I am not a people person. I never have been and I doubt that I ever will be. I remember reading a Tom Clancy book in high school called Rainbow 6 and it was about this terrorist organization who was trying to significantly decrease the human population of the world through some kind of eco virus.
My memory is a little hazy on this. It's been a bit. But basically, they wanted to turn back the clock on Earth and get it back to when like humans were the minority and not in control because they thought the world was better back then when people weren't in charge and covering nearly every square inch of the earth.
And I remember when I was reading this book and I was thinking, I can kind of see their point on this one. I know that I was a reasonably social kid when I was younger, but I think a gradually accumulating pile of like hurt and misunderstanding and even trauma at the hands of other people gradually turned me into what I would describe as a misanthropic recluse. For most of my life, other people have mostly just felt like the things standing in between me and being able to enjoy my life rather than a source of like nurturing or caring and support.
And so I have spent about half of my life avoiding them whenever possible. On the rare occasions when I had an interaction with somebody that seemed to be going well, my goal would usually be to exit that interaction as quickly as possible before I screwed it up or they screwed it up or most likely both. I don't feel nearly as strongly negative towards people now as I did back then, but I do still honestly have a lot of trouble finding enjoyment or maybe even tolerance um in or for my interactions with my fellow human beings.
Unfortunately, that's been a pretty big problem for me because, as you yourself have likely noticed, it's pretty difficult to have much of a life without regular dealings with other human beings. They are everywhere. And some of them really want to interact with you sometimes.
I am by no means an expert on thriving in this society. I don't even understand it half the time. But I think I do it about as well as anyone who has my internal disposition does it.
And so I do feel appropriately credentialed to create this piece of content which I'm calling the antisocial individuals guide to functioning in society. I am making this for me, but if it happens to help you too, awesome. I'm going to lay out all of the strategies I've learned and practiced that have helped me transform from a completely socially unskilled person who is miserable to be around all of the time to a relatively low social skills person who is miserable to be around much of the time.
That may not sound like a huge transformation, but I think it's important for you to have realistic expectations of me here. The first strategy that has been huge for me in this realm is to focus on one- on-one interactions whenever possible. I call this the men in black rule.
If you've ever seen Men in Black, there's this quote from the movie and it says, "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals and you know it. " If you Google Men in Black quote, that's the very first thing that comes up.
I think it stuck with a lot of people because it's such a serious and profound quote for such an otherwise silly movie. I align with it for the most part. With most human beings, if it's just you and me oneon-one, I enjoy most people.
I genuinely do. When it's just us talking about something as soon as other people enter the interaction, that is when things start to break down for me. One of my biggest revelations about my social functioning and my role in society is that I actually like most people.
I I used to say I don't like people. That's not true. I like most people, but I don't like groups of people.
I just don't. When people get around other people, they start acting really weird. They start trying to impress one another and one up one another and argue about stupid stuff and make weird sounds and they wouldn't do these things without the other people around.
Like if it's just you and them, those things would not be happening for the most part. And everything in a group just seems to so often become unpleasant really quickly. There is just in my opinion and in my observations a massive difference between the behavior of an individual human being and the behavior of a herd of human beings.
And in general, I just don't like herds of anything really. Maybe I'm still carrying trauma from the stampede scene in the Lion King. I don't know.
I'm just trying to cram every '9s reference into this point as possible. Obviously, it is not realistic to have only one-on-one interactions with other people and never have to deal with groups. Like, there's no way you're going to be able to orient your life around that.
But I do think it's a decent principle to keep in mind as a general goal to keep interactions one-on-one or smaller when possible. I used to get so confused when I would go to like parties or gatherings of people and every single person there was a person I generally liked but I would have a miserable time and I was like what if I like all of these things individually why don't I like them all together but if you really think about that nothing in life works that way I like Chinese food and I like cheese and yet I don't think I would like cheese on Chinese food just cuz things are good by themselves does not mean they go well together and people are not an exception to that rule. The second strategy is to look for what unites instead of what divides.
And I know that sounds very like political and cheesy but this is a really real thing. My mind naturally creates divisions between myself and other people. I very very strongly believe that this is essentially like a proactive defense mechanism because I've faced a lot of rejection and ostracism and isolation in my life.
And I think what's happening here is I'm trying to find reasons not to care about people or what they think of me before they decide that they do not care about me. Because something in my mind tells me that is an inevitability. This person is not gonna like you.
this person's going to have a problem with you. This person's going to reject you. And before that happens, you need to already find out why you're okay with that.
So, you need to figure out everything about this person you don't like. Everything about this person that is so fundamentally different from you that you could not possibly have a meaningful relationship with them. And you need to keep that in your mind before you even start to interact with them so that you can be protected when they hate you.
I find all the reasons I anticipate not fitting into groups before I even try to fit in. And basically like I do the you can't fire me, I quit thing. Like I reject myself preemptively and I do it so effectively that in many cases I don't even bother trying to form new relationships.
This is an understandable defense mechanism, but it is not a healthy one. It isn't. I also see it play out in group therapy all the time.
I've heard some people refer to it as terminal uniqueness, which is basically the idea that you are just so different and unique that no one else is ever going to really understand you. And and this is something I felt a lot in my life. Like no matter who I'm with and what they've experienced, I ultimately often end up feeling alone with whatever I've been through.
And that tells me there's no point in even trying to connect with other people. And the tricky thing about this one, this terminal uniqueness, is there is a degree of truth to that statement. Yes, you are ultimately a unique individual.
Nobody else out there has ever experienced your exact combination of experiences, nor has anybody else out there ever had your exact brain and body. So technically, you are unique. You are.
But that uniqueness doesn't have to condemn you to isolation and alienation. unless you allow it to. Being a therapist has helped me get really good at finding one or two uniting factors or commonalities that I have with a person, even if there is little else, and maximizing a relationship based on that small amount of common ground.
Sometimes all you need to is one or two things to have in common with a person. And they don't even have to be big things. They can be little surface level things to at least be able to withstand a decent conversation with them.
And sometimes you can have entire relationships with people based on a relatively small amount of common ground. The two best friends that I've had in my life, well, two out of three. I've had three best friends, one of whom really was almost like a mirror image of me.
The other two I didn't really have that much in common with. We just had a couple hobbies together. We spent a lot of time on those hobbies.
And like that was the foundation of our relationship. And outside of those hobbies, I don't think we had a ton in common, but we kind of made it work. Maybe nobody will ever understand everything about you.
In fact, I'd say that's a guarantee. But that doesn't mean you can't have enjoyable or even deep and meaningful relationships with other people. My wife is the most important person in the world to me, and she is my single biggest source of earthly support.
But she doesn't understand everything about me, nor do I understand everything about her. In fact, we have determined through a lot of conversations that our lives up until we met each other were near polar opposites in some really, really big ways. And that hasn't stopped us from loving one another and and being able to support one another through our greatest challenges in life.
Instead of searching for everything that makes you different, try looking for what makes you the same. Instead of looking for the reasons you don't belong, look for the reasons that you do. Stop looking for division and start looking for unity.
Another tool that can really help you form and maintain healthy relationships with other people and gain valuable insight into how you might be coming across to others is a therapeutic relationship. A good therapist won't be afraid to let you know about habits or patterns you have that might accidentally be driving people away and keeping you lonely and isolated. A therapeutic relationship is also one of the relatively few relationships, maybe only relationships for some people, where making mistakes or screwing up or not knowing what to do can be explored with curiosity and strategy instead of judgment and condemnation.
Do not show up to therapy trying to impress your therapist. That won't do you any favors. Show up warts and all and figure out what the heck is going on with you.
That being said, I very much understand how difficult it can be to find a therapist who you feel comfortable exploring these uncomfortable issues with. And that is why I am proud to partner with Grow Therapy for today's content. Growth Therapy believes, as I believe, that finding a therapist you're excited to work with shouldn't involve 20 Google searches, nine phone calls, and getting ghosted three times only to find out your top choice doesn't even take your insurance.
With Grow Therapy, you can browse a searchable and filterable directory of thousands of licensed therapists with diverse backgrounds and approaches. And you can book directly into their schedule, sometimes in as little as 2 days. Growth Therapy is not a subscription service.
You pay per session and their providers accept over 100 different types of insurance plans. They have over 1 million active users and a 4. 7 rating on Trustpilot.
To learn more about Grow Therapy, head to the link in my description or scan the QR code on the screen for a quicker way to get support. My third strategy, and I've spoken on this one before, but I'm going to speak about it a little more in depth today. Find popular things you don't hate.
Even if it's just one. I This has been such a powerful tool for me and and that's why I want to revisit it and it fits in very well with this piece of content. I don't purposely try to be countercultural.
I don't I just genuinely don't like most of the things that most other people like. I don't do it to be edgy. I don't do it to be weird or controversial.
It's just how I feel. There is nothing inherently wrong with having niche or obscure tastes in anything or everything for that matter. But if the majority of people who you interact with don't know or understand anything about what you are into, it is going to be a big barrier to being able to tolerate or potentially enjoy your interactions with other people.
If you can find just one or two things that you even kind of like, you don't have to love them. They don't have to be your favorite things. They can always be secondary to your really like primary special interest niche things.
That's fine. But if you can just be like competent to hold a conversation in a couple things that are reasonably popular, it will open up so many doors for you. And I don't care what it is.
It can be a sport. It can be a hobby. It can be a Marvel movies or a popular show, a fandom, a musician.
Just find one or two things in this world that most people like and learn a moderate amount about it. And like magic, you can now briefly converse with most people without horrible awkwardness. It really is an incredibly powerful tool.
My fourth strategy for you today is to use information tears. So tears like a tear system, not like crying. This is actually a system I started to use with my autistic therapy clients to help them determine when to share various types of information at various stages in their relationships with other people.
But I have found that a lot of people who struggle with socializing benefit from it. And I really wish someone would have taught me this earlier in life because I had a tendency to share way too much personal information with people shockingly early in relationships and info dump about special interests that they could not have cared less about. It was because I was so lonely that I desperately wanted to be liked and accepted and I was so excited for that to happen that I tried to rush it and it backfired every single time.
Do not try to speedrun your relationships. It will crash and burn eventually. People will interpret potentially controversial or divisive information about you very differently if it is the 30th piece of information that they learn about you than if it is the second piece of information that they learn about you.
I mean, just think of it statistically. If a person learns something about you that they don't like and it's the second thing they know about you, half of what they know about you is problematic. If it's the 30th thing they know about you, that's harder to calculate in my head, but it's a smaller percentage.
It's 3 point something%. The the proportion of information they have about you that is potentially problematic is relevant to their feelings about you. So, tier one information is information that has almost no chance of being controversial.
You never know for sure. Nothing is completely safe. People can be offended by anything.
But tier one information is information that for the most part you can share with anybody, even complete strangers, and you're not going to get judged or rejected or ridiculed for it. Some examples of this would be things like, "What are your favorite foods? How do you feel about the weather today?
" "What are some hobbies that you like to do for fun? " Unless you have some really weird hobbies, then that's not tier one. But again, these would be like your popular hobbies, your socially acceptable hobbies.
Some people can be offended by anything, but these are usually going to be safe categories. Tier 2 information is information that could be fairly controversial in certain situations. And this is information that you would share with people you know.
Doesn't have to be a family member or your best friend or your romantic partner, but you also maybe shouldn't tell this to a complete stranger. And this is going to be stuff that has the potential to be kind of divisive. So things like sports fandom, favorite musical artists, like these are things that, you know, depending on what the other person feels could potentially cause an argument.
Probably not a super deep heated argument, but it could be like I I am on a very different side of this particular thing from you. And although it's not a super divisive topic, it does make me feel like there's some animosity between us. So these are going to be a little bit more in-depth character reveals about who you are, what you like, what you don't like.
You got to be especially careful with tier two about saying what you don't like because if the thing you don't like is a thing that the other person likes, now you've got the potential for conflict. So tier 2 you can usually get to fairly quickly. I just wouldn't lead with that because that can get things started off on the wrong foot.
Tier three information is information that you can reasonably expect to be controversial with a large proportion of the population. And these would be things that you should really only share with people who you have deep meaningful relationships with. Some obvious examples of this would be religious beliefs, political affiliations.
If you have some unusual hobbies or habits that you know mainstream society isn't super accepting of, this would also include things like your trauma. Your trauma is not tier one or tier 2 information. Uh mental health diagnoses are tier three information.
If if you have just met someone and one of the first things they know about you is like what DSM things you have. That's not how that should be. Um sexual preferences, tier three information should strangers probably should not know that about you.
Um now you know it's up. Don't let me be the boss of your life. You can share whatever you want with people whenever you want with them.
I'm just telling you what's not gone well for me. And I know that because I hold a lot of positions on things that aren't super common, when I actually start to let people know who I am, that's when the problems begin. And so I've just learned to kind of titrate that information over time.
Do with that what you will. The fifth strategy that has helped me a lot is to shift my line of questioning to genuine questions rather than snarky questions. I'm a very snarky person.
I'm sure that shocks you, but I I am. And so I really have to watch my tone. Often the dis the difference between a genuine question and a snarky question simply is that it is tone more so than wording.
Think about let me give you two examples here. Why did you do that? Why did you do that?
Same question. First one was actually not a question though, right? The first one was a judgment masquerading as a question.
The first one was me telling you you did something stupid and putting a question mark on the end of it. The second one was me wanting to understand you better, wanting to know what went into that decision-making process. What what was happening in your life that led you to this point?
What was the context around this decision? How did you feel about it then? How do you feel about it now?
These are genuine questions that actually invite a conversation rather than shut it down. I used to be like the king of snarky questions. And guess what?
People didn't like me very much because of that. Shocking, I know. It doesn't make people open up.
It doesn't facilitate a healthy conversation. It just shuts it down and make everyone think that you're an a-hole because you're being one. So, don't be one.
There's more, but those are my top five. And sometimes maintaining a sustainable level of actionable information is a better strategy than just dumping every single thing I've learned in my entire life about socializing. So, I'm going to cut it off there for now.
Those are my top five strategies for learning how to be functional in society if like me, you are at your core a deeply antisocial person. Whether you were born that way or whether your experiences on this earth with the people in it have made you that way, I think that these things would work for either group of people. One last quick thank you to Grow Therapy for sponsoring today's content.
I really do think I think therapy can help just about anybody, but especially if you're somebody like me who just doesn't integrate well into society, you might need some help with that. And there are a lot of people out there who would love to be on your team for that journey. As always, I hope this helps.
Take care.
