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Also relates to Disagreeableness arc (2025-10-27) & Not wanting to talk (2025-10-24)
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I live in a community but I hide away a lot
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When was the last time I truly just hung out and enjoyed it? Plausibly with my high school friend group, the trips we’d go on? Snowdon, for example. And in my friend’s living room
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What is the point of pontificating on this? To find some ignorance, and then drop both thorns (The two thorns analogy of Advaita Vedanta)
“I don’t care about talking”
- This is a lie that I’ve told myself, without realising that it’s a lie (e.g., see Not wanting to talk (2025-10-24))
- If I truly didn’t want to talk, then I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable, right? And I wouldn’t feel soothed and pleased when a good conversation actually does take place.
- What’s more likely: that I genuinely don’t want to talk, or that I feel uncomfortable around others because of thoughts like “I need to make the conversation a good one” and “oh god I don’t have anything to say”, and as such talking is loaded with negative valence and feels bad. It feels like this is a skill issue
Humans like connection
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It’s really nice when conversation flows. We hung out at the dinner table in the evening a few nights ago and we were all talking about the same thing (phone addiction), and it was connective and generative.
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Often, I’m in a group of others, in a state of dis-connection, rather than connection. So I tell myself that I don’t like groups of people. But that’s obviously not the case, because I like groups of people when I’m connecting with them. So really, I don’t like disconnection, and I like connection.
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There’s a Heidegger thing here of: when being in connection is going well, you’re not thinking about it, in the same way that when you’re using a hammer, you’re not thinking about the hammer, it is transparent to you (he called this “ready-to-hand”). And when connection is going badly, you go into theorising, “looking-at-the-lack-of-connection” mode (“present-at-hand”), and this is where you form theories about how Connection Is Pointless And Bad, Actually. And you never even really notice all the times when connection is going well, because when it’s going well, you’re not in the “present-at-hand”, Looking At The Connection-state, you’re just in the flow, having a good time.
How much of my disconnection is due to the mistaken belief
- I walk around with a belief, the red box in the diagram: “I don’t like talking, I don’t like groups, it’s not worth it, it’s not meaningful”
- And this is provably false, as when talking goes well, I enjoy it very much. I literally have abundant experiential data that shows that I do like talking, actually. And if I asked anyone here, “hey, do you think that I actually enjoy talking, sometimes?”, they’d be like, “of fucking course, you love making people laugh, you love connecting with people”.
- “Talking is not meaningful to me” cannot coexist with “talking is meaningful to me”. It’d be like believing “I do not need to drink water”, whilst also needing to drink water. Clearly, I need to drink water. Both cannot be true. Do I need to drink water or not? Do I enjoy connection or not? I enjoy connection.
So, it’s a skill issue
- There are various skill issues
- There’s fear. Currently, there are people here who I’m intimidated by, because I model them as being very well adjusted, cool, interesting, living rich lives. I fear that I don’t have anything to offer them, that they’ll be baffled by me, etc.
- I fear that I don’t have anything to say. I’ve spent the last ten years stumbling towards an illusory horizon rather than enjoying the here and now, rather than valuing friends and memories (see Poor education, and my decade of tanha, 2026-02-19)
- But at the very least (and maybe this is all I need, as an 80/20), I could ask myself:
What would make me feel more connecting to this person right now?
And fuck it, this’d be edgy as hell, but I could even say something like this out loud. “I’m noticing that I want to feel more connected to you right now”. Maybe it’s as simple as that.