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The Need to be Alone

The Need to be Alone”:

At a certain point, we have had enough of conversations that take us away from our own thought processes, enough of external demands that stop us heeding our inner tremors, enough of the pressure for superficial cheerfulness that denies the legitimacy of our latent inner melancholy – and enough of robust common-sense that flattens our peculiarities and less well-charted appetites.

We need to be alone because life among other people unfolds too quickly. The pace is relentless: the jokes, the insights, the excitements. There can sometimes be enough in five minutes of social life to take up an hour of analysis. It is a quirk of our minds that not every emotion that impacts us is at once fully acknowledged, understood or even – as it were – truly felt. After time among others, there are a myriad of sensations that exist in an ‘unprocessed’ form within us. Perhaps an idea that someone raised made us anxious, prompting inchoate impulses for changes in our lives. Perhaps an anecdote sparked off an envious ambition that is worth decoding and listening to in order to grow. Maybe someone subtly fired an aggressive dart at us, and we haven’t had the chance to realise we are hurt. We need some quiet time to console ourselves by formulating an explanation of where the nastiness might have come from. We are more vulnerable and tender-skinned than we’re encouraged to imagine.

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On Conversation

When I was little young fellow, I loved to go to the car wash with my Dad. On bitterly cold days, we’d sit in the line-up for a car wash, listening to Car Talk on NPR. At the high-intensity air-dryer at the end of the wash, I looked at the windshield wipers fluttering in the wind. I still my remember my stupid little joke that I thought was so funny at 7 years old: “It looks just like a nervous bride on her wedding day!”

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MeFi: Ask & Guess

This is part of a extremely popular, insightful MetaFilter comment by a wise fellow about two different kinds of people:

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

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Rejection IQ

Rejection massively reduces IQ:

Aggression scores increased in the rejected groups. But the IQ scores also immediately dropped by about 25 per cent, and their analytical reasoning scores dropped by 30 per cent.

“These are very big effects - the biggest I’ve got in 25 years of research,” says Baumeister. “This tells us a lot about human nature. People really seem designed to get along with others, and when you’re excluded, this has significant effects.”

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Talking to Women

I don’t consider myself particularly gifted in the art of conversation. My one hard and fast rule is to avoid saying too much or revealing a lot of my personality; I would rather most people saw me as shy and reserved, instead of judging me on a sliver of myself that is likely misrepresentative of the whole. This default reserved behavior is important in surviving when speaking to or interacting with a novel group, where you can feel the judgments flying back and forth like biscuits in a food fight.

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Conversation

When I say I ran into my English teacher today, I do almost mean it in the literal sense. I was biking and he was driving, the corner was rather blind, and we both swerved and braked in emergency avoidance maneuvers. We casually chatted afterwards, but I the pounding heart-rates of both parties precluded the pretenses most people usually observe in polite conversation. I guess I am a bit socially awkward, not really in a debilitating sense, but still an inconvenience I could do without. My mantra is and almost always has been, be yourself. You can turn up the volume and turn down the volume on the traits, characteristics, and actions that make you as the situation dictates, but you should always go with being you. “Me,” as I currently stand, is a little bit awkward. The price of sincerity, I guess.

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