It may vary from person to person, but yeah. I’m in the same boat, I can socialize, but prefer not to, because that feels plain and boring. I have so many questions which almost nobody around thinks of, sometimes these are far off their comprehension (not in an intellectual sense, but in a deep curiosity related one). Complexity is my thing.
I thought that maybe it is just my way to escape socializing which I can’t really handle, sort of a replacement. I worked with my CBT doctor for a year(!) and even he came to conclusion that… it is not. You, HN, popsci and books and articles are my best intellectual friends, and that’s why I spend most of my free time in the internet and not with my friends or colleagues which I naturally have no genuine interest in. It’s hard to socialize when everything is boring and second-order af.
Edit: sometimes I think about how they feel. I really tried to find out if they maybe feel like always a little drunk or high on weed, because some people always act just like I am in these states. It would be interesting to experience some magical mind-hardware swapping to check if it’s true. Maybe I just lack natural alcohol levels in my blood or something like that, or is it a completely different experience. No chance to know for sure.
> that’s why I spend most of my free time in the internet
A friendly tip, spend less time "on the internet" and more time deep-diving into a narrow topic that interests you, do R&D, create. I find that many who spend much time "on the internet" simply consume and never create.
Einstein would perhaps have achieved nothing if he had the Internet, he was too curious, would perhaps have wasted all his time jumping from rabbit hole to rabbit hole. Unless, he chose to focus on his research, and kept web browsing to a minimum.
The Internet should be used more like a research tool than a time-killing device. It doesn't matter the topic of the articles you read, no matter the complexity and technical depth of the information you consume if you never do anything with it. If it never amounts to anything.
Even writing this comment, I can feel the waste of time it is, or any other comment. I recognize it for what it is, and try to spend very little time on such activities.
Checking my recent comment history, I can see that fortunately I seem to have it under control, with two weeks time between my days of commenting.
A good tip, and I try hard to find a balance. I raise this question once in a while to myself. But some areas like modern physics or biology or medicine are inaccessible to me to create because I’m not smart enough in “calculate” part of it. Instead I put free time efforts in my main area, human-oriented programming, hoping something meaningful will come out. Not even for money in there.
Even writing this comment, I can feel the waste of time it is, or any other comment
Seeing people now who got drunk and went walk instead of reading and having on-topic conversations “back then”, I don’t think you are wasting your time. I prefer not to be them, even if it would make me happier. Thanks for your time!
> Even writing this comment, I can feel the waste of time it is
Commenting somewhere like HN may feel like a time waste...but I like to believe many of us are drawn to it because we can somehow feel it's not. Your comment here connected with me enough that several thoughts crystalized in my mind. I could appreciate that that may not be super important or rewarding to you, but it IS valuable to me.
Additionally, there is a long tail during which an internet comment can become useful -- as long as the comment is up. It's hard to say for any given comment when it will last provide value for someone.
In a world of intellectual loneliness that could approach starvation, a given comment may be a drop of water in the desert to someone very important and we'd never know.
Any advice for someone whose primary intellectual interest is how people socialize online? Because damn it's hard not to get pulled into the communities I like observing...
Did you ever play as a kid? If you had kids, how would you play with them? Do you play with pets? Is all of the above boring?
I think I would take being bored in social settings as a creative challenge. I love the play element of social interactions. It's an improv. Think of taking a hot potato and passing it back and forth as you and the partner continue some line, which could seem almost pointless outside of that context. It's the activity which I enjoy, not the content.
Maybe it helps that I'm generally quick witted when I'm talking to people, and I love every opportunity to exercise it. Cracking jokes is a great way to get people out of "serious" mode.
As I said in another comment, deep conversation is like dating. It's unlikely that any given person is going to be interested in whatever it is that you're looking for right at that time. It works better when you have a large pool of people, because you get a higher hit rate. That's why the author of the article likes writing online in front of a big audience.
I took a medication that tanked my intellectual abilities once and it was TERRIBLE. I was in graduate school at the time and I actually got 'stuck' on something for the first time in the sense that I had a project and needed to accomplish something but couldn't think of how to do so. (As opposed to my usual, which is knowing what I'd need to do but feeling no motivation to do it...)
It was very unpleasant. If the feeling is anything like what most people feel when they're thrown into a conversation over their level, then I don't blame them for hating it. I'm sure discussing color theory with aliens with more cones than humans would hurt my brain; that's probably what my interests are like to most people.
You're basically asking for a short story from Jorge Bucay. Let me deepl it for you:
Joroska had always been interested in puzzles. From an early age, he had loved solving crossword puzzles and brainteasers, deciphering cipher writing, exploring mazes, and unraveling every mystery that had presented itself to him.
With varying degrees of success, he had devoted much of his life and brain power to solving problems that others had devised. Of course, he was not omniscient, he had always come across puzzles that were too complicated even for him.
If he found himself faced with one, Joroska had a certain ritual: he would look at it for a long time and finally determine with an expert eye whether it was indeed an unsolvable problem.
If it was, Joroska would take a deep breath and set about solving it. But immediately a period of frustration began, and Joroska only became more engrossed in the puzzle analysis.
The questions seemed unsolvable, dead ends appeared, some symbols led astray, unknown terms and unforeseeable complications got in his way.
Some time ago, Joroska had discovered that he needed a certain sense of achievement in life. Was that the reason why the puzzles no longer gave him such pleasure?
Already after the first attempt, he was usually overcome by a deadly boredom, and he let the matter rest, mocking somewhere in the back of his mind the idiotic creator of such tasks, who would surely be overwhelmed even with their solution.
From the fact that even the easy cases quickly bored him, he concluded that puzzles were always tailored to fit their puzzle solvers and only they knew the right level of difficulty for themselves.
Ideally, he thought, everyone tailors his own puzzle to his own body. But he immediately realized that this would mean that the puzzle would lose its mystery, because of course every inventor also knew the tailor-made solution to the problem.
A little out of playfulness and a little guided by the idea of helping people who, like him, enjoyed guessing, he began to invent problems, word games, number puzzles, logical brainteasers and abstract questions of all kinds.
But his masterpiece was the invention of a labyrinth.
One quiet sunny day he began to raise walls in one of the rooms of his huge apartment, and stone by stone he built a huge labyrinth on a natural scale.
The years passed. He spread his puzzles among friends, in professional journals and in one or another daily newspaper. The labyrinth, however, he kept under lock and key: it grew and grew inside his house, constantly changing.
Joroska made it more and more complicated each time, almost imperceptibly adding more and more aberrations.
This work developed into a life task. Not a day went by without Joroska adding some brick, bricking up an exit or extending a curve to make the course more difficult.
After a good twenty years, the labyrinth took up the entire room and had already imperceptibly extended to the rest of the house.
To get from the bedroom to the bathroom, one had to go eight steps straight ahead, turn left and after six more steps turn right again, then climb down three steps, five steps straight ahead again, turn right again, jump over an obstacle, and then one stood in front of the door.
To get to the terrace, one had to swing over the left wall, crawl a few meters and climb a rope ladder to the top floor.
The whole house gradually turned into a maze on a scale of one to one.
At first, he was very proud of his work. He amused himself by wandering through the various corridors that kept leading him astray, even though he himself had designed them, because it had simply become impossible to keep all the paths in mind.
It was a labyrinth tailored to him.
Tailor-made just for him.
At some point Jorosko began to invite people to his home, to his labyrinth. But even those who had initially been burning for it began to get bored within a very short time, as he himself did with unfamiliar puzzles.
Joroska offered to give tours of the house, but often a mood of departure set in very soon. The visitors usually agreed: "You can't live like this!"
At some point, Joroska grew tired of his eternal loneliness and moved to a house without mazes, where he could easily receive guests.
However, as soon as he met someone who seemed a bit bright, he showed them his true home. Just like the pilot in the Little Prince with his giant boa open or closed, Joroska opened his labyrinth to those worthy of such a revelation.
But Joroska never found anyone who would have been willing to live there with him.
I thought that maybe it is just my way to escape socializing which I can’t really handle, sort of a replacement. I worked with my CBT doctor for a year(!) and even he came to conclusion that… it is not. You, HN, popsci and books and articles are my best intellectual friends, and that’s why I spend most of my free time in the internet and not with my friends or colleagues which I naturally have no genuine interest in. It’s hard to socialize when everything is boring and second-order af.
Edit: sometimes I think about how they feel. I really tried to find out if they maybe feel like always a little drunk or high on weed, because some people always act just like I am in these states. It would be interesting to experience some magical mind-hardware swapping to check if it’s true. Maybe I just lack natural alcohol levels in my blood or something like that, or is it a completely different experience. No chance to know for sure.