Note: I’ll phrase thelife advice here as advice to myself, but I suspect that it’s pretty good advice for you as well.
Claim: I should seek to fill my life with more quality-adjusted-seconds-spent-socializing.
Proof:
- This is literally part of the objective — one of my terminal values.
- It can lead to new opportunities.
- It tends to increase my happiness.
- It is helpful in clarifying ideas.
Q: Why is this post called “taking social initiative”?
Because my default mode of being is not well calibrated to how important I think this is: I still feel some level of resistance to initiating social interactions. (Although I’ve definitely seen personal progress here, and it feels like a tractable problem).
What cognitive distortions cause this?
- Worry that I’m inconveniencing people.
- ”Fear of being rejected”.
- This implicitly is rooted in a need for external validation / an aversion to invalidation.
- Sometimes a worry of “I don’t haven’t been particularly productive today and don’t want to have to admit this to someone”.
Bad methods for dealing with this:
- Thinking that other people are responsible for initiating social interactions with me.
- Avoiding social interactions.
- Worrying about whether I’m inconveniencing someone, and then having to overcome this to initiate social interaction.
- I think it’d be way better — for all parties — if I was not worried about this, and default expected people to say yes. While of course also not being perturbed if they say no.
- Another bad method I sometimes employ is trying to prevent “pain of rejection” by pre-committing to not being too sad if someone says no to a social invitation. More specifically, this is bad if my method for doing this is devaluing the interaction — like saying “I won’t be too disappointed if this interaction with person X doesn’t pan out, because I wasn’t even that excited to see them”.
Better methods for dealing with this
- Remembering that I the world is full of allies
- Not worrying about giving offense
- Be charitable to people in your thoughts.
- Schedule recurring social events
Q: tell me more about the “quality-adjusted” part of quality-adjusted-seconds-spent-socializing
todo add better questions to questions to connect