> I don't understand why are you downvoted. Are people in this thread really pulling out a laptop and trying to get it connected (or pay for one with a cellular modem) every time they need to respond two words to an email, call a uber or look up where is the nearest coffee shop that is open at an odd hour?
Because some of us read the original comment and thought maybe the discussion should be responsive to it:
> If the task can’t be done in a few taps I feel I’m better off opening a laptop anyways.
Talking about Uber, email and directions in Maps are literally "task[s] that can be done in a few taps". Perhaps being less "weirdly" defensive and taking the time to think about the discussion you're about to jump into would be helpful?
> how someone can work for a company like that and maintain possession of a soul
I mean, they don’t. There isn’t a single decent person who has ever worked at Meta, and that started long before this nonsense. The entire company is about the social destruction of its users. Everything anyone there works on drives towards that goal.
It’s weird how y’all are so desperate to catastrophize responses, and then want to call other people “internet badasses”. Look in the mirror next time you tell someone they’re going to get shot, bud. You’re the problem.
It doesn’t seem like catastrophizing when discussing how people might react to a stranger attacking them. Hitting someone in the face hard enough to knock off their glasses isn’t exactly some silly little thing that people would be ridiculous to respond to. It is an attack and people would likely perceive it as such. Plenty of people would just be stunned and do nothing, but plenty of people carry and go to the range every weekend just waiting for someone to try something.
When stranger assaults you, every person with some practical military training is going to want to neutralise target as fast as possible because this is the survival strategy that is hammered into your muscle memory.
There is no thinking or musing whether they just want to slap you or I don’t know what. You don’t know your attacker and their intentions.
This is the real world. I don’t know why you would think this is some kind of stupid game to go around and slap people. It will cause problems.
Bullshit. That's internet incel horseshit. Have an actual conversation. Get to a point where your sole, entire intention isn't just to con a woman into sleeping with you, and where you like, maybe want to get to know her. Lose the weird, internet pick-up artist intensity.
Like, do random men you talk to think you're a creep? If they do, then maybe it's time to get some life coaching. If not, maybe, just maybe, there's some subtle differences in how you approach people you see as sex toys vs. people you see as, you know, people.
>Get to a point where your sole, entire intention isn't just to con a woman into sleeping with you, and where you like, maybe want to get to know her.
But the point of this exercise isn't to make a deep friendship. It's practice. Is this article inherently creepy?
>Like, do random men you talk to think you're a creep? If they do, then maybe it's time to get some life coaching.
If they do, they're a lot better at hiding it. The big difference is in threat level. I don't see men nor women approach me and think "are they trying to hurt me/hit on me" as a default.
> But the point of this exercise isn't to make a deep friendship. It's practice.
Personally, that wasn't my takeaway. I thought it was more that you and the other person would get some joy out of the interaction. As in, conversations with strangers will be fun, even if you don't end up being friends.
What a bizarre perspective. Have you never gotten any personal value out of a single conversation in your entire life? Have you never made a friend? I don't understand this "all conversations are bad and useless" nonsense. What on earth do you think you're doing on social media?
One of the basic rules of starting conversations with other people is letting the other person do most of the talking. People like talking about themselves. So the old lady in the article violated that rule. That isn't to say that just talking to people instead of actually talking with them will never work. You might be lucky and the person you talk to just happens to be very interested in what you want to tell them, but it is rather unlikely.
Once you have shown that you are interested in someone by listening to them and thereby learning about them, you might sometimes find that they might also be interested in something you can share with them. The easiest way to get someone interested in you is to first get interested in them.
It's a pretty simple principle, but since people like to talk about themselves they often do not follow it.
Yeah, some of the responses in this thread I hope are just jokes. Asking someone how their day is going is bare minimum social behavior that should carry zero risk of anything.
I mean, why does it ruin your day? It's just some random person - you'll likely never see them again, or you'll know to avoid them in the future. Why is the opinion of some rando weighing on you so much?
This whole thread is about wanting to talk with strangers because it makes you feel good, if approval from strangers makes you feel good the natural corollary is rejection from strangers can also make you feel bad. It would be bit weird to go out of your way to talk to people because you'd enjoy their kindness but then when they're unkind turn around all like "oh I never cared about you anyway". Isn't it?
have you had actually negative interactions like that? they sting for years, even after hundreds of mild-to-positive ones. the brain focuses on risk-minimization and not reward-maximization.
My brain on a Monday in a crap mood driving on the highway: that jerk that just cut me off has ruined my entire day.
My brain on Friday after good sleep and a relaxing morning: heh look at the guy, he's definitely in a hurry. Hope he gets where he's going, back to my jams!
I try to train myself to remember to be Friday brain, but sometimes Monday brain comes out and I'm in a funk that makes me forget I actually have a choice about NOT reacting a specific way. I like to think I'm getting better at consistently not sweating the small stuff and just letting those instances go without giving them an appreciable amount of mental space better suited to relaxing and listening to good music.
I think it frequently depends on the thread you're reading and your expertise in that area? There are a few things I'm intermediate to expert in - frequently the quality of comments in those threads is quite poor, but the noise & upvote-y memes look like signal in those areas, so it may not look as bad from the outside.
On the other hand, there are a number of things I'm not very informed about, and I do frequently find a few posters in those threads who seem to have very insightful things to say, but I'm not sure if they actually are (sometimes you can tell from replies) or if it's just because I'm a neophyte.
Which all goes to say I don't know if this system would really help, or would just turn into bad opinions getting even more support because the crowd-sourcing is coming from others who don't have the necessary expertise to evaluate what's worth listening to.
Because some of us read the original comment and thought maybe the discussion should be responsive to it:
> If the task can’t be done in a few taps I feel I’m better off opening a laptop anyways.
Talking about Uber, email and directions in Maps are literally "task[s] that can be done in a few taps". Perhaps being less "weirdly" defensive and taking the time to think about the discussion you're about to jump into would be helpful?
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