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Comment by koeng | Hacker News Reader

I’m learning swing dancing. It’s been humbling.

It’s humbling because all my life, I’ve been really good at technology - I specialize in biotechnology and manipulating DNA, but am also fluent in programming (mainly python, go, lua) and am able to build hardware - even helped run a robotics startup for a while. Anything related to technology and science comes easily and naturally to me. This isn’t to brag, but just a fact that learning things has mostly been something I do way, way faster than my peers.

But I’ve never danced before, or done anything that required that particular skill set - then realizing I’m real bad at it. Seeing all my peers learn faster and be better, with the same amount of study and practice time, and really trying my hardest and just not being good at it. I’m really thankful for this experience! And I really enjoy dancing, and will definitely keep doing it!

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Am a software engineer who fell into salsa dancing many years ago - originally went to meet women, but found I really enjoyed salsa - yes, agreed partner dancing is very difficult, especially for the lead (as you probably heard, it takes something like 3x the amount of time to become a good lead as it does a good follower). Such a difficult art to master (am a musician and I still found it extremely hard, especially at first).

One thing you may want to try is becoming a master at the beat. You've probably already heard this, but still even so, seems like leads (and followers) don't realize just how truly important it is to taking the next step. Yeah, a good way to practice is to do a very clean and confident basic step to the beat of any song you hear.

And if you've already got this down, more power to you :-)

I tried to learn to dance (hated it). It is a bit of a weird thing though, there as social events where people feel like it is OK to really try and pressure people into dancing. It is really annoying.

I've had very good experiences with swing dancing. People are so nice (LindyGroove in Pasadena). No pressure, and everyone is very accommodating to newbies. I'm not sure why, but there is a very high percentage of engineers.

I tried Contra dancing a couple times. The people were nice enough, no complaints there, it was just like… I could be doing anything else and be happier, hahaha.

incase you want to give it another shot sometime, teaching your self via youtube/other platforms like steezy.co is a viable option if you want to go at your own pace w/o peer pressure.

Yeah, I hate it. I now can say "no" in such a way, that people immediately stop trying to make me dance, but when I was younger, it was really annoying.

It's a pretty important social custom in a lot of cultures. I feel for you as there are times when I really, really don't feel like dancing but also don't want to be the odd one out.

It doesn’t really seem like an important one in US culture anymore, thankfully, so much as one of the few remaining fronts on which it is oddly socially acceptable to pester people.

I dunno, maybe it's not as important as it used to be, but high school dances have some cultural heft, and dancing is a centerpiece of the American wedding tradition. Weddings are pretty universally important across cultures. Plus America is becoming more Latino which I understand values dancing pretty highly.

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