know well, especially if someone else is passionate about it. Most of my first meetings with people quickly become conversations where I'm listening attentively and asking interested questions about some niche thing they love and their friends and family members are sick of hearing about. I get stellar reviews on initial conversations at unstructured social events.
And yet I spend the vast majority of my time at home by myself because after about the fourth interaction, something about me registers as "off" to other people and they start to distance themselves from me. I have never understood why.
I'm not socially anxious, at least not in the typical "can't get out and meet new people" way. I just can't take the never-ending hope-rejection loop anymore.
> after about the fourth interaction, something about me registers as "off" to other people and they start to distance themselves from me. I have never understood why
I’m not sure it would be helpful, but have you tried asking anyone?
Speaking strictly for myself, it's because I did eye contact wrong.
As a teenager, with standard-issue high-function ASD eye-contact aversion: fake it, by looking only at the bridges of people's noses.
After learning, from doing theatre, that vulnerability is amazing, actually, and eye-contact is powerful: try for it, by looking fixidly at one of their eyes.
After being told by a kind friend, in my early twenties, that I had a "staring problem": shift focus between both of their eyes.
Soon after: figure out that you're supposed to look away from their eyes sometimes.
Since: try to pick up and match their gaze-rhythm. I still have difficulty doing this with some people: there are folks who don't seem to have a rhythm. I don't get them!
My wife told me a few weeks ago that when we first got together (over a decade ago) that the times I forgot to mask - during sex, specifically - sufficiently weirded her out that it's why she broke up with me (for about twenty minutes, lol; she reconsidered on her own). Now, bless her, she says she likes it when I "stare", because she says she knows it means I'm comfortable with her and feeling relaxed.
I've got other peculiarities - and some I haven't noticed yet, I'm sure! - but that's a big one, and how I've dealt with it. I hope that helps someone.
I second this suggestion. This might sound obvious but during my therapy my psychologist asked me to do this, but in a non-personal/non-threatening way for the relation. Just by telling them that I'm working through my issues and I'd like to get an honest (best would be written/no-interaction type) feedback - what makes them uncomfortable etc.
This helped me a lot - to see how different the transmission was on the receiving end from my intentions.
It's about a specific type of debilitating fear. The DSM has a rule for criteria that, to be considered as having a condition, it must seriously affect your ability to live a normal life.
Most social anxiety is not debilitating, and would not meet the diagnosis. This is why therapists receive so much training - you must encounter enough people with a truly debilitating fear that you know when to diagnose it.
It's not just embarrassed, it's about avoiding being used as a punching bag by the local bullies the school will do nothing about.
And, yes, when the typical outcome is exclusion without any reason, or without a reason that you have any control over (such as that bully, people don't want to be around the targets because it might spill onto them) what else would you expect?
> It's about the fear of being negatively evaluated or embarrassed.
It's not just a fear, it's "persistent and intense fear". and like most psychological disorders, a key part of the definition includes "a negative impact on the person's functioning in daily life".
Like OP said, fear of being embarrassed is entirely normal and healthy response. It's not social anxiety nor a psychiatric disoder.
It's not different than OCD, phobias, etc. They can all be entirely normal responses. What makes them a disorder is the level of intensity and the impact on the person's life.
> You will be depressed after your beloved pet dies.
You'll experience *grief* after a pet dies. We've pathologizing grief to a point that it makes it harder for those experiencing both grief and depression, two separate (but sometimes linked) human conditions.
I completely agree and I don’t like when non-medical professionals take these terms too seriously.
Psychiatrists are way better equipped to diagnose these things not because they can read diagnostic manuals (anyone can) but because their training exposes them to real cases.
There’s a world of difference between feeling awkward and quiet at a social event vs having heart palpitations and panic attacks that prevent you from even going outside.
Exactly right. And you might waste years of your life trying to "fix" social anxiety by attempting to change your mindset or trying to adopt new social practices. (Speaking from experience.)
Except it’s not. It can be thought away, under enough pressure people can do extraordinary things. There is just no such pressure in society now. I’ve suffered immensely in my life, and if you describe your condition as “anxiety” you simply aren’t suffering enough for treatment to have any real impact.
If you think you’re suffering rises to the medical treatable level please develop a more serious condition before getting on a waitlist. All doctors are taken up on your non-physical problems and you don’t immediately need care like I do.
I didn't get the sense that this article was trying to help people rationalize away social anxiety. Rather, it seemed much more that it was trying to get the socially anxious to accurately assess the nature (and effects) of their reactionary behavior.
IMO it's a useful first step, as a major facet of treating anxiety disorders with CBT involves challenging negative thoughts and beliefs and replacing them with positive alternatives.
Properly understanding that your anxious lizard brain is (successfully) trying to protect you from the threat of being disliked helps reframe that behavior in a positive light.
Exactly this. The article conflates normal social nervousness with an actual disorder, then provides a reframe that may help with nervousness (?) but completely misunderstands the clinical condition.
You can feel socially anxious without having social anxiety.
That is not true in plain English, just because a particular profession decides to use words one way, does not mean the definitions change for the rest of us.
> just because a particular profession decides to use words one way, does not mean the definitions change for the rest of us
This is a particular pain in physics, which has taken very commonly used words and given them a very narrowly defined meaning, within a strict framework - like the words Energy or Work
> Social anxiety is a condition that cannot be thought away
I hope not, I don't want to be hooked on some prescription meds eg. what about exposure therapy
I do wonder if being nervous to talk to a hot girl is the same as social anxiety I mean I'm not the jock/main attention guy either but I can talk to strangers (guys or not attractive women)
I have social anxiety and it is completely unrelated to likeableness.
I do not think people would not like me, I do not try to avoid people disliking me, that's not the point at all. Quite the opposite, I'm sure I'm an interesting person and I'm confident people would like me if I could take the step.
Problem is, there is something that physically prevents me from saying "Hi!" to a stranger. I literally cannot get myself to take a step towards them and I can't explain why that is, because I do not understand it myself.
Also quite interestingly (to me), this completely goes away under certain circumstances: (1) If I take around 2-3 units of alcohol and it is not a totally alien environment (it would not help if I was in a bar alone with complete strangers). (2) If more than about 70% of people in the room are people I know well. Then I do not feel anxious about approaching the remaining 30%.
I have the same exact experience as you. It's like some weird physical barrier, but I can't really articulate the feeling or explain it. The exposure therapy method here doesn't work because "just do it a bunch of times and you'll get more comfortable" isn't even possible for me, I can't "just do it."
For me though, it takes more than a few beers to be comfortable approaching someone. I'd have to be completely sloshed and even then it's a struggle.
The only time I didn't experience the seemingly physical barrier was in college when a friend convinced me to try MDMA and we went out. I became almost the exact opposite of who I am with the social anxiety. I was the most extraverted, outgoing person in our group quite literally chatting up anyone and everyone that I crossed paths with without any care or inhibition around it.
No other pharmaceutical has been able to cure it for me like that, and it's a bit depressing because I liked that version of myself and I'd like to be able to be that person again without an incredibly dangerous illegal substance.
If you’re open about it, maybe you can take a look into Phenibut — it’s somewhere between alcohol and lightweight MDMA in terms of disinhibition effects. It can help tremendously in the context of aiding progressive exposure. Do you own research, though: it can get into slippery slope fairly quickly.
What you say about "extroverted" is interesting, because I do not see myself as an introvert. Once I am familiar with the people around, I am social bee, very chatty, energised by speaking with others etc. I crave social relationships but I can't find or start them.
My wife is exact opposite. She is an introvert who does not have a problem with approaching people. Relationships drain her energy, she can't chat to even a close friend for more than a couple of hours, but approaching a complete stranger when necessary or she wants to? That's not a problem for her at all, she just does not usually want it, and she loves her alone times.
Make your own decisions of course, but make sure you are fully educated about the risks of MDMA. It is not generally considered to be a dangerous substance. It is illegal though, and moderation is always prudent.
I find it helpful to think of that physical barrier as your own emotions barring you from entering a state where the uncertainty as to whether you'll be safe grows too high to trust yourself to operate in real time.
The problem isn't really being liked or not being liked, the problem is the cognitive overload of trying to predict what will happen and respond to it in realtime, which is sure to set in when one's mental model of the potential interaction is very uncertain. Of course, if your brain quits in a conversation, the other person is not going to be very impressed with you, so this kind of failure carries social risk itself.
The way to fix this is to have as many interactions which are bearable as possible so as to build out the mind's mental model of itself and others in social situations. Gradually the danger just fades away. There's no substitute for firsthand experience; no amount of premeditating, ruminating, or brooding will fix this.
> The problem isn't really being liked or not being liked, the problem is the cognitive overload of trying to predict what will happen and respond to it in realtime, which is sure to set in when one's mental model of the potential interaction is very uncertain.
I think is a big piece. I have social anxiety and I have a tendency not to answer with what I'm thinking but what I think they want to hear because it's more predictable. This gets amplified tenfold in interviews. In an interview, I know that they're looking for a specific answer when they ask a question, but also that the answer differs from interviewer to interviewer. It's like there's this sub-process that is constantly running trying to figure out what to say, but in some situations it ends up locking up the system because it's using too many resources due to the constraints.
Mine is similar to this. In addition the anxiety comes from me thinking that most interactions are banal and more about “trading good vibes and energy” with the other person rather than a genuine deep conversation, and I fear that my facial expressions will reflect what I’m really feeling inside - “ugh can we transition off talking about my weekend or the weather?”. And also because I’m not that witty without alcohol, but it’s almost like most of western small talk is based off of exchanging humor and wit, then laughing very loudly at the punchline. So my anxiety is more to do with not performing well enough to have this stereotypical exchange done smoothly.
This is relatable, mine is somewhat similar. It feels like a very specific version of performance anxiety that unfortunately affects the most banal social interactions. It is obviously multiplied tenfold when I'm in a situation where there are actual stakes (an interview, a first date, etc), but it still applies if I am just talking to a friend of a friend at a party that I don't know very well. The stakes feel very high to me because it's our first time talking.
It's less that I need them to like me or fear being disliked and more that I am just way too conscious of the stakes and the social interaction that's happening, which causes my brain to sort of freeze up. It feels like when I used to play tennis in high school. I'd do great at practice, then freeze up and barely remember how to hit the ball in games because the stakes on each point felt so high.
If I'm around some good friends it completely goes away. If I have hung around the person enough (even without directly talking to them), it goes away. I've also had random days where I don't feel the performance anxiety and performed really well in those situations (and coincidentally some of those days I'd meet a new group of friends or a girlfriend). It's extremely frustrating. Xanax makes the performance anxiety go away completely but slows me down cognitively so I become much less witty and interesting to talk to.
You have the fear of being judged; the antidote is realizing that most people barely notice you, it just feels like they do because you’re self-conscious around new people.
It's amazing we don't have a good answer for this yet.
For me it happened on its own and I realized I was fine with who I was flaws and all. Yeah I get disappointed in myself or whatever but it was just getting comfortable in my own skin over the years that seemed to mostly fix stuff like this.
Also a lot of observing the anxiety and then after it subsided realizing I don't have enough time to worry about everyone else like I was assuming people worry about me.
Sorry for the rambling it's late. Anyway wish you best of luck out there :)
100% agree. I used to think there was some cognitive loop I could will my way out of. Then I did Keto and all the sudden it was gone.
Keto does a lot to the neurotransmitters in the brain and it clearly balances out things for me and I feel no social anxiety at all.
I’m sure cognitive tricks work for some people. They mostly had the opposite effect on me in the long term. I would encourage people to not buy into it too much
I assume it can be different for everyone. This post resonates with me, but my social anxiety mixes being sensitive to negative feedback and low self-esteem.
So, you want to avoid both being disliked, but also being liked - because this puts you in novel situations you fear lead to an even bigger failure down the road.
Perhaps it is normal, it has been a great challenge my whole life.
Every new school, new job, new environment has been a struggle until I made friends in natural ways (either I had to wait someone approached me, or it has been through activities like shared home work etc.)
But moving to a new country has been a disaster in terms of relationships. I'm already very anxious, but I now need to approach people in a foreign language and there's no school-like environment where relationships form naturally. Clubs and events do not help as they are at most an hour a week so nothing like the school.
I am sure there are many people like me, but I doubt it is the majority. I am just back from my kids birthday and as far as I could see, among 20, there were only one or two other adults who did not speak to anyone, majority somehow has less challenge.
Like most anxiety disorders, there is a reason for your response. Your brain is basically trained to jump from stimulus -> response without cognitively thinking through stimulus -> interpretation -> response.
This is why cognitive behavior therapy can help many people. With a trained professional, you uncover the reasons why you developed the response. Once you know the thinking pattern that drives the response, you can work on changing those thinking patterns.
Actually I have attributed it to the pervasiveness of advertising. I fucking hate all ads, and salesmen. And in an attempt to never be anywhere near this thing i hate so much, i do not interrupt strangers ever for any reason
Neither "wanting to be liked" or "wanting to avoid being disliked" rings true to me, at least as applied to my own social anxiety. I want to avoid being thought of at all. The idea of being liked is just as anxiety-producing as being disliked. Possibly more so. Every relationship with another person, positive or negative, is another cognitive burden to maintain. I would vastly prefer most of my interactions to just remain at the default/stranger level where I can re-use the same anticipatory model for most people I deal with.
Tangentially related, I have for some time had a desire to write short stories, but the anxiety around revealing anything that might expose my inner self is probably the biggest reason why I don't.
I was reading a collection of short stories yesterday and came upon Michael Swanwick's "Slow Life". It struck me that it shares more than a few similarities to his "The Very Pulse of the Machine": Woman astronaut on a moon in the outer solar system is placed in lethal danger, encounters alien intelligence that communicates by reading/influencing minds, she isn't sure whether the communication is genuine or hallucinated, eventually the alien intelligence provides a long-shot resolution to save her.
Maybe Swanwick just had another story to tell with some of the same beats. It happens. Or maybe it's like bare feet in a Tarantino movie. The point is, the idea of someone examining my own stories and thinking such thoughts about me is extremely distressing. It's not being disliked that I try to avoid. I'm trying to avoid the baseline stress of social interaction.
I recognize the irony of opening up about this in writing. If you have something to say _about me_, please don't.
The weird thing about "The idea of being liked is just as anxiety-producing as being disliked" is that it is an incorrect prediction of reality: actually being liked would. Thinking about it is really a different thing: it overestimates the stakes involved, it mistakenly invents "ideas of people" to do the liking which do not behave like actual people, and is unable to build any self-esteem by imagining people liking you because these imagined people are under your our control; being liked by your own imagined people doesn't "count" the way being liked by real people would...
The human mind is not really designed to handle under-socialization well, and seems to fill in the empty space with imaginary figures which fail to meet its social needs. Taken outside its natural tribal operating regime, it bugs out in all kinds of strange ways.
> the idea of someone examining my own stories and thinking such thoughts about me is extremely distressing
This is a very familiar feeling to me, and in my experience it actually is a fear of being disliked, or more specifically about not being able to control others' reactions to me. But the fear is so great and unapproachable that the mind cordons it "out of sight" of conscious feeling.
It becomes better to not be thought of than to expose myself to the possibility of others seeing me poorly, especially if I'm not able to defend myself and make the case for my being seen with grace. I suspect that it is over-exposure to human meanness and judgement and under-exposure to kindness and grace which brings about this expectation of others' dispositions towards oneself; this perhaps is the reason for the Christian injunction that humans not judge one another--it guards against this particular failure mode of the social mind.
This rings true to me as someone who's overcome most of his social anxiety over the last few years. The last graph is particularly correct. It's about being authentic and being okay with people not liking you. This is especially useful in dating because then you stop being needy (which is unattractive) when you can let go of the outcome and just show someone who you are and if they reject you then you simply realize that they aren't the person you were looking for because you were looking for someone who likes you for who you are.
Is the person who wrote the post qualified to say this though? Like are these statements the result of scientific research or just his opinion like my opinion?
It's a opinion piece. But so are must attempted explanations of emotions. How would you even study this?
It seems some in the comments resonate and some disagree. So its somewhat useful.
One thing i feel missing is the anxiety part of social anxiety. The way the brain colors vague or unclear external (social) signals in default negative ways, in a feedback loop.
Not avoiding being disliked or seeking being liked, but simply being unable to quantity it correctly.
Fair enough but I still don't understand this person's relationship to the subject and why they are so vague about what they do and what their qualifications are on all of their social media.
I think the premise, backed up by a couple of random tweets, is questionable, but glossing over that, the conclusion is more or less "just be yourself and you'll have more success". Maybe. But I feel like it's pinning social anxiety purely on neurotic safety-seeking behavior, which is superficial. Surely generalized social anxiety is an unhealthy over-correction, but some personality types have inherently more success socially than others, or in blunt terms, some people are more likeable than others. If you're socially compatible with 90% of the population, it's not hard to ignore the 10% you don't meld with, but swap the numbers and the negative feedback will be overwhelming and makes the majority of social interactions anxiety-inducing. I guess that's why the anonymous Internet is full of disagreeable people.
I find "just be yourself" insulting. It implies that the problem is attempting to fake it coming off wrong--it's all in your head. It ignores the reality that some people fit in better than others.
As someone with apparent social anxiety, I don't really care about being disliked either. Being left alone is the overriding priority by far, it is not an aversion to being disliked, although being disliked is not the best since it's still attention.
If someone came to me and tried to mentor me about unlearning my discomfort with being disliked, I would feel like I'm being manipulated and I would make sure to avoid that person.
Yeah same here. I like people, I like me - what I don’t like is the expectation that I essentially perform improv for others when I don’t want to. The problem is being observed, and expected to perform. It feels bad. Being left alone, with no risk of social interaction, feels really really good. It’s a literal relief from the constant energy expenditure that is acting out socializing.
I’d prefer to avoid being disliked - or at any rate, disliked without good reason - but as you say, that’s mostly because then I’d be wasting even more of my time managing interactions with (or more likely avoiding interactions with) those who dislike me. My god what a waste of energy, how I abhor it.
I’ve never been good at banter so this speaks to me.
But it’s interesting to think that when people like you, they tend to want more from you and that leads to social obligations. And you can either go along with these social obligations or decline and come off as rude.
So in a sense, social connections give people some amount of control over your life and that can feel restricting and draining sometimes.
Even something as simple as a text message can be thought of as a task that someone gave you without your consent. And if you don’t respond within a certain time window then you’re rude and risk damaging the relationship. Or if you respond poorly that can damage it as well.
Sometimes I wonder if this is social anxiety or just being extra aware of the realities of life.
The way my psychologist explained social anxiety to me was it's based off an innate system in our brain which is sensitive to social rejection. Rejection is potentially very bad because that might mean we get kicked out of our group and die (at least that is true thousands of years ago). Anxiety is overthinking and subconsciously trying to control all the outcomes to reduce rejection. And this includes avoidance as a response.
This social anxiety pattern can be reinforced over time with negative or even neutral experiences, particularly through childhood. The system becomes attuned to unpleasant confirming evidence. Some brains may be particularly prone to this too.
I think this explanation is consistent with all the experiences people are sharing in this thread. The core model at work is still the social rejection system, even if the exact behaviours and rationalisations you have are a little different.
And the treatment is exposure therapy to get more neutral and positive experiences. Which can be very hard because your brain can be very strongly configured to avoid rejection. You may have to start very gently from steps which may not be particularly challenging (e.g. have a friend in a new coffee shop).
Anyone who has had to contend with social anxiety should be insulted reading this.
Author is trying to frame social anxiety as "rational risk aversion"; it's not. Social anxiety isn't a strategy— it's your brain misfiring and treating normal social interactions as more serious threats. It's not about being liked. It's not about being disliked. At all. Reframing avoidance as "successfully avoiding dislike" just repackages the dysfunction with a motivational poster.
This is part of it, but everyone to some degree has discomfort with being disliked and will do things to avoid it. At least in my experience, social anxiety is much more about the cognitive distortions that convince you others dislike you, when they may in fact be neutral or even have a positive view of you.
Just as one example, when I'm interacting with someone who I haven't reached a certain level of comfortability with, I'm highly aware of and sensitive to their reactions to me in terms of what they're saying, their tone, their micro facial expressions, etc., and I perceive any small negative reaction as a sign that they don't like me. This usually isn't true! But it ironically has the effect of inducing self-sabotaging avoidant behaviors in me, such as over-censoring of what I say and just general awkwardness around them, which makes it much more likely they will end up disliking me.
I can dig it. I'm constantly and annoyingly replaying every social interaction in my head for days, and even longer when they're (in my perception) bad. Why would I want to go out, if I might subject myself to more of that? (I do go out and continue to subject myself to that, but nowhere near as frequently as my more social friends.)
I've been reading through the book The Courage to be Disliked recently. I'm not a big fan of the writing style of the book, but some of the ideas in the book appear in this post too.
One of the concepts in the book is being comfortable with being disliked. If instead you're trying to avoid being disliked, you're effectively subject to other people's whims.
When you look at it from that perspective, that's a pretty stressful experience!
I can't help but feel that these criticisms, like many others of the book, are mostly down to cultural misunderstanding. The writing style of the book is deeply Japanese and that's off-putting for many, myself included. But for some, it's to the point where the forest is missed for the trees. I've read a few translations of it and some do a better job at conveying the idea than others, but they all feel clunky without the cultural context.
A good example of what I mean is your first suggestion, choosing a less triggering explanation for teleology. The idea of trigger words as we understand them, and the need to shield people from them, is not a universal cultural phenomenon. The suggestion feels a bit like visiting a country where they drive on the left side of the road and suggesting they try and drive on the right instead. Maybe the suggestion is good! But maybe not, without cultural context, the suggestion reads mostly like just asking for things to be made more familiar to you.
IDK, in my experience not avoiding being disliked only results in a lot of people disliking me, but hasn't brought any gains, unless a rate limit on HN is a gain (they say I'm "too ideological", whatever that means)
Since you brought it up, I will put in my 2 cents, and I will try to articulate it in a constructive way, not meant as an attack at all.
Fair warning, I'm American and I realize you are European, and there are obvious cultural differences that may be at play.
The main problem I have with you is the attitude. Very black-and-white thinking, as if you seemingly just know everything, about everything, which I don't think can be true for anybody really.
I think it makes you actually appear less intelligent, although it is obvious that you are intelligent, but it makes people think things like "pshh what does this guy know, acting like he wrote the book on this subject". But lower intelligence people are masters of black-and-white thinking, and see constructive feedback as criticism, unable to use it to improve themselves, which I don't think you want to be seen as.
Of course, there are people who criticize because they're haters and get a kick out of it. Despite their hatred, their criticism may still be valid.
But most of your comments IMO just seem to be very matter-of-fact, often seemingly blind to important context/nuances that make the answer not really as simple as you make it sound. And when people ask for sources, you often do not respond. I don't think I've ever seen you admit you were wrong either.
In fact this is the biggest problem I have with people in general (not just you), this kind of dogmatism, the black and white thinking. To me it shows a lack of empathy and humility, often those people are also very quick to anger, and I think it shows a lack of critical thinking, as if you somehow have all the answers and are infallible, that there can be no other possible valid perspectives or opinions, I think this is a rampant problem on IRC/the Internet and indeed life in general.
I also notice that a lot of your comments get downvoted, which I assume may be a combination of both unpopular opinions (or that they are stated in a way people disagree with), and just haters that will always downvote certain people.
All that being said, I realize I'm not perfect either, and I have absolutely fallen trap to all these same things and more, and for anyone who I have wronged by it, I apologize.
I have not noted his comment history so I'm only addressing this in a general fashion:
A lot of things actually are black and white, but people invent shades in them in order to avoid having to admit there's a problem without a solution. I've been accused of black and white thinking many times, almost never has the accuser been able to actually show a nuance to the situation.
My issue is with people who take this to the extreme and apply it to the vast majority of their responses, the so-called "know-it-alls" that Dunning & Kruger told us about.
I think if we want to be seen as truly intelligent, we need to have much more humility and empathy, and accept that we can't know everything about everything, and not try to act like we do.
> almost never has the accuser been able to actually show a nuance to the situation
I accept that that has been your experience, but I don't think it applies to everyone, not even close, and I think it also doesn't mean that they were wrong, they may just be unable to articulate a better response than you.
This thread is full of wonderful books! I had a lightning-bolt insight (one of few in my life) when listening that audiobook - the section about the shut-in.
The followup book is worth reading as well.
Different but related: Not Nice, by Aziz Gazipura.
A person's existence is made up of what others think about the person and how the person relates to them. There is hardly anything else to make up the existence for the person. You are just a collection of perceptions about you, and your relations with the world. Even your money and assets are only as a valuable as seen by the world around you. You look trendy and stylish only because you align with the trends of the place and time. Your physical fitness is meaningful only at your place and time. A village woman in a third world can outlive many gym goers of the Western world.
There is nothing else left to be considered as your absolute existence outside of how you relate with the world.
Have you no interior life at all? Nothing that matters to you even if nobody else knows or cares that it does?
This is one of the bleakest, most discouraging comments I think I've ever read, and it's hard for me (in a sad way) to believe anyone might actually mean it.
There is nothing bleak or discouraging in what I said. This is true for even inanimate things on Earth or in the Universe. There is hardly any absolute existence of anything. Try to describe an alien life form. All your description is nothing but list of relations between that life from and things that you know about on the Earth. Things like, size, color, weight, shape - everything is a relation to some referential unit or frame. Things come into existence by relating themselves to the already existing worldly things.
If a thing can't be described, it simply doesn't exist.
I like the comparison to financial risk-aversion. The idea that social anxiety is a system working as designed, just with a different optimization function (avoid downside vs pursue upside), fits well with how behavior often emerges from misaligned incentives rather than "malfunction."
A book "How to attract women through honesty" by Mark Manson (I think the only book in dating genre I recommend without some caveats, and recommend regardless on one's gender or orientation) has a lot about insecurity vs security (or: neediness vs non-neediness).
There was one passage that although most insecure people are in this "I don't want be hated" or "let anyone like/love me", there are also some people that are obsessed with everyone liking them. It has some different symptoms, but also stems from insecurity.
I guess you know friends (or maybe you are one yourself) who play too hard to be liked by everyone. Also, there is an interesting case of super-popular people, who are super-needy, even though at the first glance they don't look so. What's is characteristic, though, it is that everything starts to fall apart when they lose their spotlight. (Think about actors or musicians who, after they are no longer as popular as they used to be, drown in depression and drugs.)
I've struggled with social anxiety for years. Just yesterday I discovered that I am unable to visualize mental images such as faces (aphantasia).
I have always struggled in social settings where I people will be attending whom I've met on multiple but infrequent prior occasions - and I will recognize that I know them from somewhere but will be unable to place them or their name.
This has happened for 40 years when I see my wife's cousins at funerals every 2-3 years (but otherwise never see them). They are so friendly and nice. Smiling and hugging me. But they have to realize that I am never able to use their name because I can't remember it - nor am I able to make inquiries about work or life because I remember nothing about them.
The same happens when I, as a middle manager, travel for multiple day business trips to the home office.
It is incredibly embarrassing which causes me to avoid such settings which in turn makes me seem aloof and unfriendly.
Some people who struggle with this maintain a "personal CRM" system.
Write down some names and notes about people. Re-read them when you're traveling to a place where you're likely to encounter them. Just writing the notes might be enough to solidify the memories for you, but re-reading surely will.
Salespeople do this to feign familiarity, and it's artificial. Don't do that. People you see every few years will not expect you to remember their kids' names or birthdays.
Specifics are often too intimate. But starting with their names, and building on with the simulation of a general memory or two (e.g. "are you still doing a lot of traveling for work?") are fine.
As a person with social anxiety and a fear of being disliked I get to be the person that people love to talk about how much they hate all of the people that don't fear being disliked and all of the ways they are getting either getting screwed by other people or are being screwed by other people. We really deserve the society we live in
No kidding, I read your comment first and then wondered how bad could it be. Turns out the whole comment is nearly that one sentence. Sentences are like functions, sometimes you need a really long one, but oftentimes they work better in reasonable chunks.
"Social anxiety is more about the fear of being disliked than the desire to be liked" is a better way to summarize the gist of the article than the actual title. And the claim put this way seems pretty obvious.
I like that bit about optimizing for not going bankrupt vs. windfall
Idk you hear these phrases all the time excelsior, shoot for the stars land in the moon, etc... gotta actually apply it
Tangent about drugs I wish I felt like I did when on the snow all the time damn, what a great mindset like anything is possible, same with adhd meds but I can see how it would be bad too not having fear/self doubt eg. "I'm gonna jump off this building and land over there", over confidence
Oh this was about 10 yrs ago I was partaking I'm not in that env anymore where I can easily source stuff, now it's just alochol
I find merit with the core point as well the delivery.
I wish it was more commonly accepted that choosing not to act is effectively a stand against one's own value system in favor of the value systems of those who do act.
Social anxiety has to be correlated with deepness, aka the more shallow a person is the less social anxiety they present.
Also some fixation with a person/ small group of people in particular and trying to win them over. The less socially anxious people cast a big net and that will cause people who'd like them and dislike them but the net is so big that they simply stick with those who like them.
I think this is deceptive. Superficial interactions seem less anxious, but they are not necessarily representative of what's going on inside the minds of the participants.
Learning to be superficial in superficial situations is a good way to fake your way through social anxiety. It isn't necessarily rewarding in itself, but it does smooth over some otherwise awkward scenarios.
Maintaining the balance is critical, and an important aspect of social maturity.
(It's a waste of time, yes! But being comfortable with a little bit of social inefficiency is essential to casual interactions which often have beneficial repercussions.)
The reason you feel that way is because social anxiety correlates with anhedonia. The person doesn't engage in playfulness which is the basis of social connection across mammals. Because they aren't playful, you perceive this as "deepness."
This cognitive fallacy connecting deepness / seriousness to substance, and connecting playfulness to triviality and frivolity has unfortunately affected me (I remember arguing it in high school English class!)
Consciously adopting a "playful" attitude fixes my social anxiety, and adds charisma and humor to my character.
I have never seen a place more playful than a roulette or a craps table in Vegas, people high five each other, they form groups they trash the casino when the bank wins... but it is very shallow and not very deep, it lasts a couple of hours and then each of the participant go separate ways.
>There's this popular idea that socially anxious folks are just dying to be liked
Really? I've never come across that idea. If fact, in my experience 'social anxiety' is almost always driven by the fear of failure, not the ambition of uncertain success.
I would counter that the opposite of 'social anxiety' - 'social vanity' - is more indicative of a deep desire to be liked.
Off topic, but my eye twitched at the word "agentic." This word has infested every computing and software discussion as a buzzword, to the point where I am having a visceral reaction just seeing it. Even though it's used appropriately here, I have to admit I retched a little while reading. So tired of hearing "agentic."
As friends of mine who I consider popular have suggested to me “don’t give a fuck what people think about you”, and this blog says that in a much longer form.
As someone who was extensively bullied as a kid, including with physical violence, my social anxiety went through the roof and it has taken me a long time and awareness of my trauma to heal from those wounds to the point I no longer have social anxiety.
The world is sadly full of miserable cruel people who want to put me down so they can no longer have to deal with their own feelings of inferiority. I have made friends who truly love me for who I am, who give me space to talk, who do not constantly put me down in cruel ways (yes, I once had “friends” like that), and who truly care about my feelings, but it has taken a lot of work to get there. I can now sniff out someone who is starting to engage in bullying behavior, and block them from being in my life.
> Why else would someone be so anxious about how others see them?
The scientific consensus would tell the author that judgement in humans happens already the moment they see a person and it is immediate, even if the person not doing anything:
>across three studies, we find that first impressions [...] made from thin slices of real-world social behavior by typically-developing observers are not only far less favorable across a range of trait judgments compared to controls
Edit:
Okay this was completely misunderstood. My point was that the "normal" people in the study immediately internally know if to like or not like a person. Hence why first impressions DO matter the most. Which is why I simply disagree with the argument in the OP that anyone has control over their perception.
You also cannot win people over if the most respected person in a group dislikes you. The others will follow boot.
The article describes how neurotypical people, i.e. the average Joe would come up with a decision to like or not like a person based on first impressions before the person being judged even talks. Fairly sure in an article about how people are thinking how they are perceived by others this is relevant. But I get it can upset people that it is out of their control entirely.
I disagree. I think the article is about the motivations of people with social anxiety. I'd agree it makes assumptions and paints with a broad brush but it feels relevant to some of the socially anxious people I know.
I edited and rephrased a lot of my posts and the other replies and maybe my though process is clearer now. I didn't word it all too well, forgive me for not being a native, I struggled to bring my point across in an enunciated way.
Thank you for the improvements, I think it does read better now. Thank you for making the effort to converse in a second language.
I still think you are making a point that feels orthogonal to the article. The author presents (supported by public expressions of the opinion) that some people believe social anxiety is based on wanting to be liked. While to that point your study indicating that autistic people may be at a disadvantage on the getting people to like them front, the author is then rejecting that proposition (i.e. that the socially anxious are actually concerned about avoiding dislike). I suppose your point can be understood relevant there too, in that for the autistic population, the baseline "disliked" level is higher. However, the article remains about the internal focus of those with social anxiety (whether it over generalizes or not) between "liked" and "not disliked" which seems orthogonal to any baseline "likability" considerations for one or any other sub-population.
[edit: s/"liked" level is lower/"disliked" level is higher/ for higher congruence with context]
Curious, yet the most people suffering from anxiety as secondary comorbid psychiatric condition are the depressed, autistic and ADHD sufferers.
The article is definitely a mental health topic. A little harmless stage fright before a presentation is not real clinical generalized anxiety and affects most normal people.
You can be diagnosed with GAD or social anxiety disorders without being autistic. The comorbidity isn't total.
I think there's a good question about whether people can tell you're anxious at a glance but worrying about that will make your anxiety much more visible.
> I think there's a good question about whether people can tell you're anxious at a glance
Which is why I linked the nature article? It's plain obvious an interesting point I tried to make that "normal" people will instantly perceive someone as likeable or unlikeable. Which the article in the OP goes great lengths to discuss.
I mean I can live with people immediately going against my point, I just see they didn't even gave it 5 minutes of thought. Which is not necessarily directed at you, I cannot possibly convince anyone and reply to anyone at the same time.
Social anxiety is significantly more prevalent in the general population than autism. So sure, the article may be less applicable to people with autism, who have other visible symptoms besides what comes from “mere” social anxiety.
I hadn’t heard the word countersignaling before, but it matches something I had observed many years ago.
My closest groups of friends always make so much fun of each other. We make negative comments about the worst traits about each other, the things that we are most self-conscious about… yet every time my friends make fun of me for something I worry about, I actually feel better and more comfortable with myself.
When I thought about why, I realized it’s because of the hidden message behind the ridicule of my longtime friends; they are telling me, “we are keenly aware of the worst qualities about you, and we love you and want to spend time with you anyway.”
There is comfort in knowing you don’t have to hide your flaws to be accepted and loved.
Perhaps this is controversial, but I think this is a mostly male way of expressing affection.
Women observing this sometimes conclude that men are horribly cruel to each other.
I wish I could find the original source on this, but I remember reading a tweet or blog that I thought had a really good metaphor for this kind of "male friend ribbing."
The metaphor went something like this: men making fun of each other are actuall y showing that they understand their friends deeply, because they know how to stab without hitting an organ.
That is - in order to make fun of someone without actually hurting them, you have to know which kinds of topics not to touch for any given friend. You skip the "your mom" joke for the friend with parent issues, and so on.
On the other hand, though, I have very often see my fellow enginerd types badly misread this dynamic. I've seen guys come onto an established team where some mutual teasing has evolved, then fall flat when they try to emulate that it - because they haven't yet earned the depth of relationship that makes it OK.
It kind of reminds me of another "nerd social fallacy" I've often observed, which I guess I'd name: "I can't be a bully." I think a lot of times people who've grown up dealing with bullying don't realize when they've become one. Sometimes the mutual teasing degrades into one guy just being a dick to the other.
Reminds me of Scalzi's Law: the failure mode of 'clever' is 'asshole'.
lol that’s good
I was shown around one job by Dave The Cunt. He was alright
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Only some kind of men behave like that. I had many friends growing up and we never did that sort of thing, and it always put me off to see people who did.
Yeah I think in America it's a pretty distinctly East Coast thing. I grew up in Southern California and had to travel a lot for work, and it was super obvious when I traveled to the East Coast and went out drinking with coworkers that I didn't have those banter/shit-talking muscles trained, because nobody in my circles social circles ever really treated each other that way.
They never directed any of it at me because they were emotionally intelligent people, but even so, I did find it kind of annoying and off-putting - it was just a legitimate cultural difference.
There are more women in my friends circle who do this than not.
Yeah, I don't do this at all, and I don't like being friends with those that do
By definition, if you don't like to experience it; don't like to witness it, it's not 'ribbing': it's bullying. It's crucial that the person being ribbed is part of the joke, and should be obvious.
It's very common for people to engage in the bullying, thinking that they are just ribbing; perhaps, never having experienced the safety that is required for ribbing.
There's also the common experience of a bully who always retreats to the defense of "I'm just ribbing you, why are you so defensive?" anytime they're challenged. Making the victim feel like they're the problem.
This is the case for so many things, though. Some people try to be funny but aren’t. Some people think they know how to drive safely but can’t. Some people think they are great programmers but aren’t.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t funny people, or safe drivers, or great programmers. It also doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to KNOW you are funny, safe, or great at something.
It is a bit of a paradox, though, that right and wrong people can be equally certain.
If you cause a car wreck, you failed at driving. It doesn't necessarily make you a bad driver in and of itself - everybody makes mistakes - but if you also refuse to acknowledge and own your error then that certainly suggests a lack of competence.
If you ship code that blows up in production, you failed at programming. It doesn't necessarily make you a bad programmer in and of itself - everybody makes mistakes - but if you also refuse to acknowledge and own your error then that certainly suggests a lack of competence.
If you tell a joke that lands disastrously, you failed at comedy. It doesn't necessarily make you a bad comedian in and of itself - everybody makes mistakes - but if you also refuse to acknowledge and own your error then that certainly suggests a lack of competence.
I still don't understand why, for many people, that last point is so much harder to understand than the first two.
I mostly agree but I think the nuance with comedy is that there can be a mismatch in audiences, sometimes the others participating are not the intended audience, but are instead used as props. In that case it could be successful comedy independently of if they enjoyed it. Whether or not that’s ethical in a given situation is a separate question.
I think sometimes you get a mismatch between the audience the person thinks they have, and the audience they actually have.
For example, if you make a public post on social media, your actual audience is effectively the whole world. If you wanted a smaller audience, you should not have chosen a public post on social media as your venue.
> the others participating are not the intended audience, but are instead used as props.
Then it is frequently just a public bullying of a victim. Bullying can be really fun and bonding activity for bullies. That is why many of them do it.
I have many friends who I don’t do this with, because I know they don’t like it and it doesn’t work with them. I show my friendship to them by understanding the type of person they are and knowing that friendly ribbing is not for them.
Would you mind being friends with someone like me? Or do you feel like engaging in that behavior at all, even if not directed at you, is enough to make you not want to be friends with them?
I would gladly be friends with someone like you!
Aww, that was sweet, the opposite of bullying or ribbing. I guess for some people it's too sweet for their taste/culture/personality, they're more used to the "mean kind of nice". I prefer the straight up kind of nice, like this, where I don't have to be on my feet for getting attacked. Writing this out, I see similarities with "play fighting" among cats or dogs.
It’s pretty universal. I’ve lived in South, East Asia and the Middle East and it’s very common there.
Why did it put you off? Did you not understand the intention behind the words, or were the words unforgiveable despite their intention?
Not the person you asked, but I think it comes down to past experiences/family environment/etc. Theres poking fun at someone to signal "i like you anyway"... that is real. There's also people who cross the line with their words, and use "i was just joking" as an excuse to be cruel.
If someone has experienced a lot of the later, it makes sense that they don't really trust the former.
Very well said.
Not OP. It's not about the words or the intentions, it's about the fact that we can talk about anything in the world, do any activity together, and you want to do something I'm not comfortable with.
That said, I understand relationships are about give and take. I couldn't be in a romantic relationship like this, but I'll indulge my friends or my cousins. I have a friend who engages in "countersignaling" often. Our connection is generally worth the uncomfortableness, but sometimes it is unbearable.
It’s 100% about intention. The whole premise of male ribbing depends solely on intention, and you can always tell the person’s intention.
Not who you asked.
With age Ive found myself much more comfortable with folks "being mean, but in a friendly way" as they intend it. When I was younger though, I never understood why folks didn't instead just "say the nice part." Like, if your friends are always glad you join them even if you're always late, making fun of you for being late with a big smile can still feel pretty bad for you. Much better to say "hey please don't be late" and also "we really enjoy you spending time with us."
With age Ive come to see that for reasons I don't understand, lots of folks have a massive aversion to saying clearly the things they appreciate about the people around them directly. Eh, their loss.
I think there's a bit more to it than that. Being mean in a friendly way is sort of a sport, for some people finding a good quip is about the mental challenge of wordsmithing. It's easy, and not all that creative, to say "don't be late" and also with certain people can come across more negatively than just jokingly berating them, believe it or not. It sounds more serious. Something like, "glad you made it, Leland! We were just posting a GoFundMe to buy you a watch." Said in the right way with people you are very familiar with keeps a lighter tone, and less like I'm actually upset (even if I may be.) Not that I'd ever say something like that in a professional setting or to people I'm not actually strong friends with; those people just get a "glad you made it, Leland!"
It's also sort of the same reason shows like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia are funny. When you're jokingly mean to a friend, you're being a bit of a caricature, an exaggeration. That's part of the fun of it, too. And why it can get a point across while keeping it light.
It's two different kinds of logic. The stereotypically male way makes sense to me: you take the weapons that could be used against someone and make them harmless. If you're fat, your friends call you fat, and you're like, hey, they know I'm fat, it's established that I'm fat, and they're my friends anyway! Being fat is fine! It takes all the fear out of it.
In my perception, the stereotypically female way is, if you're fat, nobody calls you fat. They're careful using the word around you. They might even tell you you're not fat. To me, that makes it seem like the friendship depends on the obvious lie that you're not fat, which makes it seem inevitable that it's going to end. One day they're going to make some acknowledgment of the evident truth that you're fat, and that's your signal that they're done with you and the friendship is over. To me, it feels like the truth is being kept in reserve for the day when they're going to shank you with it.
That's my (male) perspective. I'd rather have friends who acknowledge the truth about me and make me feel okay about it than friends who act like the truth about me isn't compatible with friendship and inclusion.
On an intellectual level, I get the (stereotypically) female perspective, too -- I get that it doesn't seem friendly to constantly remind someone of their shortcomings, and that a friend group should give someone an escape from oppressive social perceptions. But that doesn't resonate with me as much emotionally.
"Men bond by saying nasty things they don’t mean. Women bond by saying nice things they don’t mean."
I think there is some truth to this old saying. If so, it would make sense that both sides find the way of the other side a bit off-putting.
Eh... if you're fat, and your friends call you fat, they mean it. You're fat.
They just don't mean for it to hurt, and that's the wholesome part. Every time they call you fat, they're showing you that it's okay with them that you're fat.
If you're fat, and your friends tell you you're not fat, then to me that implies that the truth is too awful to say, but for your sake they'll pretend you're a different person. Which to me seems like it really underscores that it's not actually okay to be the way you are.
Recently a lady was telling me that she wasn't taken seriously. When a male colleague proposed something that she proposed years ago, people suddenly accepted it, she said. I explained her about 'implicit pecking order' in company culture and 'he is taller'. Then she said "yeah i'm short". Then I said yes but you are perfect the way you are, and I think she appreciated that.
Basically the company is sexist anf that is ok?
There's bias in _every_ company, every culture even. The bias is towards age, race, height, beauty, weight, as well as gender. I live in one of the most inclusive countries in the world and work for a very inclusive company. Still, pecking order and biases exist. I think it is human nature and maybe it is fine even.
there are so many potential confounders in that story that might influence why the proposal was accepted. maybe his co-worker just proposed it too early and no one was ready for it?
Fair enough. They do mean it, but not it in a nasty way.
I have seen men say nasty things they absolutely meant and bond by bullying other people. That dynamic is actually very common among men. You literally see it in male only social groups (such as army or prison) where bullying someone is how guys show in group membership.
You also see men say nice things they dont mean ... frequently to a women they then badmount or mock behind their backs.
I haven't looked at this topic this way, but now this really does make sense! I remember a lady asking me once how tall I am. I'm rather tall and in fact I don't like being asked that, since it is obvious that I am tall and the actual number does not matter. I responded with my height and immediately asked: what is your weight? Wrong question. In my male brain it was an equal kind of question. In the female brain totally not.
Probably because it's a completely unrelated question. Height and weight are only similar in that they're both descriptors of something physical. That's... pretty much it. Height is basically immutable. More of it is not bad. Less of it is not bad. It's not particularly reflective of lifestyle outside of simply not being malnourished. It's just... there.
Weight, obviously, is nothing like this. It absolutely comes off like you're trying to be snarky.
> Less of it is not bad.
Many men would disagree. Many women would also disagree.
Edit: I also thought that immutable characteristics where the ones we should be most sensitive towards
she was trying to calcute your BMI ;-)
but yeah, that's a conversation i would have with my doctor, not an acquaintance.
Interesting.
I don't think it's OK or fine to be fat. It's a health risk. But I also don't think that "fat shaming" is OK either.
Same goes for how men are comforting each other by acknowledging flaws/mistakes/situation to try to help move on. Which is very different on how women comfort each other.
It's a stereotype that women are directly mean to other women more than men are mean to other men. No idea if there is any data to back that up, only that it's a commonly repeated meme.
https://www.google.com/search?q=women+are+just+horribly+crue...
There's also culture at play. I don't know if men affectionately dissing their friends is universal but there's plenty of related things like:
In Japanese culture you don't brag about co-workers or family to outsiders. Outsiders you treat with respect. Insiders you don't. The fact that you don't get the more polite treatment is proof that you're an insider. It's a common scene in stories where someone asks to stop being treated like an outsider by specifically asking for the less polite language. You can also watch the ribbing man to man, man to woman, woman to man, woman to woman. I don't know if there is data on which is more common.
the stereotype is also that when men don't like each other they'll just get into a fight once and move on whereas when women don't like each other they'll tear each other down in extended social and psychological campaigns
I suspect this is partly true:
Once they've had that fight, they both know who won, and their pecking order is established. Then life can go on with that settled.
yes, but of course the "pecking order" is more complicated than that. oftentimes the victor (the "alpha") gains respect for his (defeated) opponent for having the balls to challenge him and is thereby far more liable to include him in matters of importance
fighters tend to respect fighters if they fight a clean fight
It may be common in many places, but it is also a great filtering mechanism for envy. People who belittle others for fun feel a need to project some kind of social status above others. It’s toxic behavior because it can grow.
I seek out the social groups where people try to help eachother and where most of the conversation is towards pushing a common goal or helping each other’s pursuits. That way someone saying something negative is a signal, and the negative can be addressed. You can only move fast and in the right direction with clear signaling. If the signal is diluted by people with low self esteem who would rather belittle those who do than do the doing, then you need to clear the signal.
I know both kinds of people, men, women and kids. Its a thing that is nurtured across generations and different for each family and not that much gender-specific.
There's a fine line between teasing, which can build up a person, and degradation designed to destroy self esteem. It's also easy to dismiss that degradation as "I'm just teasing. You're too sensitive. "
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I don’t find it very gendered, my sister and I used to do this often, like young wolf pups, we’d jostle and play for the upper hand.
I have women friends who will play like this with me. It can reveal insights that neither of us were clear on without the other bringing it to light.
Of course it can be one sided too, and it turns into bullying. I think context matters and even if you’re being bullied, it’s still revealing if you are able to see beyond the emotion. You’re not your looks, your body, your mind, your bank account, your friend group, etc… Your worth is beyond these things. I hope you find that someday!
> it can be one sided too, and it turns into bullying
That's pretty insightful. I've had some friends I would tease and some I would never tease. People are different and relationships change over time. There's no one way to be with everybody all the time.
It can certainly be a barrier to male-male relationships if you didn't grow up around this behavior.
Likely because women do it too, but they aren't joking.
I think that's because when women do it, they are usually being intentionally cruel. Any woman will tell you how cruel teenage girls are to each other.
It's also women ... here's the proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xS9Y_mjTjc
Some men view this as "psychological warfare among friends" ... and it's tiring.
I think it is both, but males may do it more and use it as the main way they bond.
I would point out that male on male bullying absolutely exists. Sometimes were sever one. It also frequently involves mocking the other guy and no it is not friendly.
Sometimes those women are actually making very accurate observation about relationships of involved guys.
It is not exactly rare when "it was just a joke" is entirely dishonest and when went on was actually attempt to put down another guy.
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That's astute. I was always uncomfortable with this kind of joking. I felt threatened. The real reason was that I didn't have a good comeback.
Let's say my nose was large, and a friend jokes about it. I need to say something back. And I could not think of anything. A low stakes situation becomes higher stakes than it needs to be.
So on their side they see me struggle and probably feel bad, so they don't do it again. But then we are just friends not best friends.
Curious how did you learn / practice this?
I don’t know if I have a clear answer to how I learned and practiced this. Probably a lot of simple exposure and observation. The important thing is the friendship comes first; I never make an insult joke to someone I don’t know well. I build a friendship first, then test out the waters with small jokes.
I also always start and focus on myself; I make jokes at my own expense often. A big part of my personality is a strange juxtaposition of bravado and self deprecation. I will joke about how amazing I am and how much of a failure I am at the same time.
It seems to work? I think people like me, generally? I don’t know man, I just wing it! I have no idea what I am doing, but I am also pretty great at not knowing what I am doing.
> And I could not think of anything.
I've identified two approaches to this situation. One is to take the insult graciously, as though it's feedback:
"Careful: you could put someone's eye out with that!"
"Oh! Thanks for the reminder." (adjust the position of your head, as appropriate for your extremely large and dangerous nose)
---
The other is to take whatever they said, and exaggerate it. This produces really good comebacks. (It's important to insist upon this point, regardless of any evidence you might receive to the contrary.)
"Careful: you could put someone's eye out with that!"
"Oh, could I? Well, your entire face is bad."
If they respond with another insult, repeat the same strategy. They'll notice what you're doing after the second or third attempt, and then it will turn from "this person's bad at comebacks" into "this person's (pretending to be) bad at comebacks and it's funny".
"My face is bad? Is that the best you could come up with?"
"Your face is so bad that it makes everyone else's faces bad, too."
"But… that means your face is also bad."
"And whose fault is that? It's your fault. Specifically, the fault of your face. Which is bad."
"Still means you've got a big nose."
"Well you've got a small nose."
"No I don't. We've got the same sized noses."
"Thus invalidating your previous aspersion that my nose is unusually large. Who's bad at comebacks now?"
"Still you."
---
There's a third approach, if the insult is disguised as faux-concern: pretend you're taking it seriously, while exaggerating the characteristic they're concerned about.
"Hey, you having trouble seeing past that, mate?"
"Oh, no, it's alright: most of my vision is unobstructed." / "I've got some tape in my bag if I need it." / "It's no worse than binoculars."
> "Oh, could I? Well, your entire face is bad."
This gave me quite a chuckle. Reads like a comeback from GPT-2 =P
A proper comeback in this scenario perverts the characteristic into a positive trait, with some added denigration.
"That's what lets me keep a wide berth from your mom, I can smell her a mile away".
the jerk store called
the life support machine called
In case anyone is out of the loop, these are both lines from an eminently quotable Seinfeld episode (The Comeback, S8E13) that perfectly encapsulates the concept of l'esprit d'escalier, which I’m not sure has a direct English translation in common terms, but is a sort of loan word in my parlance, but I’ll admit I have studied French in secondary school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Comeback_(Seinfeld)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier
> L'esprit de l'escalier or l'esprit d'escalier (lit. 'staircase wit') is a French term used in English for the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late.
Now that Curb Your Enthusiasm has wrapped, I could go for a rewatch of Seinfeld, as I can’t think of a better coda to Curb than a return to the roots from which Larry David’s own show sprang.
Hope springs eternal, and both Seinfeld and Curb are wry reminders that every silver lining has its cloud. I’ll take the rain.
> Oh, could I? Well, your entire face is bad." > If they respond with another insult
I seriously doubt they will. “Your entire face is bad” sounds like lashing out from a place of hurt. Typical response would probably be a confused or disgusted look followed by a change of topic.
There are not a lot of people who could pull this kind of response off without coming off extremely weird or like assholes. And none of the people who could pull this off successfully are asking for comeback advice on Hacker News.
> “Your entire face is bad” sounds like lashing out from a place of hurt.
Childlore isn't well documented online, but in my part of the world, "your face" was the orphan-friendly equivalent of "your mom". It is well-understood to be an extremely bad comeback in the circles I frequent: I've not known anyone to misunderstand it. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
Maybe I’m just old and out of touch.
No, it's the children who are wrong.
just say it with big ass grin on your face, problem solved
Yeah but also no. This feels a like bit like “just be charismatic”. Someone asking how to respond to this sort of playful insult is unlikely to pull this off in any natural way.
I would think a better response for someone who does not know how to naturally respond to these sorts of playful insults would be to just absorb it goodnaturedly. “Haha, yep. I get this big nose from my dad.” Instead of continuing banter that is awkward, end it in a friendly way and move on.
Another strategy is to tell them to fuck off.
dpark's caveat (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45467182) applies here as well: there's a big difference between "fuck off" and "fuck off", and someone inexperienced in such conversations probably won't hit the right tone. (Especially if they've just come out of "oh no I can't think of a comeback" and are a bit stressed.)
"one-upping"
when i dont have a comeback i simply say, "oh no ive been owned" or something similar. the toxic male environment social equivalent of brushing yourself off and standing back up. lets them get whatever they needed from the exchange but also signals theyre not going to get a big reaction from you if they happen to be 100% bully
ur ma
Can I float an adjacent idea? It collapses the anxiety by simply forcing the thing your anxious about to be over. I've definitely had the experience you're describing where someone likes me despite something I'm insecure about. I've also had the experience where someone dislikes me precisely because of something I'm insecure about and tells me as much to my face. Both are better than not knowing.
I think this varies a lot depending on the person and the relationship. When I was younger, I couldn't put up with ribbing at all. I always took it as bullying. I still think very negatively of some of the people I was "friends" with at the time due to that.
On the other hand, I have ~3 friends I made as an adult that I have been talking to very frequently (with some, daily), for a decade or so, and there, any level of ribbing is fine.
I don't think it's about us knowing each other's worst qualities and being fine with it, as a lot of our banter is on things we can't change about ourselves. I think it's just a matter of trust.
The book Impro treats extensively of what it calls "status games", in the context of building believable, natural scenes of dialog for the stage (or other dramatic purposes) and as a framework for making improvisation interesting.
The author muses that the situation of feeling safe playing status games with another person—that is, treating them only as games, not as serious and with real status in play—is perhaps the definition of what friendship is.
This could include trading barbs, taking turns playing the bully and the victim, trading playing "high" and "low" roles, jokey one-upsmanship, that kind of thing. Stuff you don't do with non-friends because there's too much risk of being taken seriously, and too much risk of losing actual status or of hurting someone else's status for-real when you didn't intend to.
OMG. The section (and one central page) in that book about status is one of the most insightful and meaningful things I have ever read in my entire life!
Once you recognize status transactions ... they are absolutely everywhere, in every single interaction.
This is a great observation. The concept from article was a eye opener. I always wondered why we give each other shit.
I once worked at a place where we all called each other “NERD.” One time a person outside the IT circle turned to us in the cafeteria and shouted, “What's up, NERDS?” There was complete silence in the room. I guess only a nerd can call another nerd a nerd.
It's a game that allies play in order to prepare for enemies.
When played with allies, it connects you to each other and lets you put your guard down (which is perverse to those that don't get it).
The same game played with an enemy teaches you to deflect rather than internalize bad-faith insults and teaches you to use wit and words to stand up for yourself, keeping your dignity without violence.
...
Also it's a demonstration of equality.
e.g. you can't play the game with your boss or your son, but you can play it with your brother and your peers.
Not sure why this article didn't link to the original when citing it, but here's the link to the Scott Alexander blog: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/23/friendship-is-counters...
And a follow up: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/09/friendship-is-still-co...
FWIW, this blog writer appears to only be cross-linking to his own posts. Perhaps good for his own SEO, but not as much for his readers...
My friend group from my school did the same thing, but I've always hated this pattern. Because of exactly this behavior, after finishing school I've decided to intentionally drop some contacts.
Maybe I've interpreted it as "I'm better than you, because you're doing X. I'm mentioning this over and over again, because it makes me feel better."
True. Back in the day, the mates and I would greet each other by saying, "Hey, fuck you." Then, "No, fuck you.". You can kinda guess it eventually ping pongs louder and funnier. We kind of had to stop when other innocent people would pop in and ask if everything is "ok".
That may be an interpretation. Another is that many have difficulty regulating their feelings, and “venting” the discomfort in this semi-controlled manner is a socially acceptable release because it invites others to do the same to you, and you all minimize the risk of catastrophic attacks under tension.
Yes! I’ve noticed that when people struggle to manage their emotions, it often comes out in a kind of jabbing or teasing way. It’s usually not really about the other person, it’s more a reflection of their own insecurities. For example, the guy jabbing his friend for being short is probably not that tall himself and may feel insecure about it deep down. There could be some unprocessed feelings around it. The genuinely tall person usually couldn’t care less. The thought of making that jab doesn’t really even surface lol
It's the opposite of conditional acceptance, and probably one of the most stabilizing forms of social support you can have
This seems fairly culture-dependent, from my experience.
For instance, I've noticed a distinct difference in how sarcasm is received in the Northeast US vs the West Coast. What you described feels more Northeast-y to me (I'm sure it varies by other segments and sub-sub-cultures, too).
There's the saying: "If an Irish person calls you 'asshole,' it means they think you're a friend. If they call you 'friend' it means they think you're an asshole."
Not just for the Irish though, I don't think (:
Well, I have lived in California my whole life, and 90% of my friends are also native Californians, so i guess it isn't exclusively east coast.
:) I also think this applies to Scotland and the UK. I love the irony that continent brings to the world.
Ha that's funny. I'm from the Midwest and found my dry/sarcastic humor tended to confuse people on the West Coast. A lot of people tended to take me completely seriously when I was obviously joking.
I always chalked that up to being around people that were new to the country and hadn't yet wrapped their head around the latest fashionable American cynicism. Generally takes a few decades to kick in, but when it does it's usually worth the wait (see Kumail Ali Nanjiani).
Yeah, I don't know about that. I had many people in my life (including close friends and relatives) who continued to be abusive "it's just fun teasing" even after I asked them to stop.
They are no longer in my life. I don't miss them even a little bit!
Anyone who doesn’t stop when asked is not a true friend. I would never tease anyone who didn’t seem to be enjoying it.
> My closest groups of friends always make so much fun of each other. We make negative comments about the worst traits about each other
That sounds terrible. A candid conversation about our flaws is one thing. IME 'friends' who most often mock each other are just trying to elevate their status in the group, by pushing others down.
The problem with using clinical phrases to describe normal behavior is demonstrated in this post. "Social anxiety" has a specific clinical meaning that is not covered by this post. The post is actually discussing a very natural and rational nervousness that normal people have in social situations. The post is providing a way of thinking about that nervousness that can help reduce it, for the nervous person's benefit, and it's great if that works, but it's not addressing social anxiety.
Social anxiety is a condition that cannot be thought away, you cannot rationalize social anxiety nor can it be represented as a cost/benefit analysis of risk of being disliked vs. reward of being liked. You can feel socially anxious without having social anxiety. You can be depressed without having depression. You will be depressed after your beloved pet dies. You will be socially anxious walking into a room full of people you haven't met before.
I agree with you as a general rule. But this is actually pretty close to how Social Anxiety is defined. It's about the fear of being negatively evaluated or embarrassed.
For example the DSM definition https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t12/ or the Mayo Clinic explainer page https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/social-anxiet....
I think what this blog post is getting at is describing for people the difference between fear of negative evaluation and positive desire to be liked.
One thing the post misses is that sometimes these are learned behaviors that come from a lifetime of experience being disliked for no obvious reason. For example, sometimes outgoing autistic children develop social anxiety after their peers reject them repeatedly.
> sometimes outgoing autistic children develop social anxiety after their peers reject them repeatedly.
As a middle-aged woman who can't figure out what the benefits would be that would outweigh the costs of pursuing formal diagnosis at this stage, I related a lot harder to that line than I wanted to.
I've always been extraverted. I always do fine in new interactions, because I'm chronically interested in anything I don't already know well, especially if someone else is passionate about it. Most of my first meetings with people quickly become conversations where I'm listening attentively and asking interested questions about some niche thing they love and their friends and family members are sick of hearing about. I get stellar reviews on initial conversations at unstructured social events.
And yet I spend the vast majority of my time at home by myself because after about the fourth interaction, something about me registers as "off" to other people and they start to distance themselves from me. I have never understood why.
I'm not socially anxious, at least not in the typical "can't get out and meet new people" way. I just can't take the never-ending hope-rejection loop anymore.
> after about the fourth interaction, something about me registers as "off" to other people and they start to distance themselves from me. I have never understood why
I’m not sure it would be helpful, but have you tried asking anyone?
Speaking strictly for myself, it's because I did eye contact wrong.
As a teenager, with standard-issue high-function ASD eye-contact aversion: fake it, by looking only at the bridges of people's noses.
After learning, from doing theatre, that vulnerability is amazing, actually, and eye-contact is powerful: try for it, by looking fixidly at one of their eyes.
After being told by a kind friend, in my early twenties, that I had a "staring problem": shift focus between both of their eyes.
Soon after: figure out that you're supposed to look away from their eyes sometimes.
Since: try to pick up and match their gaze-rhythm. I still have difficulty doing this with some people: there are folks who don't seem to have a rhythm. I don't get them!
My wife told me a few weeks ago that when we first got together (over a decade ago) that the times I forgot to mask - during sex, specifically - sufficiently weirded her out that it's why she broke up with me (for about twenty minutes, lol; she reconsidered on her own). Now, bless her, she says she likes it when I "stare", because she says she knows it means I'm comfortable with her and feeling relaxed.
I've got other peculiarities - and some I haven't noticed yet, I'm sure! - but that's a big one, and how I've dealt with it. I hope that helps someone.
That’s really interesting. Thanks for explaining.
I second this suggestion. This might sound obvious but during my therapy my psychologist asked me to do this, but in a non-personal/non-threatening way for the relation. Just by telling them that I'm working through my issues and I'd like to get an honest (best would be written/no-interaction type) feedback - what makes them uncomfortable etc. This helped me a lot - to see how different the transmission was on the receiving end from my intentions.
It's about a specific type of debilitating fear. The DSM has a rule for criteria that, to be considered as having a condition, it must seriously affect your ability to live a normal life.
Most social anxiety is not debilitating, and would not meet the diagnosis. This is why therapists receive so much training - you must encounter enough people with a truly debilitating fear that you know when to diagnose it.
It's not just embarrassed, it's about avoiding being used as a punching bag by the local bullies the school will do nothing about.
And, yes, when the typical outcome is exclusion without any reason, or without a reason that you have any control over (such as that bully, people don't want to be around the targets because it might spill onto them) what else would you expect?
> It's about the fear of being negatively evaluated or embarrassed.
It's not just a fear, it's "persistent and intense fear". and like most psychological disorders, a key part of the definition includes "a negative impact on the person's functioning in daily life".
Like OP said, fear of being embarrassed is entirely normal and healthy response. It's not social anxiety nor a psychiatric disoder.
It's not different than OCD, phobias, etc. They can all be entirely normal responses. What makes them a disorder is the level of intensity and the impact on the person's life.
> You will be depressed after your beloved pet dies.
You'll experience *grief* after a pet dies. We've pathologizing grief to a point that it makes it harder for those experiencing both grief and depression, two separate (but sometimes linked) human conditions.
https://undark.org/2022/07/21/the-hidden-dangers-of-patholog...
I completely agree and I don’t like when non-medical professionals take these terms too seriously.
Psychiatrists are way better equipped to diagnose these things not because they can read diagnostic manuals (anyone can) but because their training exposes them to real cases.
There’s a world of difference between feeling awkward and quiet at a social event vs having heart palpitations and panic attacks that prevent you from even going outside.
Exactly right. And you might waste years of your life trying to "fix" social anxiety by attempting to change your mindset or trying to adopt new social practices. (Speaking from experience.)
Except it’s not. It can be thought away, under enough pressure people can do extraordinary things. There is just no such pressure in society now. I’ve suffered immensely in my life, and if you describe your condition as “anxiety” you simply aren’t suffering enough for treatment to have any real impact.
If you think you’re suffering rises to the medical treatable level please develop a more serious condition before getting on a waitlist. All doctors are taken up on your non-physical problems and you don’t immediately need care like I do.
I didn't get the sense that this article was trying to help people rationalize away social anxiety. Rather, it seemed much more that it was trying to get the socially anxious to accurately assess the nature (and effects) of their reactionary behavior.
IMO it's a useful first step, as a major facet of treating anxiety disorders with CBT involves challenging negative thoughts and beliefs and replacing them with positive alternatives.
Properly understanding that your anxious lizard brain is (successfully) trying to protect you from the threat of being disliked helps reframe that behavior in a positive light.
"The post is ... not addressing social anxiety."
Exactly this. The article conflates normal social nervousness with an actual disorder, then provides a reframe that may help with nervousness (?) but completely misunderstands the clinical condition.
You can feel socially anxious without having social anxiety.
That is not true in plain English, just because a particular profession decides to use words one way, does not mean the definitions change for the rest of us.
> just because a particular profession decides to use words one way, does not mean the definitions change for the rest of us
This is a particular pain in physics, which has taken very commonly used words and given them a very narrowly defined meaning, within a strict framework - like the words Energy or Work
> Social anxiety is a condition that cannot be thought away
I hope not, I don't want to be hooked on some prescription meds eg. what about exposure therapy
I do wonder if being nervous to talk to a hot girl is the same as social anxiety I mean I'm not the jock/main attention guy either but I can talk to strangers (guys or not attractive women)
I do think posts like this can still be valuable for people on the edge
He (and it’s a he, of course) says this on a forum full of people who have convinced themselves they’re neurodivergent.
inb4 we live in a society etc
I have social anxiety and it is completely unrelated to likeableness.
I do not think people would not like me, I do not try to avoid people disliking me, that's not the point at all. Quite the opposite, I'm sure I'm an interesting person and I'm confident people would like me if I could take the step.
Problem is, there is something that physically prevents me from saying "Hi!" to a stranger. I literally cannot get myself to take a step towards them and I can't explain why that is, because I do not understand it myself.
Also quite interestingly (to me), this completely goes away under certain circumstances: (1) If I take around 2-3 units of alcohol and it is not a totally alien environment (it would not help if I was in a bar alone with complete strangers). (2) If more than about 70% of people in the room are people I know well. Then I do not feel anxious about approaching the remaining 30%.
I have the same exact experience as you. It's like some weird physical barrier, but I can't really articulate the feeling or explain it. The exposure therapy method here doesn't work because "just do it a bunch of times and you'll get more comfortable" isn't even possible for me, I can't "just do it."
For me though, it takes more than a few beers to be comfortable approaching someone. I'd have to be completely sloshed and even then it's a struggle.
The only time I didn't experience the seemingly physical barrier was in college when a friend convinced me to try MDMA and we went out. I became almost the exact opposite of who I am with the social anxiety. I was the most extraverted, outgoing person in our group quite literally chatting up anyone and everyone that I crossed paths with without any care or inhibition around it.
No other pharmaceutical has been able to cure it for me like that, and it's a bit depressing because I liked that version of myself and I'd like to be able to be that person again without an incredibly dangerous illegal substance.
If you’re open about it, maybe you can take a look into Phenibut — it’s somewhere between alcohol and lightweight MDMA in terms of disinhibition effects. It can help tremendously in the context of aiding progressive exposure. Do you own research, though: it can get into slippery slope fairly quickly.
What you say about "extroverted" is interesting, because I do not see myself as an introvert. Once I am familiar with the people around, I am social bee, very chatty, energised by speaking with others etc. I crave social relationships but I can't find or start them.
My wife is exact opposite. She is an introvert who does not have a problem with approaching people. Relationships drain her energy, she can't chat to even a close friend for more than a couple of hours, but approaching a complete stranger when necessary or she wants to? That's not a problem for her at all, she just does not usually want it, and she loves her alone times.
Make your own decisions of course, but make sure you are fully educated about the risks of MDMA. It is not generally considered to be a dangerous substance. It is illegal though, and moderation is always prudent.
> It is not generally considered to be a dangerous substance.
Yes, but regular long time use can lead to memory impediments.
I find it helpful to think of that physical barrier as your own emotions barring you from entering a state where the uncertainty as to whether you'll be safe grows too high to trust yourself to operate in real time.
The problem isn't really being liked or not being liked, the problem is the cognitive overload of trying to predict what will happen and respond to it in realtime, which is sure to set in when one's mental model of the potential interaction is very uncertain. Of course, if your brain quits in a conversation, the other person is not going to be very impressed with you, so this kind of failure carries social risk itself.
The way to fix this is to have as many interactions which are bearable as possible so as to build out the mind's mental model of itself and others in social situations. Gradually the danger just fades away. There's no substitute for firsthand experience; no amount of premeditating, ruminating, or brooding will fix this.
> The problem isn't really being liked or not being liked, the problem is the cognitive overload of trying to predict what will happen and respond to it in realtime, which is sure to set in when one's mental model of the potential interaction is very uncertain.
I think is a big piece. I have social anxiety and I have a tendency not to answer with what I'm thinking but what I think they want to hear because it's more predictable. This gets amplified tenfold in interviews. In an interview, I know that they're looking for a specific answer when they ask a question, but also that the answer differs from interviewer to interviewer. It's like there's this sub-process that is constantly running trying to figure out what to say, but in some situations it ends up locking up the system because it's using too many resources due to the constraints.
Mine is similar to this. In addition the anxiety comes from me thinking that most interactions are banal and more about “trading good vibes and energy” with the other person rather than a genuine deep conversation, and I fear that my facial expressions will reflect what I’m really feeling inside - “ugh can we transition off talking about my weekend or the weather?”. And also because I’m not that witty without alcohol, but it’s almost like most of western small talk is based off of exchanging humor and wit, then laughing very loudly at the punchline. So my anxiety is more to do with not performing well enough to have this stereotypical exchange done smoothly.
This is relatable, mine is somewhat similar. It feels like a very specific version of performance anxiety that unfortunately affects the most banal social interactions. It is obviously multiplied tenfold when I'm in a situation where there are actual stakes (an interview, a first date, etc), but it still applies if I am just talking to a friend of a friend at a party that I don't know very well. The stakes feel very high to me because it's our first time talking.
It's less that I need them to like me or fear being disliked and more that I am just way too conscious of the stakes and the social interaction that's happening, which causes my brain to sort of freeze up. It feels like when I used to play tennis in high school. I'd do great at practice, then freeze up and barely remember how to hit the ball in games because the stakes on each point felt so high.
If I'm around some good friends it completely goes away. If I have hung around the person enough (even without directly talking to them), it goes away. I've also had random days where I don't feel the performance anxiety and performed really well in those situations (and coincidentally some of those days I'd meet a new group of friends or a girlfriend). It's extremely frustrating. Xanax makes the performance anxiety go away completely but slows me down cognitively so I become much less witty and interesting to talk to.
This is not a full solution, but it really helped me; the book The Charisma Myth
Every chapter has exercises that help deal with social anxiety
Even doing just the 3 basic recommendations in the intro can be very impactful
Thanks! Checking this out now...
You have the fear of being judged; the antidote is realizing that most people barely notice you, it just feels like they do because you’re self-conscious around new people.
I believe most people barely notice me but how do I realise this?
It's amazing we don't have a good answer for this yet.
For me it happened on its own and I realized I was fine with who I was flaws and all. Yeah I get disappointed in myself or whatever but it was just getting comfortable in my own skin over the years that seemed to mostly fix stuff like this.
Also a lot of observing the anxiety and then after it subsided realizing I don't have enough time to worry about everyone else like I was assuming people worry about me.
Sorry for the rambling it's late. Anyway wish you best of luck out there :)
100% agree. I used to think there was some cognitive loop I could will my way out of. Then I did Keto and all the sudden it was gone.
Keto does a lot to the neurotransmitters in the brain and it clearly balances out things for me and I feel no social anxiety at all.
I’m sure cognitive tricks work for some people. They mostly had the opposite effect on me in the long term. I would encourage people to not buy into it too much
Have you got any links to any peer reviewed papers discussing this about Keto?
https://www.metabolicmind.org/ has some of the best info. Research is still early but picking up steam https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...
I assume it can be different for everyone. This post resonates with me, but my social anxiety mixes being sensitive to negative feedback and low self-esteem.
So, you want to avoid both being disliked, but also being liked - because this puts you in novel situations you fear lead to an even bigger failure down the road.
I feel like it's more like a disconnect between intention and action
Maybe it's just me but this seems pretty normal? I don't see myself as having social anxiety, but I am probably more reserved than what you described.
Perhaps it is normal, it has been a great challenge my whole life.
Every new school, new job, new environment has been a struggle until I made friends in natural ways (either I had to wait someone approached me, or it has been through activities like shared home work etc.)
But moving to a new country has been a disaster in terms of relationships. I'm already very anxious, but I now need to approach people in a foreign language and there's no school-like environment where relationships form naturally. Clubs and events do not help as they are at most an hour a week so nothing like the school.
I am sure there are many people like me, but I doubt it is the majority. I am just back from my kids birthday and as far as I could see, among 20, there were only one or two other adults who did not speak to anyone, majority somehow has less challenge.
Alcohol reduces fear.
If it wasn't for booze I'd have no friends.
And school produces fear.
Like most anxiety disorders, there is a reason for your response. Your brain is basically trained to jump from stimulus -> response without cognitively thinking through stimulus -> interpretation -> response.
This is why cognitive behavior therapy can help many people. With a trained professional, you uncover the reasons why you developed the response. Once you know the thinking pattern that drives the response, you can work on changing those thinking patterns.
I've done CBT before and it's been quite helpful.
Actually I have attributed it to the pervasiveness of advertising. I fucking hate all ads, and salesmen. And in an attempt to never be anywhere near this thing i hate so much, i do not interrupt strangers ever for any reason
Neither "wanting to be liked" or "wanting to avoid being disliked" rings true to me, at least as applied to my own social anxiety. I want to avoid being thought of at all. The idea of being liked is just as anxiety-producing as being disliked. Possibly more so. Every relationship with another person, positive or negative, is another cognitive burden to maintain. I would vastly prefer most of my interactions to just remain at the default/stranger level where I can re-use the same anticipatory model for most people I deal with.
Tangentially related, I have for some time had a desire to write short stories, but the anxiety around revealing anything that might expose my inner self is probably the biggest reason why I don't.
I was reading a collection of short stories yesterday and came upon Michael Swanwick's "Slow Life". It struck me that it shares more than a few similarities to his "The Very Pulse of the Machine": Woman astronaut on a moon in the outer solar system is placed in lethal danger, encounters alien intelligence that communicates by reading/influencing minds, she isn't sure whether the communication is genuine or hallucinated, eventually the alien intelligence provides a long-shot resolution to save her. Maybe Swanwick just had another story to tell with some of the same beats. It happens. Or maybe it's like bare feet in a Tarantino movie. The point is, the idea of someone examining my own stories and thinking such thoughts about me is extremely distressing. It's not being disliked that I try to avoid. I'm trying to avoid the baseline stress of social interaction.
I recognize the irony of opening up about this in writing. If you have something to say _about me_, please don't.
The weird thing about "The idea of being liked is just as anxiety-producing as being disliked" is that it is an incorrect prediction of reality: actually being liked would. Thinking about it is really a different thing: it overestimates the stakes involved, it mistakenly invents "ideas of people" to do the liking which do not behave like actual people, and is unable to build any self-esteem by imagining people liking you because these imagined people are under your our control; being liked by your own imagined people doesn't "count" the way being liked by real people would...
The human mind is not really designed to handle under-socialization well, and seems to fill in the empty space with imaginary figures which fail to meet its social needs. Taken outside its natural tribal operating regime, it bugs out in all kinds of strange ways.
> the idea of someone examining my own stories and thinking such thoughts about me is extremely distressing
This is a very familiar feeling to me, and in my experience it actually is a fear of being disliked, or more specifically about not being able to control others' reactions to me. But the fear is so great and unapproachable that the mind cordons it "out of sight" of conscious feeling.
It becomes better to not be thought of than to expose myself to the possibility of others seeing me poorly, especially if I'm not able to defend myself and make the case for my being seen with grace. I suspect that it is over-exposure to human meanness and judgement and under-exposure to kindness and grace which brings about this expectation of others' dispositions towards oneself; this perhaps is the reason for the Christian injunction that humans not judge one another--it guards against this particular failure mode of the social mind.
I really hope it doesn't make you too uncomfortable for me to say: amen to that.
That's it. Leaving you in peace now. Peace!
Social anxiety is not one uniform phenomenon
This might be therapeutic for you:
The vast majority of people who interact with you in any way, think about you extremely little or not at all beyond the moment of interaction.
We just don't play nearly as big a role in other peoples' lives as we sometimes imagine.
It's the observant and introspective people among us who believe otherwise. Most people are neither.
This rings true to me as someone who's overcome most of his social anxiety over the last few years. The last graph is particularly correct. It's about being authentic and being okay with people not liking you. This is especially useful in dating because then you stop being needy (which is unattractive) when you can let go of the outcome and just show someone who you are and if they reject you then you simply realize that they aren't the person you were looking for because you were looking for someone who likes you for who you are.
Is the person who wrote the post qualified to say this though? Like are these statements the result of scientific research or just his opinion like my opinion?
It's a opinion piece. But so are must attempted explanations of emotions. How would you even study this?
It seems some in the comments resonate and some disagree. So its somewhat useful.
One thing i feel missing is the anxiety part of social anxiety. The way the brain colors vague or unclear external (social) signals in default negative ways, in a feedback loop.
Not avoiding being disliked or seeking being liked, but simply being unable to quantity it correctly.
Fair enough but I still don't understand this person's relationship to the subject and why they are so vague about what they do and what their qualifications are on all of their social media.
I think the premise, backed up by a couple of random tweets, is questionable, but glossing over that, the conclusion is more or less "just be yourself and you'll have more success". Maybe. But I feel like it's pinning social anxiety purely on neurotic safety-seeking behavior, which is superficial. Surely generalized social anxiety is an unhealthy over-correction, but some personality types have inherently more success socially than others, or in blunt terms, some people are more likeable than others. If you're socially compatible with 90% of the population, it's not hard to ignore the 10% you don't meld with, but swap the numbers and the negative feedback will be overwhelming and makes the majority of social interactions anxiety-inducing. I guess that's why the anonymous Internet is full of disagreeable people.
I find "just be yourself" insulting. It implies that the problem is attempting to fake it coming off wrong--it's all in your head. It ignores the reality that some people fit in better than others.
As someone with apparent social anxiety, I don't really care about being disliked either. Being left alone is the overriding priority by far, it is not an aversion to being disliked, although being disliked is not the best since it's still attention.
If someone came to me and tried to mentor me about unlearning my discomfort with being disliked, I would feel like I'm being manipulated and I would make sure to avoid that person.
Yeah same here. I like people, I like me - what I don’t like is the expectation that I essentially perform improv for others when I don’t want to. The problem is being observed, and expected to perform. It feels bad. Being left alone, with no risk of social interaction, feels really really good. It’s a literal relief from the constant energy expenditure that is acting out socializing.
I’d prefer to avoid being disliked - or at any rate, disliked without good reason - but as you say, that’s mostly because then I’d be wasting even more of my time managing interactions with (or more likely avoiding interactions with) those who dislike me. My god what a waste of energy, how I abhor it.
I’ve never been good at banter so this speaks to me.
But it’s interesting to think that when people like you, they tend to want more from you and that leads to social obligations. And you can either go along with these social obligations or decline and come off as rude.
So in a sense, social connections give people some amount of control over your life and that can feel restricting and draining sometimes.
Even something as simple as a text message can be thought of as a task that someone gave you without your consent. And if you don’t respond within a certain time window then you’re rude and risk damaging the relationship. Or if you respond poorly that can damage it as well.
Sometimes I wonder if this is social anxiety or just being extra aware of the realities of life.
The way my psychologist explained social anxiety to me was it's based off an innate system in our brain which is sensitive to social rejection. Rejection is potentially very bad because that might mean we get kicked out of our group and die (at least that is true thousands of years ago). Anxiety is overthinking and subconsciously trying to control all the outcomes to reduce rejection. And this includes avoidance as a response.
This social anxiety pattern can be reinforced over time with negative or even neutral experiences, particularly through childhood. The system becomes attuned to unpleasant confirming evidence. Some brains may be particularly prone to this too.
I think this explanation is consistent with all the experiences people are sharing in this thread. The core model at work is still the social rejection system, even if the exact behaviours and rationalisations you have are a little different.
And the treatment is exposure therapy to get more neutral and positive experiences. Which can be very hard because your brain can be very strongly configured to avoid rejection. You may have to start very gently from steps which may not be particularly challenging (e.g. have a friend in a new coffee shop).
Anyone who has had to contend with social anxiety should be insulted reading this.
Author is trying to frame social anxiety as "rational risk aversion"; it's not. Social anxiety isn't a strategy— it's your brain misfiring and treating normal social interactions as more serious threats. It's not about being liked. It's not about being disliked. At all. Reframing avoidance as "successfully avoiding dislike" just repackages the dysfunction with a motivational poster.
This is part of it, but everyone to some degree has discomfort with being disliked and will do things to avoid it. At least in my experience, social anxiety is much more about the cognitive distortions that convince you others dislike you, when they may in fact be neutral or even have a positive view of you.
Just as one example, when I'm interacting with someone who I haven't reached a certain level of comfortability with, I'm highly aware of and sensitive to their reactions to me in terms of what they're saying, their tone, their micro facial expressions, etc., and I perceive any small negative reaction as a sign that they don't like me. This usually isn't true! But it ironically has the effect of inducing self-sabotaging avoidant behaviors in me, such as over-censoring of what I say and just general awkwardness around them, which makes it much more likely they will end up disliking me.
I can dig it. I'm constantly and annoyingly replaying every social interaction in my head for days, and even longer when they're (in my perception) bad. Why would I want to go out, if I might subject myself to more of that? (I do go out and continue to subject myself to that, but nowhere near as frequently as my more social friends.)
I do this too. I’ve been led to believe it’s a symptom of OCD, which I absolutely express in other ways
I've been reading through the book The Courage to be Disliked recently. I'm not a big fan of the writing style of the book, but some of the ideas in the book appear in this post too.
One of the concepts in the book is being comfortable with being disliked. If instead you're trying to avoid being disliked, you're effectively subject to other people's whims.
When you look at it from that perspective, that's a pretty stressful experience!
> I'm not a big fan of the writing style of the book
OP here. I address that in How I'd rewrite The Courage to be Disliked: https://chrislakin.blog/courage
I can't help but feel that these criticisms, like many others of the book, are mostly down to cultural misunderstanding. The writing style of the book is deeply Japanese and that's off-putting for many, myself included. But for some, it's to the point where the forest is missed for the trees. I've read a few translations of it and some do a better job at conveying the idea than others, but they all feel clunky without the cultural context.
A good example of what I mean is your first suggestion, choosing a less triggering explanation for teleology. The idea of trigger words as we understand them, and the need to shield people from them, is not a universal cultural phenomenon. The suggestion feels a bit like visiting a country where they drive on the left side of the road and suggesting they try and drive on the right instead. Maybe the suggestion is good! But maybe not, without cultural context, the suggestion reads mostly like just asking for things to be made more familiar to you.
Thanks for the link! I read through it and agree with most of your points, especially the parts about presence and separation of tasks.
I personally liked the intellectual aspect of it, though I also agree that the emotional component should be there as well.
IDK, in my experience not avoiding being disliked only results in a lot of people disliking me, but hasn't brought any gains, unless a rate limit on HN is a gain (they say I'm "too ideological", whatever that means)
Since you brought it up, I will put in my 2 cents, and I will try to articulate it in a constructive way, not meant as an attack at all.
Fair warning, I'm American and I realize you are European, and there are obvious cultural differences that may be at play.
The main problem I have with you is the attitude. Very black-and-white thinking, as if you seemingly just know everything, about everything, which I don't think can be true for anybody really.
I think it makes you actually appear less intelligent, although it is obvious that you are intelligent, but it makes people think things like "pshh what does this guy know, acting like he wrote the book on this subject". But lower intelligence people are masters of black-and-white thinking, and see constructive feedback as criticism, unable to use it to improve themselves, which I don't think you want to be seen as.
Of course, there are people who criticize because they're haters and get a kick out of it. Despite their hatred, their criticism may still be valid.
But most of your comments IMO just seem to be very matter-of-fact, often seemingly blind to important context/nuances that make the answer not really as simple as you make it sound. And when people ask for sources, you often do not respond. I don't think I've ever seen you admit you were wrong either.
In fact this is the biggest problem I have with people in general (not just you), this kind of dogmatism, the black and white thinking. To me it shows a lack of empathy and humility, often those people are also very quick to anger, and I think it shows a lack of critical thinking, as if you somehow have all the answers and are infallible, that there can be no other possible valid perspectives or opinions, I think this is a rampant problem on IRC/the Internet and indeed life in general.
I also notice that a lot of your comments get downvoted, which I assume may be a combination of both unpopular opinions (or that they are stated in a way people disagree with), and just haters that will always downvote certain people.
All that being said, I realize I'm not perfect either, and I have absolutely fallen trap to all these same things and more, and for anyone who I have wronged by it, I apologize.
I have not noted his comment history so I'm only addressing this in a general fashion:
A lot of things actually are black and white, but people invent shades in them in order to avoid having to admit there's a problem without a solution. I've been accused of black and white thinking many times, almost never has the accuser been able to actually show a nuance to the situation.
And other times, people invent shades in order to pretend there isn't a clear solution.
> A lot of things actually are black and white
My issue is with people who take this to the extreme and apply it to the vast majority of their responses, the so-called "know-it-alls" that Dunning & Kruger told us about.
I think if we want to be seen as truly intelligent, we need to have much more humility and empathy, and accept that we can't know everything about everything, and not try to act like we do.
> almost never has the accuser been able to actually show a nuance to the situation
I accept that that has been your experience, but I don't think it applies to everyone, not even close, and I think it also doesn't mean that they were wrong, they may just be unable to articulate a better response than you.
Thought here: Very often if you see something that's not black and white it really is multiple issues mixed together.
This thread is full of wonderful books! I had a lightning-bolt insight (one of few in my life) when listening that audiobook - the section about the shut-in.
The followup book is worth reading as well.
Different but related: Not Nice, by Aziz Gazipura.
A person's existence is made up of what others think about the person and how the person relates to them. There is hardly anything else to make up the existence for the person. You are just a collection of perceptions about you, and your relations with the world. Even your money and assets are only as a valuable as seen by the world around you. You look trendy and stylish only because you align with the trends of the place and time. Your physical fitness is meaningful only at your place and time. A village woman in a third world can outlive many gym goers of the Western world.
There is nothing else left to be considered as your absolute existence outside of how you relate with the world.
Have you no interior life at all? Nothing that matters to you even if nobody else knows or cares that it does?
This is one of the bleakest, most discouraging comments I think I've ever read, and it's hard for me (in a sad way) to believe anyone might actually mean it.
There is nothing bleak or discouraging in what I said. This is true for even inanimate things on Earth or in the Universe. There is hardly any absolute existence of anything. Try to describe an alien life form. All your description is nothing but list of relations between that life from and things that you know about on the Earth. Things like, size, color, weight, shape - everything is a relation to some referential unit or frame. Things come into existence by relating themselves to the already existing worldly things.
If a thing can't be described, it simply doesn't exist.
It's a flight instinct, it's due to danger. Isn't that obvious?
Gangs of humans are dangerous if you don't know them, historically. Murderously dangerous. Hobbes is right, society is a thin veneer.
I like the comparison to financial risk-aversion. The idea that social anxiety is a system working as designed, just with a different optimization function (avoid downside vs pursue upside), fits well with how behavior often emerges from misaligned incentives rather than "malfunction."
There are various types of insecurity.
A book "How to attract women through honesty" by Mark Manson (I think the only book in dating genre I recommend without some caveats, and recommend regardless on one's gender or orientation) has a lot about insecurity vs security (or: neediness vs non-neediness).
There was one passage that although most insecure people are in this "I don't want be hated" or "let anyone like/love me", there are also some people that are obsessed with everyone liking them. It has some different symptoms, but also stems from insecurity.
I guess you know friends (or maybe you are one yourself) who play too hard to be liked by everyone. Also, there is an interesting case of super-popular people, who are super-needy, even though at the first glance they don't look so. What's is characteristic, though, it is that everything starts to fall apart when they lose their spotlight. (Think about actors or musicians who, after they are no longer as popular as they used to be, drown in depression and drugs.)
I've struggled with social anxiety for years. Just yesterday I discovered that I am unable to visualize mental images such as faces (aphantasia).
I have always struggled in social settings where I people will be attending whom I've met on multiple but infrequent prior occasions - and I will recognize that I know them from somewhere but will be unable to place them or their name.
This has happened for 40 years when I see my wife's cousins at funerals every 2-3 years (but otherwise never see them). They are so friendly and nice. Smiling and hugging me. But they have to realize that I am never able to use their name because I can't remember it - nor am I able to make inquiries about work or life because I remember nothing about them.
The same happens when I, as a middle manager, travel for multiple day business trips to the home office.
It is incredibly embarrassing which causes me to avoid such settings which in turn makes me seem aloof and unfriendly.
Some people who struggle with this maintain a "personal CRM" system.
Write down some names and notes about people. Re-read them when you're traveling to a place where you're likely to encounter them. Just writing the notes might be enough to solidify the memories for you, but re-reading surely will.
Salespeople do this to feign familiarity, and it's artificial. Don't do that. People you see every few years will not expect you to remember their kids' names or birthdays.
Specifics are often too intimate. But starting with their names, and building on with the simulation of a general memory or two (e.g. "are you still doing a lot of traveling for work?") are fine.
As a person with social anxiety and a fear of being disliked I get to be the person that people love to talk about how much they hate all of the people that don't fear being disliked and all of the ways they are getting either getting screwed by other people or are being screwed by other people. We really deserve the society we live in
That first sentence is hard to grok.
No kidding, I read your comment first and then wondered how bad could it be. Turns out the whole comment is nearly that one sentence. Sentences are like functions, sometimes you need a really long one, but oftentimes they work better in reasonable chunks.
Should be "to talk to", I think. Missing a "to". But has an extra "getting".
Astounding irony.
"Social anxiety is more about the fear of being disliked than the desire to be liked" is a better way to summarize the gist of the article than the actual title. And the claim put this way seems pretty obvious.
I like that bit about optimizing for not going bankrupt vs. windfall
Idk you hear these phrases all the time excelsior, shoot for the stars land in the moon, etc... gotta actually apply it
Tangent about drugs I wish I felt like I did when on the snow all the time damn, what a great mindset like anything is possible, same with adhd meds but I can see how it would be bad too not having fear/self doubt eg. "I'm gonna jump off this building and land over there", over confidence
Oh this was about 10 yrs ago I was partaking I'm not in that env anymore where I can easily source stuff, now it's just alochol
I find merit with the core point as well the delivery.
I wish it was more commonly accepted that choosing not to act is effectively a stand against one's own value system in favor of the value systems of those who do act.
It annoys me greatly when people say "I didn't choose [elected official] because I didn't vote at all".
Social anxiety has to be correlated with deepness, aka the more shallow a person is the less social anxiety they present.
Also some fixation with a person/ small group of people in particular and trying to win them over. The less socially anxious people cast a big net and that will cause people who'd like them and dislike them but the net is so big that they simply stick with those who like them.
I think this is deceptive. Superficial interactions seem less anxious, but they are not necessarily representative of what's going on inside the minds of the participants.
Learning to be superficial in superficial situations is a good way to fake your way through social anxiety. It isn't necessarily rewarding in itself, but it does smooth over some otherwise awkward scenarios.
Maintaining the balance is critical, and an important aspect of social maturity.
(It's a waste of time, yes! But being comfortable with a little bit of social inefficiency is essential to casual interactions which often have beneficial repercussions.)
The reason you feel that way is because social anxiety correlates with anhedonia. The person doesn't engage in playfulness which is the basis of social connection across mammals. Because they aren't playful, you perceive this as "deepness."
This cognitive fallacy connecting deepness / seriousness to substance, and connecting playfulness to triviality and frivolity has unfortunately affected me (I remember arguing it in high school English class!)
Consciously adopting a "playful" attitude fixes my social anxiety, and adds charisma and humor to my character.
I have never seen a place more playful than a roulette or a craps table in Vegas, people high five each other, they form groups they trash the casino when the bank wins... but it is very shallow and not very deep, it lasts a couple of hours and then each of the participant go separate ways.
Social anxiety is what happens when the effort to appear acceptable to polite society feels overwhelming -- and pointless at the same time.
>There's this popular idea that socially anxious folks are just dying to be liked
Really? I've never come across that idea. If fact, in my experience 'social anxiety' is almost always driven by the fear of failure, not the ambition of uncertain success.
I would counter that the opposite of 'social anxiety' - 'social vanity' - is more indicative of a deep desire to be liked.
Off topic, but my eye twitched at the word "agentic." This word has infested every computing and software discussion as a buzzword, to the point where I am having a visceral reaction just seeing it. Even though it's used appropriately here, I have to admit I retched a little while reading. So tired of hearing "agentic."
social anxiety i think it is more the fear of breaking your own perception of yourself
This is so true. All of the other comments and the article itself fail to take into account the ego.
At the end of the day you can only be sure that you are judging yourself. There's nothing else it could be about.
I like seeing something along the line of constructive logic in the wild (i.e. not (not p) != p).
As friends of mine who I consider popular have suggested to me “don’t give a fuck what people think about you”, and this blog says that in a much longer form.
As someone who was extensively bullied as a kid, including with physical violence, my social anxiety went through the roof and it has taken me a long time and awareness of my trauma to heal from those wounds to the point I no longer have social anxiety.
The world is sadly full of miserable cruel people who want to put me down so they can no longer have to deal with their own feelings of inferiority. I have made friends who truly love me for who I am, who give me space to talk, who do not constantly put me down in cruel ways (yes, I once had “friends” like that), and who truly care about my feelings, but it has taken a lot of work to get there. I can now sniff out someone who is starting to engage in bullying behavior, and block them from being in my life.
different ppl get different reasons for social anxiety bro. it's not tech you can't just say that mental problem Y is 100% because of X
Quote:
> Why else would someone be so anxious about how others see them?
The scientific consensus would tell the author that judgement in humans happens already the moment they see a person and it is immediate, even if the person not doing anything:
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep40700
>across three studies, we find that first impressions [...] made from thin slices of real-world social behavior by typically-developing observers are not only far less favorable across a range of trait judgments compared to controls
Edit:
Okay this was completely misunderstood. My point was that the "normal" people in the study immediately internally know if to like or not like a person. Hence why first impressions DO matter the most. Which is why I simply disagree with the argument in the OP that anyone has control over their perception.
You also cannot win people over if the most respected person in a group dislikes you. The others will follow boot.
This study seems to look at a different dynamic than seems under discussion in the article.
The article describes how neurotypical people, i.e. the average Joe would come up with a decision to like or not like a person based on first impressions before the person being judged even talks. Fairly sure in an article about how people are thinking how they are perceived by others this is relevant. But I get it can upset people that it is out of their control entirely.
I disagree. I think the article is about the motivations of people with social anxiety. I'd agree it makes assumptions and paints with a broad brush but it feels relevant to some of the socially anxious people I know.
I edited and rephrased a lot of my posts and the other replies and maybe my though process is clearer now. I didn't word it all too well, forgive me for not being a native, I struggled to bring my point across in an enunciated way.
Thank you for the improvements, I think it does read better now. Thank you for making the effort to converse in a second language.
I still think you are making a point that feels orthogonal to the article. The author presents (supported by public expressions of the opinion) that some people believe social anxiety is based on wanting to be liked. While to that point your study indicating that autistic people may be at a disadvantage on the getting people to like them front, the author is then rejecting that proposition (i.e. that the socially anxious are actually concerned about avoiding dislike). I suppose your point can be understood relevant there too, in that for the autistic population, the baseline "disliked" level is higher. However, the article remains about the internal focus of those with social anxiety (whether it over generalizes or not) between "liked" and "not disliked" which seems orthogonal to any baseline "likability" considerations for one or any other sub-population.
[edit: s/"liked" level is lower/"disliked" level is higher/ for higher congruence with context]
I don’t think the article is about autism.
Curious, yet the most people suffering from anxiety as secondary comorbid psychiatric condition are the depressed, autistic and ADHD sufferers.
The article is definitely a mental health topic. A little harmless stage fright before a presentation is not real clinical generalized anxiety and affects most normal people.
You can be diagnosed with GAD or social anxiety disorders without being autistic. The comorbidity isn't total.
I think there's a good question about whether people can tell you're anxious at a glance but worrying about that will make your anxiety much more visible.
> I think there's a good question about whether people can tell you're anxious at a glance
Which is why I linked the nature article? It's plain obvious an interesting point I tried to make that "normal" people will instantly perceive someone as likeable or unlikeable. Which the article in the OP goes great lengths to discuss.
I mean I can live with people immediately going against my point, I just see they didn't even gave it 5 minutes of thought. Which is not necessarily directed at you, I cannot possibly convince anyone and reply to anyone at the same time.
Social anxiety is significantly more prevalent in the general population than autism. So sure, the article may be less applicable to people with autism, who have other visible symptoms besides what comes from “mere” social anxiety.
What if my social anxiety is based on not liking other people? :)
> being socially anxious tends to make you less likeable
Citation needed.