Look at the first two subheadings:

> 1: Connecting with people is about being a dazzling person

> 2: Connecting with people is about playing their game

The post felt like a rollercoaster between using tricks to charm and manipulate, and periods of genuinely trying to learn how to be friends with people.

I don't want to disparage the author as this is a personal journey piece and I appreciate them sharing it. However this did leave me slightly uneasy, almost calling back to earlier days of the internet when advice about "social skills" often meant reductively thinking about other people, assuming you can mind-read them to deconstruct their mindset (the section about identifying people who feel underpraised, insecure, nervous,) and then leverage that to charm them (referred to as "dancing to the music" in this post).

Maybe the takeaway I'd try to give is to read this as an interesting peek into someone's mind, but not necessarily great advice for anyone else's situation or a healthy way to view relationships.

I was telling my therapist of several years recently about being uncomfortable with the number of new people I've had to meet recently.

He seemed surprised that I wasn't excited by it all and said something along the lines of "You seem like a very social person, that seems out of character." It struck me… am I really that good at masking that my therapist didn't realize I am absolutely terrified in near all social situations? I have zero idea how to make small talk with people I haven't known for years.

Working from home since COVID has made my social skills so much worse because I don't get the practice.

Once my spouse and I worked for the same company and attended many of the same meetings. The opportunity to pick apart our impressions of the subtext really helped me to learn that I should listen to my gut, that everything I needed to know about how other people were feeling was already in my head and i just needed to stop doubting.

Another time I watched a rather ugly and old person have amazing romantic success with a young beautiful person. How could it be? And I realized that authentic confidence is social gold. I had to let go of my insecurities because my flaws were irrelevant in the face of authentic, confident self acceptance.

I think everyone has a different journey and different epiphanies and it is so enjoyable to hear these experiences put into words.

And in many ways I think this was a positive energy to bring to the world! But eventually I realized that, deep down, I was doing this out of anxiety. I wanted to be accepted and this was a crutch I was using to achieve that. In fact, I was scared of not providing this level of support, because what if I was too aloof and the other person got mad at me? And since people often liked this quality about me, what would I become without it?

Now I mostly focus on ... relaxing. There are times where intense-therapy-like energy will be useful, and I can provide that if I want. But most of the time it's just not necessary. Unlike the author, I don't necessarily have the ability, or practice, to skillfully provide whatever the person in front of me actually wants, but that's ok too. It's ok to just be calm.

As in, the author was working as a waiter or a coach at the time.

A waiter's job is to keep your butt in the seat, get you to order some stuff, and then leave a tip. The waiter may or may not give a shit about you as a person, but it's secondary to their job. That simulation is the creepy vibe.

I've probably never eaten at the kinds of stratospherically high-end restaurants the author writes about. I've eaten at restaurants with Michelin stars. I've never had a waiter flirt with me, daydream with me, or offer ad hoc therapy. And if I ever do, I suspect I might find the charade off-putting.

> I was one social notch above children who were so pitiable it would be rude to mock them.

I love this quote. Excellent and very relatable piece.

Social skills can be acquired through practice. But being an introvert, I've specifically picked my profession so that I can focus on ideas over people. Tinkering and solving problems excited me, whereas staying in touch with friends, noticing social dynamics, networking, reading people, being good at remembering everyone's birthday, etc felt tiring to me and was less appealing.

I'm at a place in my career where I'm managing more and doing less. It's a weird transition because I've spend a decade acquiring technical skill, only to discover soft skills are equally if not more important (perhaps increasingly so with AGI) .

1. Smart person faces problem, observes what's going on, thinks about it and finds solution

I mention this b/c a lot of folks feel like "I'm me and I know something is wrong in what I'm doing but I don't know what" and stop there.

But a lot of life is just learning new skills. That can be from books, videos, friends, or just opening your eyes and seeing what other people are doing and then modeling that behavior.

2. The pieces you need are already in you

I used to be TERRIBLE at dating. e.g. I would go on dates with smart, funny and attractive women (mostly met online). The date would start out great and then something would happen halfway through and I could tell the energy went away. It go so bad that I almost wanted friends to sit near me and then point out what I was doing wrong.

After reading some dating books, I realized what it was:

There were a LOT of women in my extended family (mostly female cousins, strong personality outgoing aunts etc). I though "dating" == "hanging out with women like my family". The books pointed out that "dating" is has a large component of "playful teasing, being cocky funny".

I already knew how to do that but didn't realize it applied to dating!

3. Work with what you have

Some other commenters have pointed out that some of what he mentions is "being fake" or "being someone else"

I make this analogy:

- You are a certain height

- That is tough to change

- BUT you can work out, get a haircut, get dental work etc

- aka there are MANY small things you can do to improve your physical appearance even if you can't change your height.

The same is true of personality: you have a core set of values and beliefs. That being said, you choose which stories you tell, how you tell them, when to let the other person speak instead of you speaking for longer etc.

funny to read this here on hacker news of all places, where I let my carefully managed, almost always inhibited, childhood nerd self fly free in the comments.

OP has definitely gone beyond me in many ways, with his talk about embodiment, and being able to be so empathic that he has elicited tears of gratitude. Enviable.

I'd add one thing though: OP's ability to observe and imitate these kinds of social dynamics he was seeing suggests he's already coming from a solid foundation of EQ and also feeling secure enough to try on these different personas. Often there's a lot of work to be done to even get to that place!

I dont have any offensive social strategy so its hard for me to dictate making friends but passively I do quite well by just projecting an authentic version of myself.

Overall this piece reminds me of reading writeups from pickup artists who sort of ascended beyond the game, like they practiced so many social skills that they can see through every situation and lose interest in it all.

https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/behold-my-ted-talk

The topic is agency. Which is a word I hear often used by rarely defined or described in detail.

She talks about agency as being the key to going from drug addict to CEO of a successful organization, and the specific habits that process involved.

but they are getting to the place that "normal" people end up, I think. It seems to be the case that no amount of being in your head is a substitute for just not being in your head in the first place.

Lately I have taken steps to re-learn how to be social. I am doing a lot of social dances, like Salsa, Swing, Bachata. I think partner dance is good training for body language. Also good training for presence, as when you really start dancing, you stop thinking; conversely when are thinking too much you will stiffen up and choke. There are a surprising number of PHDs and other very cerebral people in my local dance scene.

One thing I have learned is that being good at dancing and being fun to dance with are orthogonal. You can be technically quite bad and people will still want to dance with you if you have good eye contact, smile, laugh at your mistakes, tell little jokes, complements, etc.

Conversely there are some people that are really technically good but not that much fun to dance with because they grimace and look away and don't match your energy.

Of course the best is when you find a partner that is both fun and technically good, and this is what I ascribe to become.

The downside of dances is that I don't get a lot of practice at talking, I guess this is something you could learn to do at bars but I don't drink and so have not found really good place to practice a lot of talking.

I try to get the guys from my jujitsu gym to come dance, these are big bad dudes who could really mess you up in fight, but they are all scared to dance with the girls. You will be scared your first few times for sure. Personally, I tend to be nervous in direct proportion to the beauty of my partner, which can be a problem because women that dance tend to be above average in that respect.

Most dances have a 1 hour lesson at the beginning and then social dance after. The lesson part is easy, you just follow the instructions and the teacher will have you rotate partners so you get to meet most of the girls. I tell my guy friends, just come for the lesson part and then if you get too nervous you can sneak out early.

The way to connect with people is to genuinely care about them and listen. The world is full of the oddest people who have normal relations because they simply care.

The author seems to show very little empathy or care towards other human beings, in fact the entirety of the article sounds like connecting is all about himself. Me, me and me. How people perceive me, how do they like me.

He never ever shows genuine interest into connection, in the the end comes off as manipulative.

The last part resonates with me, early on I realised that listening to people was the easy ticket to connection.

But like the author, a lot of the time I was not emotionally available for that connection and I have definitely caused some pain and confusion.

https://brajeshwar.com/2016/how-to-win-friends-and-influence...

It's fascinating to think about how much goes on inside each person's mind!

One thing this article reminded me of is a conversation I had with an old roommate of mine. I always considered her an absolute sorceress when it came to dealing with people.

Anyway, I forget how her and I got onto the conversation, but she asked me, "Before you say something to someone - do you ever play out the conversation in your mind?" and, of course, I said, "Yeah. I'll practice what I'm going to say and think a bit about how it'll land." and she countered with, "Do you ever take it one step further? By responding to yourself as if you were the person you're speaking to and then formulating your response to their anticipated response?" And my answer was an emphatic, "Fuck no. Are you crazy? Do you do that in real-time mid-conversation??"

Of course, my roommate's approach wasn't something she used all the time, but the entire notion was foreign to me because the number of branching outcomes seemed large enough as to not be valuable to explore. I'm not psychic - why bother trying to formulate a response to a response not yet verbalized? And yet, if it were low enough effort and I had good enough confidence in the outcome, I could completely see the value in anticipating responses and trying to approximate the ideal N+1 response. It shocked me that someone I considered naturally talented in this space had also become comfortable taking on a mental exercise that I'd entirely written off as too effortful.

FWIW, I still don't follow her approach and am reasonably happy with my conversational skills, but the revelation really made me take a step back and consider how much potential depth there is in areas I considered shallow.

Once I did find out, it wasn’t really a huge revelation, as I was already well on my way towards learning to compensate.

I know that the popular outlook, is that folks use “neurodivergent” diagnoses to excuse (and not address) bad social behavior, but that certainly wasn’t the case for me. It was just another data point.

If we’re jerks, then no one will cut us any slack; regardless of a diagnosis. It’s still incumbent upon us, to address the issue.

In my case, I’ve spent my entire adult life in an organization that forces us to work intimately with others, seek out and interact with many types of people, and to look at ourselves, in a harsh, realistic manner.

That naturally encouraged me to address my social issues, regardless of the causes. Eventually, it also forced me to find the cause, but by then, the cure was already under way.

I'm #3 naturally, always have been. #4 gets practiced within me, the more I meditate. I owe my HN username to it :)

"I'm Autistic and this is how I learned to mask"

I see this increasingly in contemporary society. People increasingly tackle certain aspects of their life as generalized problems to solve. They want to "get better at social connection" or "be more athletic" or "be more productive". None of these things are ends in themselves. This is a tendency toward egocentrism and needless abstraction that plagues a lot of people.

In reality, life consists of concrete things. We can only become more productive once we have an actual goal in mind. Talking about productivity in the abstract is meaningless. We cannot determine our social connections in advance. We have or desire certain or more friends, we want to improve certain relationships. By starting from such an abstract place as "wanting to connect" or "being socially normal" you are basically doomed from the start. Connect with who? What is normal? These are not generalized problems to solve, they are rather determined by others. Viewing them this way stinks of main character syndrome—you don't actually care about or value other people, you view all of life through the lens of yourself and see all possible engagements as little more than reflections on your own personal player "stats". Yearning to "connect" with "people" is a completely meaningless and empty desire.

The atomization of individuals and hyperindividualism caused this. Social anxieties and struggles to learn how to properly socialize arise the more isolated we become, and the more distant and rare our interactions with others become. People raised in highly group-oriented and community focused environments don't have these issues to nearly the same degree, for obvious reasons—they learn how to actually care about other people, rather than view life as nothing more than "my personal journey" or as a challenge for nothing other than self-oriented improvement or self enlightenment.

I think it goes a long way in treating people properly.

It's all about the vibes.

I am still getting the hang of that one. But baby steps :)

Also counterintuitively, just giving up on that goal often leads to much more fruitful and lasting friendships. "Hi, I'm author. I'm abrasive and abrupt, excitable and sensitive. Interacting with me could be exhausting. Would you like to try? Please say yes or no."

Seriously, HN: if you saw one guy saying that to people, and another playing a ukelele at you as he "tells dramatics stories" about his life, which one would you choose to interact with?

Then it hit me. That ancient sound of two modems pushing static noise at each other, adjusting, until they identified their common frequencies.

Now I strike up low stake conversations with anyone and everyone. It adds interest to life, and it is a lot easier to make connections.

For me this was a profound life changing epiphany explosion.

I learned this from the old movie called The Shining, by the way.

But I also have Williams Syndrome, which gave me empathy and a fondness for people and their stories.

So while I was bullied mercilessly I also had friends. Deep, lifelong friends I still have today.

When you meet someone, your goal should be to get a little look into their inner world. Find out what they care about. And second, be genuinely interested but don't judge. It shouldn't be fake, you should really care. Pay attention to what they say.

This works pretty well for getting to know a person.

Any reasonably "normal" person (anyone that's not severely autistic) will find there are people that we effortlessly connect with and many others we don't. It's the natural state.

Now in any sufficiently intelligent and psychologically OK person the act of eliciting / pushing emotional connection with people from the latter group (where there's no natural connection) should trigger a certain amount of internal disgust.

The fact that it doesn't seem to be the case with the author would indicate that he's more of an outlier. Based on his writing he does seem intelligent and psychologically OK, so there might be other factors at play. My point is that his journey might not be transferable 1:1.

> Because of course the absolute opposite is true.

Average LLM conversation.

I don't feel the need to build rapport or have close relations with all people. Either we genuinely click or we don't and it's fine for me anyway.

I trust myself enough and I don't crave the approval of others, I don't crave affection.

That being said, for work, in professional circles, with some aquitances, etc. I need to build good rapport and build trust fast, to the point that we build a good relation but not to the point we are friends. And it seems quite easy: be a good listener, echo their opinions, voice their unspoken concerns, summarize their opinions, be appreciative, repeat some key words from what they are saying, be appreciative, don't be judgemental, be genuinely friendly, tell jokes, look them in the eyes, smile, mind your body language and a few others.

When coming in a new workplace, there are people who still didn't integrate well or get along with other people well, even if they work ed there for a few years. There are people that need years to build a relationship with others. But for me, in a few months more people see me like I worked there since ages. I just signal to people that their ideas are mine, too, that we are very much alike.

People are set up to trust other people because that is the easiest way and takes the least effort. If you help them trust you and like you, they will.

Connection is being interested in what someone has to say. Not in being "interesting" or playing some kind of game. Ask questions, share similar experiences.

Also stay the fuck off IRC.

You spend years honing your skill with a weapon and then you stop using it.

The hard part is feeling like your weapon isn't being used. But you need to accept that disuse can be good. Otherwise you end up hurting people.

Basically, don't treat people like toys.

The author's next step will probably be to find places where he can go at full speed. Perhaps grief counseling, the clergy, hospice visits, or something along those lines.

Well, it speaks for itself.

> I was demonstrating my erudition

Those two things might have been linked. I wasn't there, but I'm suspicious.

Fortunately the author learns better by the end of the article, but it stuck out to me because LLMs have made people suspicious of five dollar words like delve so to use the word erudition in this day and age is a choice.

> I’ve tried so hard to learn how to connect with people. It’s all I ever wanted, for so long.

Are there really people like this? HN is probably the wrong place to ask this question, but this is so far outside of my bubble that I just cannot relate. Some people feel like this, for real?