Ask HN: Have humans always found socialising so challenging?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

* 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.

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 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)

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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 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.