Why In-Person Socializing Is A Mandatory To-Do Item | Hacker News Reader

Why In-Person Socializing Is A Mandatory To-Do Item

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61 pointswallflower13 comments

All very true. People need contact with people.

I am a geek and a type B (very happy with my own company) personality type like many others around here I'm sure. I am also a pastor and that's a people business. Some of the best advice I ever heard was from John Maxwell who said "walk slowly through the crowd". He described a time when he saw one of his assistant pastors charge through a crowd in the reception area of the church. He caught up with the young man and asked what he was doing. "Hurrying to get on with my job" was the reply. "These people are your job", said John Maxwell. I have tried to live this every time I'm around the congregation. I even had to remind my wife of this just yesterday.

People need contact with people.

Usually, but not always. Hermits really do exist.

True. I was painting with somewhat of a broad brush there.

Although, you could say that hermits are just extreme members of the type B personality, and that they need far fewer people than others. I'm not sure that even the most die-hard of hermits would need zero other people, so my general point still stands.

This isn't all good. There are reasons that email tends to be popular. On the other hand, there's a reason email can go off into the weeds as well.

The issue I have is that face-to-face meetings tend to lack depth. By necessity, you either have to take a lot of time explaining yourself over and over or you make decisions based on surface criteria. In fact, a lot of time, decisions are made based on how well a person has manipulated[1] the group -- not on the merit of the argument in question. Lawyers make their money this way every day.

If you're not good at being put on the spot -- or you forget an important point you wanted to make at precisely that moment, you loose. Some people are good at holding court until their brain catches up, but some are not. :-)

I think a culture of (respectful!) criticism is good, but that doesn't require face to face.

[1] not necessarily with bad intent -- maybe they are just naturally more persuative, whatever the argument.

> If you're not good at being put on the spot -- or you forget an important point you wanted to make at precisely that moment, you loose.

I think the point you are trying to make actually reinforces the need for face to face meetings. Every interaction with another person is an investment - the 'lack of depth' that you mention is often what builds up mutual understanding of each other, how they think, their reasoning, their biases - and overall, it builds up trust.

When you have this trust, then when you are put on the spot and you flub your discussion points, the listener gives you a lot more slack to clarify yourself, or they they may give you the benefit of the doubt because they trust you. It's this investment in people that pays off when you are under-performing for whatever reason - far from losing, you actually win because of the face-to-face meetings.

I think that works better with some people than others. If there's a big difference in how good two people are at on-the-spot negotiation, often the less-good person will end up just not saying much, or feel coerced into something, while over email they might've hashed out an agreement. On the other hand, some people good at face-to-face discussion are really incompetent emailers, so that can also have downsides. I'm very unconvinced there's a clear ordering of what you get from each; you get different things out of different people from different modes of communication (same with phone vs. IM, to take another huge-variance example).

I actually find the people I know best are people I've IM'd with a lot, for whatever reason. Some I've also hung out in person with a lot, and that also adds a certain amount of depth. But people I only know in person---with little to no significant IM'ing---are in a lower-depth category.

Social networking (e.g. Facebook) is not the same as actually being social.

I agree, though I don't think that's a pure digital/physical split. Social networking is a lot more diffuse "socializing" than many other, older kinds of digital socializing are. A good IRC channel with 10-15 people who know each other well, BBS regulars, or a one-on-one IM discussion with a person you know well enough to pick up subtle cues even from textual conversation, are all much different than clicking through an FB or Twitter stream.

I'm not sure if it's my personal experience or in any way generalizable, but I feel like the internet today is actually less of a replacement for in-person discussion than the 1990s internet was, in part because people tend to do more of this surface-level socializing, and don't build up familiarity with people in manageable-sized groups, or enough fluency with textual conversation to make chats include emotional subtext/etc. rather than just exchanges of messages. Maybe just a disinterest in the old "cyberspace" idea, dunno, but I find people who only got online in the 2000s to be fairly hard to interact with via text in meaningful ways (they seem much quicker to resort to a Skype video chat). That might explain why many of them also don't think it's possible to interact online in meaningful ways, because they have no experience doing so.

I definitely agree. I just think that Facebook is much better at networking than at socializing, and people tend to confuse the two. I have hundreds of friends on FB, but it's not my first choice if I actually want to have a conversation with any of them.

Alternate title: "How to be a happy human being"

Isn't it weird that it took this many thousands of years of civilization before someone came up with a way of explaining it that works for every single person?

This is probably true for many people. But some of the best work in history was produced exclusively by people in solitude. In fact, without thinking in solitude first, most people cannot have meaningful in-depth conversation with people in person.

I'd say that solitude (away from all (including online) social interactions) is also a mandatory to-do item once in a while. Just as in-person socializing, it's easier for some people than others.

As a mild introvert, being social in-person requires effort. Being "social" on facebook is effortless. Clearly this is why facebook is enticing, but this should be a red flag. After all, few things worth doing are effortless.

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