Danny ChaiI had a couple realizations recently about myself. Not sure if they’re fully consistent but whatever, consistency is overrated.
The first is this: I think I’m uninteresting. I’m speaking relatively here. I dunno, I just look at my friends, and I think they’re more interesting / fun to be with / entertaining than I am. I dunno, just my claim. It’s more pronounced / evident in person, I think. I’m going to say this page is reasonably (again, relatively) interesting, at least 50% of the time. But in person, yeah, I dunno.
Here’s the other thing. I was thinking about a few people I’ve been having trouble becoming friends with. I’m using a loose definition of friendship, not like super close or anything, just casual friends, but even that, I dunno, it’s been hard. Anyway, it’s not that I don’t like them or vice versa. And the problem isn’t that we don’t “click” – I think I’m friends with plenty of people with whom I don’t click. It’s something else.
And I’m thinking about it and basically it just comes down to the fact that they’re cool. It’s just really hard for me to be friends with cool people. Actually, I think it’s more accurate to say that for me to be friends with cool people, it takes more initiative on their part for it to happen. It’s not that I don’t want it to happen, I just am not able to make it happen.
What’s interesting to me is the fact that this bothers me now, that it’s hard to become friends with these people. It bothers me because it’s the exception. And that’s like a 180 turnaround from high school. Up until high school, maybe even later, the default in my mind was that I could not be friends with people. There was just a small minority with whom I thought friendship of any kind was even possible.
Somewhere between then and the present that changed so now by default I expect to be able to become friends with people and get a little troubled when it’s hard to do. That turnaround is fascinating to me.
I attribute only 10% of that to my social growth. The rest I think is indicative of my social environment. Just, I think my social spheres are really small now, and I’ve limited my exposure to “cool” people. Dunno if that’s mostly good or mostly bad, still thinking about it. But I do think it deludes sometimes into thinking I’m more than I am and I need experiences like these to jar me back to reality: I’m cool and I never will be. And I have no problem with that.
Boring.