What does connecting with someone mean?
talk.bradwoods.io88 points by bradwoodsio 2 days ago
88 points by bradwoodsio 2 days ago
> People hate small talk because it avoids [vulnerability]. The purpose of social conversation is to connect but talking about the weather or the latest sportz ball result reveals sh!t.
I’m a defender of small talk. It’s the MVP of connection; you are at least talking to another person, mutual acknowledgement. It’s where relationships begin. It’s where you and the other can safely feel out the space of shared values and what’s top of mind: sports? Work? Family?
Oversharing is perhaps defined as sharing too much too soon, when you should still be doing small talk.
Sometimes people say they hate small talk but complain of the difficulty of making friends. Start by learning how to have light conversations. Keep talking. Depth comes naturally with time.
Among the problems of small talk: (a) It's a crutch that just plain avoids the need for connection. (b) It lets you acknowledge someone - but so do more constructive acts such as simply noticing the person near you and being considerate to them, or even smiling. In particular so many people will have small talk with one person while not even noticing the others. (c) Small talk fills up time - aka wastes - to the detriment of other topics. (d) Do people really learn connection by starting with small talk? Perhaps a few.
After that, the question exists of what topics you can tackle - that are not small talk. That can be tough. But usually you do have something in common with the other, already. Recognizing what it is can be tricky. Certainly teaching the various ways you can interact with others would be nice to have in school.
I do not think smalltalk has much to do with vulnerability, personally. Smalltalk is boring and useless. It is a waste of time, IMO, just because people find silence awkward.
Conversations should be progressive over time, as this builds trust and support over a given period of time
I think hating small talk and avoiding it is a perfectly fine selection filter. If someone takes a long time to warm up and talk about deeper stuff, that's totally valid, but it's probably a sign of there being a mismatch in either vulnerability, actual available depth of conversation, or general conversation patterns. This mismatch means that yes, I could put in a lot of effort to get this person comfortable, but then you're accommodating someone else's priorities over your own, and I don't really want to do that with strangers. I'll go make friends with someone that is going to better match me.
Empathy plays a crucial role in strengthening human connections, which unfortunately I believe has been eroded strongly by social media and a rise in individualism. The combination of anonymity, and the modern day psychological wiring towards instant gratification, makes online cruelty largely rewarding unfortunately.
I loved the book "How to know a person - The art of seeing others deeply and being deeply seen, David Brooks, 2023". I found truly interesting ways to look at the problem. By a professional of getting people to connect. Including issues such as how we see ourselves or how we see the world is not how it is (which applies to the person in front of us). Also a great discussion of culture vs individual. And plenty of tips for everyday usage. A useful piece of work.
"It means mutual empathy — they get you and you get them. It's discovering similar values, experiences and perspectives. It's a feeling of trust and comfort where you both feel safe to say what is truly on your mind."
Ah, sounds all fine and dandy!
But what do you do when you discover you don't have similar values?
Maybe there's no answer in todays polarized world; personally aspire to this:
I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.
— Abraham LincolnGot to go beyond shared values/experiences/perspective.
The deeper commonality lies in the messy hardware we all share - the human mind.
If you take a Philosophy or Psychology class, it usually starts by showing how incoherent and conflict-ridden the mind is.
From Plato’s tripartite soul (reason vs. appetite vs. spirit), to Hume’s (reason is just a slave to our passions), to Freud’s (id vs ego vs superego), to Kahneman (System 1 vs. System 2) there’s a constant theme running - the mind is not unified.
It’s a battlefield of impulses, instincts, ideals, and rationalizations.
And because we all live inside this strange ridiculous machine, one that can easily go off balance, we’re all vulnerable in the same essential way.
We all know what it’s like to be overwhelmed, to act irrationally, to feel pulled in opposite directions. That’s the real basis for connection: shared fragility, not shared ideology.
That’s why systems(and relationships) that are grounded in patience, forgiveness, empathy, compassion etc survive the long term.
They don’t depend on sameness, they depend on the recognition that everyone is doing battle with themselves. When that realization dawns it get easier to speak to the other person showing you understand this fact. And then we get the possibility of connection even across radical differences.
> But what do you do when you discover you don't have similar values?
Look deeper? Explicitly held beliefs are just a sliver of the tip of the iceberg that constitutes our experience as humans. The US, in particular, seems particularly fond of declarations of identity, so it helps to understand that such things are about as fundamental as the health of your pancreas.
IMHO, polarizing reactions, whether in others or yourself, look like obvious fear responses, which often respond to empathy and understanding.
More than fear, certainty smells like the mind killer to me.
I’ve spent the better part of 20 years trying to get through to my Trump loving, racist, hateful father in law using compassion and shared understanding. At some point you need to accept that some people don’t respond to that, and usually it’s the people who lean towards the authoritative that are not receptive.
Your comment is very confusing. The article is about making a connection with someone, the measure of which is that you have achieved a shared understanding. It sounds as if you have managed that. And yet it seems that this is not enough for you and you are expecting to “get through” to him in some other sense, that he will be “receptive” to something more that goes beyond mutual understanding, that he will “respond to that” shared understanding with something that goes beyond personal connection. What is it you are looking for, that would make that connection complete? That he recants all of his views and changes them to be in line with your own? Or is there something else that you expect shared understanding to lead to, rather than being a goal in itself?
I want him to realize that he achieved what he did not because he’s somehow better than people whose skin is darker than his, but because he was very lucky in where and when he was born, who his parents were, etc. I want him to realize that pulling up the ladder behind him (he often says that minorities don’t deserve the same benefits of society that he got) does nothing but make life worse for other people.
They were pretty clearly responding to the previous comment more than to the article directly??
I believe that another quote attributed to Honest Abe, is ”The best way to destroy an enemy, is to make him your friend.”
In my own life, I regularly interact (and connect) with folks that are notoriously difficult to deal with.
This had significant advantages in my career. The folks in the office —regardless of their proclivities— were amateurs, compared to some of the people I hung with, in my free time.
> This had significant advantages in my career. The folks in the office —regardless of their proclivities— were amateurs, compared to some of the people I hung with, in my free time.
Could expand on this? What advantages in your career? Also, what do you mean by:
> were amateurs, compared to some of the people I hung with, in my free time.
Do you intentionally look to meet people with whom you disagree?
> Do you intentionally look to meet people with whom you disagree?
Sort of. I like to develop good relationships with people that have a hard time getting along with others. I consider it to be a bit of a "challenge," and I like to live a life, where I'm constantly challenging myself. Also, I participate in an organization that is focused on helping people recover from significant life trauma. It's sort of my job.
Part of it, is because I'm "on the spectrum," myself, and come from a childhood fraught with atomic wedgies. I have some empathy for outsiders. I don't come from a "superior position," I have very much been an outlier, for most of my life. I know what it feels like.
It's been my experience that people that are difficult to deal with, come from some kind of personal trauma. I have found that they are often quite open to getting along with folks that are willing to accept the idiosyncrasies that arise from their coping mechanisms.
So if I can accept, and even be close friends with, someone that has spent significant time in Ossining, for violent offenses, having an employee throw a minor tantrum because I said "no," is a cakewalk.
Maybe you don't need to connect with everyone? If someone has a few different opinions to me, that's fine, I'm sure there's plenty of other things we agree on. Maybe we can find common ground and connect over that. If someone has fundamentally incompatible values to mine about things that I consider important, then I probably consider them a bad person. Like, I don't know how else to define "bad person". Definitely not someone I want to connect with.
I have no desire to get to know someone who is racist or homophobic. We can disagree on supply side economics or universal healthcare all day long. I don’t owe my energy to get to know assholes.
A black man befriended a KKK wizard and has convinced over 200 klansmen to give up their robes
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
There's little better than helping someone like that expand their understanding of the world and their place in it. In the end, influencing hearts and minds is one of the few things you can do that will have a lasting impact after you're gone.
we should all aspire to be a little bit like daryl davis. just a bit. i am not going out of my way to seek out people like that, like he did, but when i discover that one of my friends is leaning into that direction, then i look to daryl davis for inspiration.
Why do I have the feeling you are not a minority, have never been stopped or questioned for being some place you “didn’t belong” or had to tell your six foot 3 step son to make sure that he and his other Black friend (two of five Black guys in the entire school) didn’t walk to the Waffle House to meet their friends after the football game unless their White friend was going with them because they would get harassed by the police?
No I’m not saying “everyone is racist”. But it’s not my responsibility to spend my energy educating racist and to proffer myself as “one of the good ones”.
The Daryl Davis that was mentioned is a black man who befriended many KKK members and resulted in them giving up their robes
You didn’t answer the question - are you a minority?
Do you also think Hispanic people who are here legally should have a chat with a bunch of ICE agents to change their hearts and minds?
If you are White, would you go out of your way to reach out to someone who belongs to a group who actively hates White people? I’m not naming a specific group even though I’m sure they exists because I honestly have no idea what groups they are and I would no more spend energy trying to change their minds either. If anyone in my family said anything that was outright racist or homophobic I would check them also.
My dad (now 83) on the other hand did slightly change his opinion on sexuality when he had to admit that one of his nephews were gay. But even then on a macro level he isn’t going to be waving a Pride flag around and he still thinks being gay is a moral sin that is going to damn a person to hell.
It’s just like a White guy I was friends with for years on a personal level, I had no doubt that if I needed him or if he saw someone harassing me or my family he would take out one of his many guns and defend me.
But once Trump came on the scene and I saw some of his posts on FB, I realized that he treated me as “one of the good ones” and if I was some random guy that he met on the street he would’ve treated me differently. He went on a racist tirade on Facebook about his daughter dating a Black guy for instance.
I'm not the person you were replying to originally, I was providing context for who Daryl Davis is and what he has done
That doesn't mean everyone else has to do the same thing, anymore than save the whales or end world hunger. Only that people aren't immutable and irredeemable and it's not fair to dismiss the idea of connecting with them as inherently ridiculous
Yes and because $TechFounder can drop out of school and become a multi billionaire, you can too. It’s “Survivorshio Bias” at its finest.