Self Improvement Goals--Improved Socializing

[unspeakablehorror]

I have to make extra effort to be sociable but I think it's very important for me to continue working on that.  I think it's very easy for me to feel alienated from other people, for a number of reasons, but I think I need to improve on that.  One thing that's hard is that I don't think my core beliefs slot easily into any of the major belief sets that people seem to have. Though I also don't claim to have anything resembling even a comprehensive understanding of what all these different belief sets involve.  Regardless, no matter what people's politics are, I tend to have important areas of disagreement with them.  And when I was more antisocial, this didn't matter, because I was just like 'well I don't need to care about anyone or feel any investment in others, I'll just avoid interacting or talking to anyone as much as possible so I will not be bothered by this and other people won't be confrontational towards me about it'.

But, haha, that doesn't really fit into my personal philosophy anymore.  Because while I don't think personal investment in other people as individuals is sufficient for compassion and solidarity towards others, I do think it's perhaps very difficult to practice either of those things purely in the abstract.  And politics doesn't mean very much if I only take my individual needs and wants into account anyway--there's many possible paths to maximizing my chances of obtaining those goals, but not all of those are good paths, and what distinguishes the good and the evil are what helps and what hurts other people, respectively. 

But I really wish there were classes like  'How to Be Friends With People' and 'How To Compromise Like a Well-Adjusted Person Instead of Always Needing to Get Your Way'.  Because that would be uh, personally helpful to me.

Comments

[chamerion]

If it helps, I think rigid conformity to every particular of a given belief system is rarer than it appears, especially among thoughtful people who typically have - well, nuanced thoughts. Obviously the data points do tend to cluster in certain spots. But society (and maybe social media in particular) tends to amplify a limited number of popular takes until it appears they’re the ONLY takes, when really there’s a significant minority of folks either dissenting or at least raising minor objections on the sidelines. (Heck, intra-left squabbling is common enough to be a punchline in politics.)

That said your frustrations are very understandable! Personally I grew up in an environment that wasn’t super tolerant of even mild disagreement, and untangling the resultant conflict aversion is an ongoing project, so you have all my sympathies and encouragement. Socializing can be rough and sometimes being a wilderness hermit sounds enticing.

[unspeakablehorror]

Oh, certainly, I understand that different people have different perspectives and that it's not a matter of being able to know everything a person's thinking just because you know what they refer to their beliefs as. I believe that for any given individual, to address a disagreement with them, it's necessary to look specifically at what they have said or done, and not assume that because you've heard someone else with the same beliefs reason a certain way, that a different person with those beliefs will reason about them in the same way. I've had enough people make faulty assumptions about my thought process just because they heard someone else come to the same conclusion, and thought I must have reached my conclusion in the same way, to know that's a quite fallacious mode of thought.

It's just that I also know very little about political theory! Like, what even are the really popular arguments for some of the (to me) sometimes baffling conclusions I see bandied about? I just don't know! I feel like I need to read more, but it's hard to motivate myself to do that. People just say things with no justification sometimes, and sometimes I can understand those things just by listening more, but sometimes there seems to be some really big gap in what I'm seeing vs what the other person is, and I feel like I'm missing out on some context they haven't voiced because it's a base assumption for the other person. And while this might be because they have incorrectly assumed something to be obvious that is not, it could also be because it's a very basic component of their belief set that I just don't know a lot about.

And thanks! I have unfortunately, as a child, had many people model behavior showing a complete and utter lack of willingless to compromise or negotiate or be even remotely reasonable, and I suspect that is why I feel uncomfortable with both compromise and confrontation. I often feel like if I concede anything, the expectation is that I will concede everything. Obviously the latter is unacceptable to me, but the former is something I need to be able to do just to...function socially.