Is this the kind of thing that you also say to the people in your neighborhood when trying to build a community, and if so, how do people usually respond to it?
Not every conversation I have with my neighbors is surface level, and sometimes we talk about how just regular life shit can be difficult. It wasn’t sarcasm, I meant it. Make an effort, despite the fact that I understand it’s hard. I get it, it hard for me too at times, but you can’t just shy away from difficult things all the time.
Gah, it is not hard for me to talk to strangers! It just burns through energy.
In particular, I have never had much trouble talking to strangers with my full empathy turned on. It gets a bit tricky when I don’t actually care about what they are talking about, but I have a couple of abilities that help with this. First, I generally care about the person and making sure that they feel valued, regardless of what they are saying. Second, I have a mild form of bipolar so I am used to having raging emotions underneath the surface that are disconnected from the situation at hand and needing to regulate them, so I can keep up an expression of interest–and again, I am generally genuinely interested in the person–even while feeling very restless underneath. In fact, I have been so successful at this that in the past a couple of conversations with strangers have led to them asking me out, despite the fact that we were both men and I am not gay.
Again, though, all of this burns through energy. So the difficulty has nothing to do with me lacking a skill but more like being exhausted from having done hard physical labor all day, and then having a random person demand that you drop and do pushups or else they will declare that you are not trying hard enough.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to suggest it was a “skill issues,” as the kids say these days. And I think it’s a pretty apt comparison to physically demanding tasks. Got a flex the social muscles or they atrophy, and the benefit is building a network.
I’m with you 100% though. I’m tired all the time, and sometimes the thought of going out and being “on” with people is daunting. And it’s funny, because my wife is like, you’re an ENFJ or whatever the fuck (I’m exactly as uneducated in that field as she is educated), and I try to tell her that despite how I was, how I am now is tired of social situations, generally. But I try to just eat it. And sometimes I don’t eat it and I sit at home and unwind. I just know that theres benefits to maintaining relationships, and that for some folks a text chain isn’t enough. I do wish that everyone was cool with texting, or even talking on forums like this, but I know that’s not the case generally.
I do feel like we’ve gotten into the weeds here. I just really believe in community, despite the fact that I’m a curmudgeon. I just imagine a world where we can’t perhaps communicate the way we do now. What are we left with? Well, the people whose homes I can walk to, essentially.
A lot of the people I regularly interact with are at a contra dancing venue. Does that not count as a community because I have to drive to interact with them instead of walking? (Genuine question; not intended as a gotcha.)
Also, keep in mind that my original comment to @ameancow@lemmy.world was responding to the following,
We have spurned community because it’s more tempting to hide inside and feel miserable and lonely. Losing community was how we lost civics and representation and basic human empathy. [emphasis mine]
Is this the kind of thing that you also say to the people in your neighborhood when trying to build a community, and if so, how do people usually respond to it?
Not every conversation I have with my neighbors is surface level, and sometimes we talk about how just regular life shit can be difficult. It wasn’t sarcasm, I meant it. Make an effort, despite the fact that I understand it’s hard. I get it, it hard for me too at times, but you can’t just shy away from difficult things all the time.
Gah, it is not hard for me to talk to strangers! It just burns through energy.
In particular, I have never had much trouble talking to strangers with my full empathy turned on. It gets a bit tricky when I don’t actually care about what they are talking about, but I have a couple of abilities that help with this. First, I generally care about the person and making sure that they feel valued, regardless of what they are saying. Second, I have a mild form of bipolar so I am used to having raging emotions underneath the surface that are disconnected from the situation at hand and needing to regulate them, so I can keep up an expression of interest–and again, I am generally genuinely interested in the person–even while feeling very restless underneath. In fact, I have been so successful at this that in the past a couple of conversations with strangers have led to them asking me out, despite the fact that we were both men and I am not gay.
Again, though, all of this burns through energy. So the difficulty has nothing to do with me lacking a skill but more like being exhausted from having done hard physical labor all day, and then having a random person demand that you drop and do pushups or else they will declare that you are not trying hard enough.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to suggest it was a “skill issues,” as the kids say these days. And I think it’s a pretty apt comparison to physically demanding tasks. Got a flex the social muscles or they atrophy, and the benefit is building a network.
I’m with you 100% though. I’m tired all the time, and sometimes the thought of going out and being “on” with people is daunting. And it’s funny, because my wife is like, you’re an ENFJ or whatever the fuck (I’m exactly as uneducated in that field as she is educated), and I try to tell her that despite how I was, how I am now is tired of social situations, generally. But I try to just eat it. And sometimes I don’t eat it and I sit at home and unwind. I just know that theres benefits to maintaining relationships, and that for some folks a text chain isn’t enough. I do wish that everyone was cool with texting, or even talking on forums like this, but I know that’s not the case generally.
I do feel like we’ve gotten into the weeds here. I just really believe in community, despite the fact that I’m a curmudgeon. I just imagine a world where we can’t perhaps communicate the way we do now. What are we left with? Well, the people whose homes I can walk to, essentially.
A lot of the people I regularly interact with are at a contra dancing venue. Does that not count as a community because I have to drive to interact with them instead of walking? (Genuine question; not intended as a gotcha.)
Also, keep in mind that my original comment to @ameancow@lemmy.world was responding to the following,