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Re: You may have steel skin, but for most people, that feels like an attack. The person you’re questioning can perceive in your body language and tone of voice...Communication is hard...

You are right, communicating is indeed hard. Achieving clarity, brevity, and social "friendliness" at the same time is a multi-skill that most people get wrong: they tend to do one or two well, but rarely all three.

I will readily agree I often get the "social math" wrong, being it body language, tone of voice, etc. Maybe thousands of hours of training with a personal coach could "fix it", but that would cost around $100,000. For one, I find it hard to process the social math rules in my mind and focus on the topic at hand at the same time. My brain is not powerful enough to run both tasks simultaneously. The social side would have to be turned into a reflex so as to not interfere with the logical side's processing, and that typically takes lots of repetition training.

Dammit Jim, I'm a logical geek, not an actor!

[sjjshzvuiajhz]

I’m not telling you to pretend to be nice, I’m telling you to actually be nice. You won’t have to hide those feelings of contempt because you won’t be feeling them. Before you start the conversation, get your brain in a place where you like the person you are talking to.

I used to be convinced I was autistic, I had a really hard time connecting with people. The median number of friends I had in my childhood was one. I might be on the spectrum, I definitely behave in a quirky way and I’m bad at small talk. But since I started taking the antidepressant I’ve had more positive thoughts about other people, which makes me nicer. Suddenly it’s easy to make friends. I went to a bar on Saturday and made a friend and he invited me to hang out at his place tonight. If you had told me that would happen five years ago I would have laughed in your face (or cried inside). Now it’s normal.

Most people want to like people. You have to give them reasons to not like you. If they sense aggression from you, that’s the best reason for them to not like you. You don’t have to play the part of a normal guy perfectly. You just have to be a decent person who doesn’t behave like they are surrounded by Ferengi.

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(Reply to "sjjshzvuiajhz" at this level because there's a message nesting limit on HN.)

Let me get this straight: you are insisting I "just feel" different? Just somehow make my brain like certain people? I realize there are books about forcing oneself to have different emotions, but they often don't work.

It's like asking a fan of classical music to just start liking hip-hip and vice-versa. "Just change your head". God doesn't hand out new brainware CD's.

[dTal]

I can second everything sjjshzvuiajhz is saying. Approach people with humility and positivity and they will care surprisingly little if you're weird or socially awkward. People don't necessarily need conversational poetry - they just want to feel safe, at ease.

These kinds of things aren't skills that it takes 100,000 hours to learn. They're "habits of mind". Adopting them is more like learning to get up on time or learning to eat well, than learning to play an instrument - once you've decided what it is you're doing, it's more about persistence than skill. You have good days and bad days, but if you stoically keep at it, you'll be rewarded.

Of course, if you talk to people all the time, you'll get better at the whole conversation thing quite naturally, over a long time. But it's best not to stress about that.

Humility and positivity.

(And in fact, challenging your brain with music you don't normally listen to is far from impossible; quite the reverse, it's one more habit of a healthy, plastic mind!)

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Re: These kinds of things aren't skills that it takes 100,000 hours to learn. They're "habits of mind". Adopting them is more like learning to get up on time or learning to eat well, than learning to play an instrument

It may be easy for you, but I am not you. I always try to improve my people skills. I've known I had a problem there since childhood and have been trying to fix it since. To me it does feel like learning to play a trombone while riding backward on a unicycle while chewing gum and reciting the Gettysburg Address. My progress is slow and I don't know where the knob is to crank it up. It's as if my brain is missing a lobe that everyone else has.

A big problem is that the feedback is not immediate. If I got an electric shock every time I presented a Sheldon-esque attitude to the listener, I might be fixed by now. But that's not legal.

(There's something funny about "reply" links on HN. Hmmm...)

[sjjshzvuiajhz]

I’m not saying you can instantly change the way your brain works on a dime, but you can make it happen given time. Read a good book about the history of hip hop. Put Warren G’s Regulate album on in the background while doing something you really enjoy. Intentionally listen for parts of the music that you’ve read about, and be proud of yourself for recognizing them. Suddenly you’ll find that hearing a sample from a song you heard before gives you a dopamine hit, just like a Star Trek reference feels for a sci-fi fan.

Appreciating the world around you is a skill, just like criticizing is. And it’s a skill you can get good at if you apply yourself! Smart people who suffer from depression and anxiety automatically get really good at criticizing things. It may not be worth the effort to learn to appreciate hip hop, but it is definitely worth the effort to learn to like interacting with the people around you.

Antidepressants are like a performance-enhancing drug for appreciating things. They make the positive thoughts last longer. My psychiatrist tells me I should try to wean myself off them eventually, so maybe training wheels are a better analogy.