1089:"Internal Monologue"

[Malt]

I'm pretty sure social anxiety is the feeling that everyone secretly hates you and is only hanging out with you out of some kind of obligation.

But in all seriousness, the people I know who have like REAL social anxiety, don't want to hang out with their friends and people they trust when they're feeling that way. They don't think you hate them or anything, they just can't deal with being social right then.

Oh God. I have this. And Asperger's. And cancer. AHHH.

[KevinLevin]

This usually happens to me.

[KarenRei]

Just as a note: a person living in another country and learning its language does this *all the time*. You have so much more to think about for everything you say and you're not always understanding what others are saying, so you're constantly deciding whether to nod, smile, make a simple response, which one would be best, etc.

[muntoo]

"I really enjoyed it" is an objective statement about your subjective experience of it. It puts you on safe ground - about the only way someone could successfully challenge you on it is if you've previously said that you didn't enjoy it.

"it was good" is a statement about its objective quality, so is open to challenge and disproof. It represents you setting yourself up as an arbiter of taste.

Of course, if you want to be subversive about it, you could say "It was good, but I didn't enjoy it" - suggesting both that you are an impartial arbiter of quality and that you have personal tastes that don't align with quality.


Anyway, if you're going to say "X was good", you'd better have the reputation, the qualifications, or the knowledge to back it up, or you'll find yourself being dismissed as a poser...

This is a good post.

I really enjoyed it.

Witty, quick, and so-meta -- this great post is a great read if you feel like having a jolly good time. A few melancholy overtones in the content, but when paired with its distinguishable aftermath, the taste it leaves in one's mouth is simply exquisite.

[Werewolf]

What's with the people who are saying that instead of doing what the comic portrays, one should simply "go" with the conversation and act natural?

Because that doesn't work for me. 99% of the time, I am completely uninterested in what people want to talk to me about. I don't want to ask them questions about the subject. However if I shrug off all conversation or actually tell people they're boring me, I'll quickly find myself with a lack of friends. I HAVE to do this, I have to feign interest, in order to maintain personal relationships. It's difficult, too. There's only so many times I can say "yeah".

[Pfhorrest]

However if I shrug off all conversation or actually tell people they're boring me, I'll quickly find myself with a lack of friends.

A lack of boring friends, maybe. And sure, maybe there's few actually interesting people out there, so that means a lack of friends in general, but why you do need people? It's ok to be alone until you meet people who are genuinely interesting. Even better when applied to dating: it's perfectly OK to be single until you meet someone actually worth your time, instead of wasting effort on someone you don't really enjoy just so you're not alone. When you don't need other people around, the quality of people you do keep around goes up exponentially, as only the people you really want around will be left.

In other words, if these people are so uninteresting, why are you interested in them? And if you really are interested in them, why do you need to pretend to be interested in them?

Alternatively, if you for some reason have to pay attention to someone you find boring: find the most interesting part of whatever uninteresting drivel they're bleating and ask questions about that. Find the most interesting part of their response to that, and keep drilling in deeper until you find something they have to talk about which is actually interesting. Then follow the connections from everything else they say back to that. That's the approach I always took to class lectures: whatever the subject, there's bound to be something to catch my interest buried somewhere in there, so I'd just find that and then focus on how everything else in the subject connects to that.

[Werewolf]

Fascinating people are hard to come by. I guess I'll look harder for them

[peewee_RotA]

Fascinating people are hard to come by. I guess I'll look harder for them

Fascinating people drive full sized suvs

[Kaden]

This comic was my very first GOOMHR moment. (Even though my husband is much worse about it than I am. xD)

[noema]

"What are some other agreeing words?"


As a writing exercise, I once wrote down everything that I said in a day. It was supposed to improve dialogue writing skills. But I decided my stories would be kind of tedious if the characters were saying "yeah" all the time.

...I have an unhelpful habit, while engaged in conversation, of imagining how I look/sound in third person.