I don’t know if this has always been true but people, in general, are very stingy with themselves. Attention, interest, affection, sympathy, friendship, assistance… Anything positive we can do for each other, we tend to give less than we can. I would like to take pains here to be very clear that the people most likely to read this and think, “oh no, it’s me! i suck!” are probably not the people I’m talking about. The people that are like this – most of us – are inattentive or ungenerous in ways that we don’t notice.
My last two jobs have involved helping people, which aroused a sense in me that this is what I have to do. One can work at walmart and put in the bare minimum effort, and honestly, you probably should. They don’t fucken pay you enough. But you are in a position where sometimes a desperate sad-ass person will want something that you can actually provide, or at least do enough to take the edge off the situation. The sense of reward isn’t some rad dopamine hit or smug warmth that filleth thy cup. It’s more like, you saw somebody bleeding and slapped a band-aid on them, and now, at least until the band-aid wears out, there’s less bleeding in the environment.
It’s not nothing, and it is necessary. People that can do things for other people should do things for other people. It’s how this social species is supposed to work. If you got nothin’, ok, disregard. But if the thought hasn’t crossed your mind, and on reflection, you think maybe you could be doing more? Do more. Let this be your permission.
You do not have to go out of your way for it. Opportunities to help people will find you. This sounds like I’m talking about helping the needy, and that’s part of it, but there’s a much bigger one that is in front of most of us everyday, all the time. That’s just being sociable.
You aren’t obliged to be friendliness champion of the world, not obliged to do anything weird. What I’ve noticed is that the most basic niceties of conversation and companionship are egregiously lacking from our interactions. Like, somebody says “I watched a movie this weekend,” and you don’t say, “What movie was it?,” you just leave them hanging in that weird space.
If they’re immune to noticing insult, they might carry on, but if they’re not, it’s “Well fuck me” on the inside. You don’t have to give a shit what movie they watched to just do the bit with them. And who knows? You might find out something funny or diverting. At least, you will not have made a person feel like they don’t or shouldn’t exist.
I got a few half-assed friends, and I don’t want to tell them to fuck off, but they don’t have anything for me unless I have something for them. Like, they literally don’t want to hang out with me unless we’re doing the one specific thing they want to do with me. Don’t wanna play a video game, don’t wanna watch a movie, don’t even want to chit-chat about the weather. What’s up with that?
Humans are like pokemons that say their name, “pika pika.” We start conversations to assert our presence in a space, like, look fellow humans, I am a human here as well. When people don’t reciprocate adequately, it feels kinda shit. This is part of our “loneliness epidemic.” Nobody wants to take half a fuckin second to say, “tell me about it, bob.”
I’m not even talking about the little old guy that’ll yard your ear off. We won’t even do this for more than a few seconds with our peers, right in front of us. It’s kinda weird. Some amount of this may be social anxiety. Social anxiety, on the other hand, may be a result sometimes of never learning how to do this, or falling out of practice with it. Socialization, they call it, when talking about puppies and kittens. We need that too. We need to learn how to not go through life alienating ourselves from everybody, wondering why we’re alone at the end of the day.
When we’re better able to look at other people as full humans with all the feelings and importance that we ourselves possess, we’ll be better able to make mutual aid happen, make durable social institutions that can succeed where liberal “democracy” has failed. Figure out how to stop spinning alone in your hamster wheel and squeak with each other. It’s time.
–
I’m not sure I’m in this group or not, I do try to do things like this when opportunity happens so maybe this is a complicating variable. I know I have this socialization void that’s partly childhood developmental neglect, partly paranoid cultural upbringing, and partly bully and abuse inspired. I’m working on it but my social parts always have pain in them. I’ve been referring to “compromised approach behavior” to be specific. There’s positive feeling in there but it’s literally always had company.
Outside of arguments it’s hard to keep exchanges going. My psychiatrist wants to try the medical version of ketamine. Maybe it will help.
from what i’ve known of you in our time together, i think it’s real safe to say you’re in that group i was trying to exclude. nice to see new posts from you! I’d say you’re doing your part with that.
I guess it’s easy to think I might be in the group given my situation. Thank you. Hopefully I can do more than a couple more posts. Those posts are like brain dumping things that have been in my head for a while.
that’s what blogs are for (/dionnewarwick)
Part of the problem is structural. Lack of time, lack of money, lack of unenclosed “third spaces” where people hang out in a non-goal-directed state. Most times I see other people they are busy getting from one thing to another or doing a task, so any attempt to socialize with them would mean interrupting them, unless their task was something like “serving me at the checkout counter”, and then it would mean holding up the line of other people waiting their turn. And I don’t see other people all that often since lack of money limits one to living in low density areas without much access to transportation.
The only area where people seem to be able to “hang out” anymore without hemmorhaging money to do so is the internet, and socializing there is fucked up by everything from echo chambers to “The Algorithm(tm)”.
I try to make a habit of being polite to people I meet, all people I meet except obvious nazis. This is just things like saying “excuse me” or “please” and “thank you” if asking for something like a bus ticket, saying “hello, how are you doing today?” to checkout staff. And I’m not doing for any sort of reward, but I get them all the same. We have a local Co-operative food shop, I’ve been going in there ever since we moved her, so fourteen years now. Today I got given a couple of bunches of spray carnations that had been marked down, by the duty manager. I don’t do anything weird, just “how are you doing” kind of stuff, yet it’s enough to mark me out, the shop was busy but he took the time to very publicly give me these flowers. It cheered me right up, and of course I thanked him, but that and your post makes me wonder how unusual it is just to say “lousy weather isn’t it? Seems like it’s making you really busy” as I pass one of the staff (which happened to be the manager today)?
And don’t get me wrong I’m certainly not a sweet almost old lady by any means, a couple of weeks ago I was getting in to my car at the Co-op when a couple of guys ran out with a basket of beer, and I yelled “THIEVING BASTARDS” at them as loud as I could (LOUD). And I’m quite prepared to tell off the school kids that pass our house every day if I happen to be out front and they are doing something out of order, like the day they were throwing a dead rat at each other and running into the road without looking to get away from the thrown rat. But I start with the assumption that if you treat people politely they will generally be polite back.
bekenstein – i feel ya, and it is very situational. however, i think if one observes the results of interactions they have with others, they can learn to gauge the appropriate way to act in the same situation going forward, and thus find ways to at least not be a problem for other people. like the person holding up the line, sometimes they’re doing it because they feel like it’s what polite is, but if they observed the result of that, they’d realize it’s being a problem. you can breeze thru an interaction with a customer service person without offending them or taking offense from them, and with a random tossed-off phrase, make the situation better sometimes. the essence of socialization – learning how to make your interactions work for everyone involved as much as possible, with a minimum of effort. could even be doable when we are living as atomized individuals with no genuine social institutions, if we’re considerate and observant.
jazzlet – sounds like yer doing it right.
GAS – I try
GAS ” you can breeze thru an interaction with a customer service person without offending them or taking offense from them, and with a random tossed-off phrase, make the situation better sometimes. the essence of socialization – learning how to make your interactions work for everyone involved as much as possible, with a minimum of effort. could even be doable when we are living as atomized individuals with no genuine social institutions, if we’re considerate and observant.”
And this is exactly what I do, you’re not holding up the checkout line if you chat while the cashier scans and you pack, you’re just trying to make the interaction human in the time that all takes.
That’s already what I generally do, though obviously I don’t try to monopolize their attention once doing so would be holding up the line.
But as social interaction goes, it’s rather thin gruel.
(There’s one other thing, as well: on the rare occasion that customer service type people decide to deviate from facilitating the transaction normally and become obstructive, I still haven’t figured out how to quickly and without offending get them to realize their mistake and return to the normal script that they ordinarily follow. In the most recent instance my ISP stopped correctly providing my service and it took several hours and three separate phone calls to their support to get them to stop doubling down on not-providing-me-service, admit that my not receiving service despite having paid the bill on time and not having violated their terms constituted an error on their part, apologize for their mistake, and return everything to normal. For some reason “small people in large organizations” tend to be extremely stubborn about persisting down a wrong path once they start down one, even when shown overwhelming evidence that their actions (or inactions) are incorrect. Either the higherups in big organizations give the customer-facing employees more power to cause problems than to fix them, for some reason, or the whole thing just has ridiculously ponderous inertia and takes forever to shift course even after the upper stratum of decision-makers has realized they’ve made an error. That, or I just don’t know the magic words/social protocol that would get them to say, within five minutes of my getting a human on the line, “oh, I’m sorry, sir, my bad” and flip the switch or whatever it is they have to do to undo their oopsie.)
i am a small customer service person in a large organization, and we are indeed a mixed bag. biggest problem is high turnover because the jobs suck a lot, so everybody is inadequately trained. you get that kind of person on the phone it’s because they barely understand what they’re doing, and you’ll be hard pressed to luck into talking to anybody who is any better.
we’re all so over a barrel with crapitalism that i often feel like there are no good solutions to a shituation. i got my ass gulled buying an expensive laptop and a warranty to go with it that is proving to be fucking useless. just gotta say oh well, i got over a thousand dollars stolen from me legally and i have to accept that. i don’t blame some pathetic English major from Hyderabad for that, much as interacting with them is no fun.
–
Well then, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is that capitalism is unsustainable and wrecking the planet.
The good news is that capitalism is unsustainable and therefore won’t last much longer.
yeah i’d like to see the fash put it on the transes when florida is underwater and the midwest turns into thousand foot flaming tornadoes every year. hopefully by then i’ll be living at a higher elevation.