Mason's mirth

Let me tell you a story.

A trait I have, one of my best, is that I can become interested in pretty much any topic. Talking to someone with a niche interest, I probably know something about it. And if I am ever to meet them again, I will learn more. If you told me you do cardiac nursing, I will struggle through several recent PubMed articles in the interim. People try to swing this if they're looking to have sex, but I can't fake sincerity so I will have to actually do some work. I can get invested in every sport, every genre of music, every historical era. This is largely because interests derive from social forces and contexts, which connects to literally any topic a living, breathing human will talk about.

It's a flexible, modular system. Especially with my sometimes flat affect.

I have come to realize this tool is awful at making me happy. Perhaps because it's a tool, and we should not confuse the tool for what we want to build.

This tool bypasses the initial filter we have to figure out how to allocate time. A lot of people hear someone talk about baseball for five minutes and know they want to do literally anything else. I do like baseball, at least enough to talk about it. This means despite my hatred of crowds, I do very well at parties, and then quite poorly at having acquaintances evolve into friends and romantic partners. I can listen quite well, the tool to know what trivia to pull out, or what information to research later. None of this is useful long term. A lot turns to dust because I have aspirations with people I have little fundamental compatibility with.

Normalizing is more insidious than people-pleasing. People-pleasing is doing things you don't want to make other people happy. Normalizing is saying no, the things you don't want you do want, and they're good. It's a two part dogleg path to get out - what I believed I wanted I don't want, and now not wanting them, I should leave.

Most, perhaps all, social skills are like this. If I could read people's minds it might make certain aspects of a conversation easier. It also would make me stilted, unnatural, and creepy no matter what I did, on a long enough timeline. Normalizing that what I wanted is to have a good chat with someone, disguised what I actually did want: to have emotional intimacy with people. All-around knowledge isn't even useful for bar trivia, really.

Master masons are the best at building their own prisons.

Artemis