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Ask HN: Have humans always found socialising so challenging?
39 points by desertraven 10 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 53 comments
At one time, my awkward encounters felt fundamental to me. Though I've come to observe awkwardness in the wild, without my being implicated at the centre (phewph). People just having friendly, but awkward, encounters.

Often when I touch on this topic in company, people will talk about their own difficulties with interacting with fellow humans.

In a way, the awkwardness seems very natural. It would be almost unnatural if we were all completely open and at ease when interacting with one another.

Perhaps social media has a part to play here, or maybe it's the same as it ever was?




I remember reading a book that stated human socialization evolved when the primary interactions were between family groups and small tribal communities. Everyone knew everyone. Socialization with outsiders was formalized and much more time-consuming and awkward.

In the modern era, we are constantly interacting with strangers or people we barely know. Some gregarious people are very good at this, but otherwise it can be a challenge to find common ground for socializing. I don't know if any of this is true, but it strikes me as intuitively true.


This book? Jeremy rifkin 2010, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness In a World In Crisis, Jeremy P. Tarcher, ISBN 1-58542-765-9


From my opinion I'll add two things.

We're expected to interact with people cold. Know nothing about them and have no shared experiences.

We have a culture of fear of strangers.

A lot of this is due to fear mongering by the media and suburbanization.

So you don't live in a small community where everyone knows everyone. You don't live in a dense city where you rub shoulders with lots and lots of strangers who are all okay. You live in a suburb where you never have a detailed interaction with strangers. And the media tries to drive home that those people are dangerous.

One thing that's declined in the US is churches, clubs, neighborhood bars. Which were good ways for people to meet each other in a high trust environment.


For millions of years our ancestors evolved in the form of small tribal bands bound often through some degree of kinship. Probably within only the last thousand years, maybe even within the last hundred years, have your ancestors lived in or adjacent to an urban setting. And then with that probably only within the last two or three generations have you been bound to the 40 hour work week paradigm away from natural light.

It would be very surprising if it wasn’t all challenging and difficult to navigate. Modern society and the expectations it saddles upon you are so alien to our development and present adaptions. We are built to patrol and forage, not write electron apps, swipe on tinder, or file taxes. People often find a lot of happiness going on a hike or camping, connecting to nature in some way, because it represents a moment of release from an unnaturally stressful environment into one where our primal instincts are allowed the reigns once again.


If you're socially misfit, it really helps to have a peer group. Speaking of myself, the high school geek is perfectly comfortable in an engineering company, for example. Doesn't provide all one's social needs, but at least a sense of having peers, of belonging somewhere.

But aside from that, 30 years ago, say, for a misfit it was either "make an effort" or "stay lonely and bored and single". With so much online interaction these days, I think all but the naturally social (not the majority of the population!) have less incentive to even bother.

And now the office social life is being replaced, to some extent, by working at home. So yes, technology has everything to do with this.


Having read a fair number of century-or-few-old novels, I'd say that awkward encounters are an old, old thing.

Which is not to say that social media has done any favors for their frequency.


It’s only awkward in certain cultures. Travel more and you’ll see places where there isn’t such widespread social disturbances.


It could be also the density and speed of the place. In big cities, it seems like everyone is already in a rush or in the middle of something, so folks may be scared to "interrupt" or disturb strangers, even if it would make their day. In smaller towns, that kind of vibe may not exist as much.


Can you name a few such places?


The entire Maritimes region in Canada. Just go to a pub, raise your glass to someone and you’ll have a roomful of friends in minutes. So friendly it brings a tear to the eye.


Try any Spanish speaking country.


Or Anywhere in the Middle East as well.

Source: I'm from Middle East, wife is Spanish. You can imagine the fun chaos we had at our wedding as our two families united.


Yeah there are some cities where you can meet your soulmates for the night within a few beers


It's not unprecedented, but it's not the same as it ever was. Because there aren't as many sharply defined and well-understood rules, protocols, and hierarchies today, people feel the awkwardness of social interaction without rules or a script. By connecting every group to every other group, mass communications removed a lot of borders and barriers, and the internet multiplied or exponentiated that effect. Clearly that has had some positive effects, but just as clearly some negative ones, of which I think this is an example.


There’s a reason humans and alcohol have a multi-thousand year history.


I was about to say something about animals that consume alcohol and looked it up[0]. It seems that elephants and monkeys do preferentially, which does seem to back that social angle.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_drug_use_in_anima...


I think awkwardness results when the goal of the interaction is unclear.

Say I go to buy a coffee. It's never awkward: I step up to the counter, spell out my order, the server acknowledges that and tells me the cost, I pull out my credit card and pay. Very clear cut and not awkward. It's almost like a video game: I have a few stock phrases, I choose from them as does my partner, we complete the interaction, it's all very smooth.

The awkwardness comes in my experience when I'm standing in front of someone and the way it should go is ambiguous. Are we... close? Going to become friends? Will there a follow-up? Is this interaction a prelude to dating? What would that mean??

I can think of two types of interaction that are often awkward that nicely demonstrate this: first dates, and job interviews.

Note that, if you can remove the ambiguity, you can also remove the awkwardness, in my experience anyway.


> Say I go to buy a coffee. It's never awkward

Baristas and prostitutes are paid to be nice to customers.

That's not the same as a cocktail party. Well . . . not ones I've been to, at least.


We have only 100% to give. To become expert at socializing costs in other areas, which is why many high performing people are socially awkward. It's a tradeoff


Possibly, although it may be relative like others have noted. Maybe people were awkward in the Radio Era, and just sat around at home listening to other people "supposedly" having fun in the Roaring Twenties. "That seems like so much fun, yet I could never do that." However, in the modern era, other reasons might be:

Cell Phones - In every situation now, there's an excuse in your pocket to avoid everybody and not interact. To scan your finger up and up through images, while avoiding those around you. To tap on the endless hallway rather than talking.

TVs - They're in many public businesses related to socialization, and in pretty much every household. It wants you to look at the screen. Its easier to look at the screen than talk. The TV does not actively dismiss you, reject you openly in a bar, or sneer at your lack of the latest fashion / tech gadget. It shows you images that are better than your life every day, it doesn't need to reject you to make you know it's part of a better social desirability class.

Achievement Pressure - The whole world's gone gamified and you can feel bad when you drop out in the operating room. Week late, week early. Didn't walk soon enough. Didn't speak first word quickly enough. Not a math prodigy before kindergarten. You're being left behind by the 10x children, the AP class children, the children that started with advantages. Your paycheck's not what all the websites say your supposed to be getting. $50B?? My paycheck has 50k on it... Your family's not like the family on TV. You, your spouse, your children, your parents, have all those horrible issues the drug commercials tell you to worry about. Not nearly as hot as the movie people. Does my voice sound that way?


I think a lot of responses here are right but as someone who has lived in big cities and small cities across multiple continents, it does seem like:

* the floor for awkward and awkward identification is lower now than it has been

* 3rd spaces and “easy to do nothing among others” cultures are way more social

I’m introverted as hell but some places bring out / inspire / feed my gregarious slices more than others. It’s true everywhere you go, you bring yourself… but I am absolutely happier and different in some places more than others.

Travelling will show you different norms, and medians too. Some places are ahead of time, and other places are on a different axis of time. And the people in those places aculturate differently too.

People are people and across time probably much the same, but collections of people can vary quite significantly.


What do you mean by awkward?

Humans have always had to care a great deal about fitting in with their peers, so being self-critical about one's interactions may be baked into our species at this point...

"I'm not always awkward, but when I am it's natural"


I sometimes wonder if it has something to do with the number of people we meet on a day to day basis. Way way back in the day one might have encountered fewer unfamiliar people I reckon when people travelled less, less dense communities, etc.


Its February... do you live in the north? Life seems better in the south: more sun, more outdoor activities, more vitamin D. Spain, Italy, Greece, the hospitality of the American South. They eat dinner later, stay up later, talk more and will invite you over for dinner #swedengate

I was just in Florida musing the difficulty of having a BBQ in Minnesota... 12 weeks of summer * 2 days people don't work = 24 days... next set of constraints: no rain, your friends are available ie. not going to weddings, kids sports or family events (things which are very booked in the summer)


Consider the difference in tribes that you’ve felt really apart of and those you haven’t or are new to. That’s the natural part - we are wary of strangers. Being part of tribes helps encourage social interactions based on shared contacts, histories, language, customs, etc. We are tribal creatures based in our evolutionary history. Tribes are more successful at hunting, foraging, reproducing, and caring for each other.


What is “awkwardness?” Maybe I’ve never felt it. Maybe I always do.

Is it the condition of not knowing for absolute certain what to do next? Is it the condition of having done something in a social setting and feeling a reaction that suggests what I did was a transgression of an unwritten rule?


People are very complicated. That’s why we have huge heads, in order to make sense of their mess


Because decorum requires too many rules and society has trained us to be empathetic to the other persons feelings and perspectives. People mostly untouched by the modern world find socializing very easy because they say the first thing that comes to mind.


Citation needed


I don't have citation, but I concur with the GP, I grew up in the east, and it is far easier to socialize and also form deep friendships because everything is said out in the open and not hidden behind layers of decorum. Here is an example and a demonstration. As an example people are allowed to comment on someone being too heavy or too thin with them present. Here is the demonstration: Now as soon as I gave an example I have made this a controversial topic for the western audience. There is no way to look past the controversy and talk about other things or form bonds based on speech. Only an infinite loop.


You have cited one example of a hang up in the west that is not common in the east. That is not evidence that the east lacks hang ups.

Example: being openly gay. Demonstration: so taboo it’s illegal in some countries


There’s plenty of bigotry like that but that’s part of being able to say what you like. I guess the idea is that a small minority has a pretty bad experience in life but the overwhelming majority feel content and speak their mind.


Hilarious take imo


I don’t think it’s particularly funny but it is true.


Years of watching anime, though, has led me to believe a certain eastern culture is basically celebrating awkwardness. ;)


There is actually some truth in the idea that developed countries suffer from more social awkwardness than developing countries. If you compare the north east coast to southern states, richer northern European countries to the poorer southern European countries, or urban areas to rural areas. A similar thing also plays out in East Asia where more developed countries tend to has more complaints about social awkwardness than less developed countries.


Great example!

Has this anti-social behaviour become more prevalent because of social media, though? I suspect it has, although perhaps supplanting some other type of 'decorum' witnessed in pre-social media times.


The irony of this passive aggressive hyper enthusiastic sarcasm is palpable.

The basic fact is that asynchrony forum posts request different social rules than live face to face conversation.


Perhaps, but "citation needed" is always just an attempt to shut down those who don't fit the 'decorum'. It adds nothing to the conversation and is not good faith forum participation. There is no quote taken that could be cited, and there never is. The request is impossible to fulfill. Of course, that's the point.

This anti-social "unless your words come from someone I respect, I don't want to talk to you" behaviour has most definitely shown to extend out into the real world. That became quite apparent during the COVID ordeal. But it is less clear if that was always the case, or if social media has made it more prevalent.


It has nothing to do with decorum. It is simply a way to point out that someone’s assertion is unwarranted by presented evidence (often none) and aggressive.

It’s far better faith to ask for some evidence than to rebuttal with “No, you’re wrong”, which is equally dumb.

If you can’t support a claim, you shouldn’t assert it as a fact.


> It is simply a way to point out that someone’s assertion is unwarranted by presented evidence (often none) and aggressive.

There was nothing unwarranted or aggressive about the idea presented originally. It may not be true, but who cares? The purpose of discussion is not simply to tell truths. Nobody wants to hear that 1+1=2. That's pointless and boring. The purpose of discussion is to explore ideas and see what that uncovers.

“No, you’re wrong” is quite dumb too, yes, but a rational person would not respond with either. Instead, they would present their own take and provide something meaningful. If they really cannot find anything of value to respond with, they would not respond at all.

> If you can’t support a claim, you shouldn’t assert it as a fact.

If you can support a claim, why bother asserting it at all? You already know it to be a fact. You are not going to learn that it is an extra double fact. Once you know something to be a fact, it ends there. There is nothing more you can do with that.

When people assert something, you fundamentally know they are not quite sure about it. It is why they are still talking about it, and why they aren't just going around saying 1+1=2 all day long.


Read Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. You'll realize that anti-social behavior is quite old.

It could be that some people evolve to be anti-social so that society can progress, because such people typically spend more time on intellectual endeavors like inventing programming languages. I say typically because the underground man spent all his brain power to fuel his existential crisis instead of working for the advancement of the human race.

But some highly productive aren't anti-social. Take Jeff Bezos for example, who is incredibly charismatic but still invented the best online shopping experience in the world. Compare him to Elon Musk, who I can't listen to for more than 30 seconds because of how awkward he is. Sometimes I think he's trolling us by pretending to be awkward.

I believe anti-social behavior can and should be treated.


It's like what happens to software when it gets stuck in states it hasn't been programmed to handle. Print 'Oops' or 'Erm' 3 times and carry on.


That is… not what software does in states it has not been programmed to handle


Maybe not your software


Can your software handle states it can’t handle?


Yes, by printing err or umm several times to every available output.


Because decorum requires too many rules. People mostly untouched by the modern world find socializing very easy because they say the first thing that comes to mind.


This is where Jordan Peterson's lobsters come in handy. They have a similar neurophysiology of socializing to ours in some ways. That demonstrates that far from being a modern problem it isn't even only a mammalian one. It reaches deep into evolution across, at least, the animal kingdom.

And of course it must, because just look at how non-trivial the stakes of social interaction are. It controls access to mates, protection from predators, access to food, etc. Socializing is a game of life and death for our genes. It can be easy, temporarily, to an elite minority. But by the nature of the scarce resources that it controls, social success must always be a limited resource.

When we're miserable from some social failure it's somewhat comforting to remember that we share the pain even with invertebrates.


Peterson is wrong about the biology of lobsters. https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/111615/do-lobste... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/0...


You know that "bubble" thing mainstream media talked about a lot until the dire existential threat of Trump meant we couldn't acknowledge certain bubbles? It's the bubble thing.

Before there was mass media, we also had huge differences from region to region. And when people travelled less, those regions were more numerous and more distinct. Mass media allowed us to be in one big bubble, all speaking with the same accent, more or less.

Bubbles are natural and normal. Don't sweat it. Be friendly. Embrace your awkwardness. Once Trump has passed, we can openly talk about it again.


Whenever I watch Jane Goodall documentaries (the lady who lived with chimps), I'm reminded of how barely removed we are from the primates. They have social groups and favorites too, along with awkward and sometimes murderous behaviors towards outsiders.

Theory of mind is a fascinating thing, and we aren't born with that ability, and even through adulthood we can't always easily understand someone else's mental state. At the end of the day we're still communicating through a very limited subset of our thoughts (verbally, through writing, or even rich media like videos and games). But most of the time our communications in real life never even get to THAT limited subset, instead just hovering around the surface discussing weather and sports and whatnot. It's hard to really get to know someone else.

I think the internet has allowed new forms of interaction that were previously difficult to find (deep discussions on a niche topics, pseudonymously) -- for better or worse, as we've come to see.

But fundamentally we're still the same social apes whose population exploded after agriculture and industrialization, but whose evolution has not fundamentally changed since before the stone age. Our brains have very limited output bandwidth compared to its input processing abilities.

------------

Slight segue here, but part of the reason I'm excited about AI and technologies like Neuralink is because they present possibilities by which consciousness might exceed our biological/neurological limitations. Even current LLMs have (I would argue) superior reasoning and moral ability compared to most non-expert humans, and a much broader theory of mind (if not necessarily deeper, but even that's debatable) that can encompass characters from so many walks of life, both real/historical and imagined. Very few writers, much less average people, have such an extensive understanding of different personalities and behaviors. One of the uses I hope LLMs come to encompass is psychotherapy, an infinitely patient yet hyper-trained therapist for every troubled human.

And if we can really start to export "brain stuff" for external observation and processing, sure, that's the end of privacy (but let's face it: it's already dead), but way more exciting to me is the possibility that we can then really start to study and maybe even inhabit the mindspace of other individuals unfettered by the limits of verbal/written communication. It's like loading their consciousness into your host as a VM, or at least dual-booting into it. It'd be a whole new level of empathy (and probably manipulation and abuse), and probably the start of commodified consciousnesses that you can rent to truly roleplay someone else for a few days/decades/whatever. It's a tired sci-fi trope, but who knows, we might begin to actually breach its frontiers in our lifetimes. That's pretty exciting/terrifying to me... not only the end of awkwardness, but the potential start of a true Borg-like hive mind. (Yeah, I'm a collectivist at heart, and that seems like a wonderful goal to me.)

There will always be individuals who don't want to be, eh, "assimilated". But even that in and of itself is something that we will probably begin to understand better with these technologies... why some organisms are more community-minded and others more individualistic. We might be able to map out a "tree of thoughts", similar to how we have a "tree of life" that documents evolution between species. We can trace certain thought patterns back to biological origins, predict how they're likely going to evolve in given habitats/situations, and probably chemically guide them toward a desired outcome. It would be the end of even the illusion of agency.

For a system like that to make sense, you'd probably have to not believe in free will to begin with (I don't), but it would mean a fundamental upset in how we perceive other organisms, with the consciousness-to-consciousness barrier broken. If we could apply the same systems to other species (animals, sea jellies, siphonophores...) at a neuronal level, we might even discover novel thought techniques that primates and mammals never evolved, opening up entire new modalities of consciousness. If you think talking to teenagers is awkward, what about singing with siphonophores? Comedy with dolphins?

It's all really fascinating to me, but anyway... this is just a sci-fi rant by this point, lol. I'll shut up now.


It's in part that some people are naturally introverts and thus withdraw into non-social activities like reading, anime, movies, music, gaming, programming etc. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because the other kids are out there interacting with others, and thus learning social cues and skills. For example, alcohol famously reduces social inhibitions.

It's not that the natural introverts cannot learn these skills if they apply their mind to it, in fact it's probably easier for them since they're generally smarter.




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