Having an interesting conversation with someone you just met. I see people do this shit all the time and they make it look like it comes naturally but every time I'm in that situation it is so difficult. Its like a series of quick time events that im severely underprepared for
I learned to combat this with 3 simple questions:
Be interrested in their answers and add some simple follow-up questions that show you are listening. Add some content of your own as a follow-up.
Posing that first question can be a bit weird, but the rest is as simple as it sounds.
Be interested in their answers
Yeah, so, that's where I usually drop the ball. What if I'm just... not?
That's where I rely on "fake it till you make it".
What if, completely hypothetically of course, I'm pushing 40 and only moderately depressed but still prefer the company of my dogs to most people?
It really depends on the person, you have to have some sort of jumping off point. Whether that is sharing something in common with someone or having cool hobbies.
I think this is the biggest myth of conversation. People always tell you to search for people whom you share something in common with, but the reality is that nearly everyone shares something in common and there’s no reason to go searching for it.
The key to a good conversation with a stranger is to initially do two things: 1. Ask details about the stranger and 2. Intertwine that with yourself in some way. You don’t even need to share this part.
Good conversations have these things I’ll call “footholds” where you intentionally give each other details shortly after meeting in order to create those ties in conversation. If you ask where someone is from, you should shortly offer up where you are from as well. Or if you ask about a hobby, offer a light comparison to your own.
Once you have enough of these footholds, the conversation should flow freely. If it ever doesn’t, ask the stranger more about themselves. And trust me, just be interested in what they say.
I'm not perfect at it, but what helps me is that I genuinely love to learn and I like to take the opportunity to learn from people when I meet them. I just need to find an entry point (job, hobby, something the person is knowledgeable about) and then I start asking questions, and applying the limited knowledge I might already have on the subject.
With short interactions with people that are working (supermarket, bank, restaurant, phone assistance) I usually go for empathy, and overall just being nice. When one comes to me I go for a joke to brighten their day a bit.
I sometimes use the alphabet method. When a conversation gets stuck I think of words starting with a and form a question from that.
Example : angler fish, amazon, aeroplane
-> do you like travelling? What's your dream destination? Do you like the deep sea/ocean/swimming?
*stressed depressed lemon zest
Parenting. Before I had kids I was often judgmental of parents, but now I've realized all the things I didn't take into account and all the things you just don't have control over. In my case, I was not expecting to be a single parent, there was the pandemic, and I did not factor in how impactful the lack of sleep and autonomy would be.
Even without suddenly becoming single, or a pandemic, or anything, being a parent isn't something that can be explained to someone who hasn't experienced it, IMO. You can use words to explain, that you think are accurate. But it just has to be experienced to fully understand. The fatigue, the change in stress levels, the amount of time you lose. Conceptually not hard to grasp. But the way it feels, different story. "Wow, this is worse/more than I thought."
But given all that, it's also hard to explain that it's all worth it. One of the best things about being a parent right now for me personally, is watching my kids learn everything for the first time, and the wonders of learning, beaming from their eyes. It's such a privilege being the one to have a chance to teach them a bunch of things. Being a role model, being someone with whom they build trust.
Also walking into their room after they've fallen asleep and watching two absolute gigawatt units expend their energy non-stop all day, now completely still (and silent, JFC), and just so peaceful. Their eyes just two lines, rather than two open balls all day. Adorable.
100% accurate.
Once they become teens, the joy is in seeing them realize how much they don't yet know. It happens rarely, so make sure to document it.
Nothing is more entertaining than being a parent.
There is also nothing to explain the disassociative feeling of having them kidsplain to you things that you taught them, or were actually there for. It's like, dude, you didn't know how to wipe your own bum until I taught you. I think I have a handle on 9/11, liberal vs. conservative politics, the Cold War, collapse of the Soviet Union, or how to drive/ shop for groceries/ pay taxes/ vote/feed my dog/apply a bandaid, or whatever thing you think just came into existence because you learned it.
I went through Army training where they intentionally deprive you of sleep for 9 weeks, and I had still never been as tired as I was the first 6 months of parenthood. I didn't know that you can get that tired and still be alive.
I have a friend with kids. I'm also an aunt. I think it's absolutely fantastic when people can be parents, but I also don't at all understand how anyone is capable of doing that shit. I'm more than capable of briefly watching and playing with kids for several hours at a time, but not caring for them 24/7 forever.
It's especially wild to me when parents basically explain to me that they are constantly legitimately going through extreme suffering in what you describe in your first paragraph.
But then they tell me how literally suffering 24/7 is somehow all worth it to them and it makes even less sense. I'm guessing there's some sort of hormonal thing going on to trick the brain into giving periodic happiness episodes in the middle of what sometimes seems to be flat out torture.
My mom told me she used to judge the parents in the shops with screaming kids, we didn't do that and she thought it was her excellent parenting. She said "Then God gave me Janet" to cure her judgemental hubris, lol.
Nobody is a good parent all the time, we aren't robots and exhaustion is such a drain on intelligence and compassion. But most of us are good parents enough of the time, thankfully.
Making friends as an adult
I'm really struggling with this right now. I've joined to some new interest groups, but everyone including myself, seems so guarded, every time I leave feeling like I've failed a barrage of social aptitude tests. I feel like so many adults have baggage that by 40 they're spring loaded to overreact and overthink, they come across as unapproachable. Or maybe I'm awful, which is what keeps kicking around in my head.
Socializing. Things to say in a conversation don't come to me naturally like they seem to do with other people. Often people remark it's like talking to a wall because I don't know how to come up with an answer to their open questions on the fly. And without that, they see no foundation to build friendship on.
Damn, I really relate to this. When I get nervous because I don't know what to say, I come back with one of my dreaded default responses.
I realized today that people on movies are weird in cute, quirky ways. Most of us are just weird in weird ways.
people on movies are weird in cute, quirky ways
Also scripted and practiced ways.
Hey, can you add a button on that webpage to do [something]?
Like, yeah, adding a button is usually easy, but making it do [the thing] can be quite difficult.
can you add a button that will save my marriage?
Done. Your marriage status is now saved and can conveniently be retrieved in JSON format.
Achieving significant political change, even as an individual with significant political power
Significant political change…for the better.
As we’ve seen all over the world or only takes a relative few to make negative change.
It's a lot easier to break things than it is to build them.
Converting a class traitor to socialism
Knitting. Always see people do it on the subway or watching tv without paying attention or trying. Spent a few hours trying to learn once and couldn't do it.
Crochet for me. It took me forever to figure out how to do it - to even get one simple stitch done. Somehow I figured it out but it's still really hard
I hear crochet is easier, and more common than knitting. But I haven't tried either so I could be entirely wrong.
Art
Picture frames.
Looks like an incredibly simple project for a beginner woodworker, doesn't it? Get some nice wood, rout in a rabbet for the glass/art/backing, rout on a nice decorative profile, then set your miter saw to 45 degrees and make 8 miter cuts, apply some carpenter's glue then wrap it in a band clamp. What's so tough?
I'll tell you what's tough: the precision with which those miter cuts must be made is exceptionally fussy. Say each cut is a quarter degree off. Well, after eight cuts that's two degrees of error. Three of the joints will look fine, the last one will look like an axe wound.
The issue isn't making the cuts at 45°, it's making them at 45.0000°. Or, more realistically, making them truly complementary.
This same issue applies to moldings around cabinetry, with the added bonus that the carcass of the cabinet won't let any of the joints close tightly, so they all look like trash.
Making an otherwise simple change in a game made by a big company.
There are tons of things that could be done relatively "easy peasy" when it comes to correcting an error in the code or making a change to a number or even adding a thing. What makes it difficult is red tape. You've got assigned tasks to do that probably don't include making that simple fix or adding that thing or changing that number. If it's just 1 dude in his garage working at a hobby project, it could get done in 10 minutes if he wanted to do it.
Of course this assumes things aren't done in a way that make doing something that might be easy even harder simply because you don't have many options to do the things you want within the system you've made without dismantling part of it and getting into a whole mess of other shit to make the "simple" change. Sometimes it be like that, too.
Perfect example is changing text in a game (maybe 10 mins) vs adding emoji to text in a game ( weeks?) does the text engine support emoji. Do we need to add support for all arbitrary images? How big can the emoji be? So many issues come out of "simple" requests.
Based on my recent failings: apparently hitting a little white ball into a hole.
Playing baseball with any level of skill.
"Reading the room" some people are really good in certain circumstances but when things are just off it goes off the rails.
As a person with no natural aptitude for it its actually tiring for me and I have to be on my A game to do it right
Manual on a bike
Ollie on a skateboard
Who's this Ollie I keep hearing about?
popular sayings like: "get well", "do not be sad", "do not be poor~"
karaage, IMO. "oh it's just fried chicken". fried-dry-chicken is the easy part.
it always looks easy when pros do it: you see it with that teacher solving that algebra problem, or that guy doing that guitar hero/osu/rhythm game song, models and their drips, mukbang/oogui, porn
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
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