ameancow @ ameancow @lemmy.world

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I haven't watched the movies in depth, but the premise alone speaks to me of a subtext that leads to this understanding about our world.

Oh I get it, I understand better than most, it's why I make a pest of myself in these posts about the benefits of just talking to people.

It's fine if you don't like talking to strangers or making eye contact if you're fine with your present social life. I am usually ragging on people about this because we're also having some pretty serious issues with loneliness right now. And you don't get from lonely to less-lonely by avoiding the things that make you uncomfortable.

I was non-verbal for a period as a child, deeply introverted, only recently diagnosed as on the spectrum though, particularly because when I was a child there was no real understanding of autism, so when taken to a doctor they just X-rayed my brain. I learned to adapt/mask but it took a long time for me to push through social discomfort and I also thought myself like many of the people in these posts who seem absolutely spiteful against people who try to strike up conversations with strangers. Again, it's understandable if talking is uncomfortable for people, particularly if they are on the spectrum or have trauma, but we need to understand that social avoidance is an obstacle to overcome, not an identity to cherish.

Pushing through discomfort talking to people and actively making an effort to be open, to go ahead and babble nonsense, to stop being afraid of bothering people with my own autistic spiels or niche bullshit, I actually started to "get it" and understand how the game is played and from there only had strings of successes both personally and professionally. Meteoric at times.

It still took some effort, but took me until middle-age to unlock this skill-tree to even start trying to work on it, and I strongly feel like I could have had a much, much better life if I made that effort sooner, and if even one other person reading this sighs and says "Okay I'll try speaking up at the next meeting" then I've done some good because I know their lives will improve if they stick to it.

Most people who "hate small talk" in posts like this have either very specific ideas in their mind of what it means, such as annoying coworkers who talk about quilting or baseball loudly in the next cubicle, or are deeply sour, lonely, cynical shits who think they're god's gift to intellectualism and have never had a girlfriend in their life so they can't imagine what people talk about casually in private, and think that being in a relationship with someone needs to be like, always planning a heist over a map of the city sewer system or talking about geopolitics or lecturing their imaginary waifu about science facts.

People will also say something stupid about the weather or news or whatever just because they want to express to you that they're friendly and open to converse. Ignoring "small talk" from a stranger is like actively rejecting someone's desire to connect. What are they supposed to say if they want to chat? "I AM A HUMAN RECEPTIVE TO CONVERSE, PLEASE TALK TO ME ABOUT GEOPOLITICS"

Which is fine, if you're as antisocial and spiteful against "casual life" like everyone in this post is pretending to be and you love it and you're happy, that's great. Say "just put it in the bag" and get out of there.

The problem is most of these people who act like people talking about "last night's game" are NPC's in the Matrix and they would NEVER stoop to the level of talking about sports or weather... are the same people who will race home to post their manifestos about how lonely they are and how society is crumbling and how they wish they lived somewhere walkable with community and how hard dating is.

Our cognitive dissonance as a species is maxing out.

The current state of society is: "Ugh I can't believe this cashier is talking about the weather when I'm in a hurry to get back on the internet to complain about how lonely I am and how hard it is to make friends and date."

This is a surprisingly powerful topic for a lot of people *

*those people particularly being the ends of the spectrum between "people who discovered how easy it is to get people to like you" and "angry introverts who don't want to change."

I believe it's coming to light that this ancient device was both not that accurate, and not entirely unique and "out of time" and that there was a lot of detailed bronze-working being done at the time with gears and clockwork, it's just that very few of them would have survived, as they usually got sunk in shipwrecks or looted and melted down over the centuries.

I mean, it only makes sense that the tools and mechanisms already existed to manufacture something like this. They didn't learn how to make gears and solder bronze plates JUST ONE TIME. This was an art and many people have experimented with engineering over the ages, it's just that we tend to forget just how vast the scale of time is and how much it buries. If we all disappeared tomorrow, in a few thousand years it would be a huge challenge figuring out a lot of our technology remnants. Metals oxidize, valuable parts are recycled over and over. People repurpose things, and over long enough scales in history, you can think of the surface of the earth like a rolling ocean. Waves of earth's crust lap at the shores of ruined cities and artifacts drown into the mire.

The most interesting thing about the antikythera mechanism to me is that it survived at all, that we somehow found it and it hadn't completely oxidized. Because it offers a unique window in the lost arts and artifacts that we probably will never know about. (No "ancient technology conspiracy historians" you're not invited. Don't make me point to the sign.)

I appreciate the nuanced and self-examined reply, Satan.

They don't need a purge night to commit tax fraud, the do it every day, for vast, vast sums of wealth.

If they had a purge night in real life, they would quickly amend it to just "murder" night. Lest the poors get an idea that they too could exploit the system.

Then they would amend it again because they don't want to get murdered. So it will be "Murdering approved people and groups night" but that also has a chance of backfiring if someone wealthy or the people protecting them could be at risk, so they will just change it to "The police get to murder you night" and then they will shrug and remove the nightly restriction, and then there you go... our current system.

Within 4 hours of announcing that a "purge night" was a thing, they would have to revise it to just call it "murder night" and even then, it will get further modified to "Murder of sanctioned people and groups night" and even THEN they will have to further amend it until it finally says "The police get to murder you night" and then they will want to remove the nightly restriction and then BAM you have what we have now.

If relative isolation is what makes you happy or you have your own core group of people who will never leave you and they reliably fulfill your social needs, that's fine. But I see this sentiment expressed by people who also whine endlessly how hard dating is, how hard it is to meet people and make friends, how hard it is to socialize, how lonely they are, etc. You can't have it all.

I hate small talk, because you (a stranger) do not interest me and I don’t care about trying to connect with you.

Pretty much sums up all our problems as a civilization in one paragraph, thank you.

Over the last few decades (i'm an online oldie) I have watched as the conversation spaces changed broadly from "places where we engage with ideas and argue our values" to "places where we pretend to debate people we don't agree with for attention from our own side" to now, "places where we viciously rip out the throats of people in our own groups because it's so much easier to purity-test your kinsmen than it is to actually go try to change someone's mind."

This is kinda silly and sad on its own, it becomes horrifying when you realize that most of these people, left and right, have this idea that they're going to someday "win" and that "someone is going to do something." And as a result don't ever pause to think about the fact that even if everything went our way tomorrow, we would still have to live next to millions of people who don't agree with you and nothing is going to end unless we actually do hard things like talk to people we've been taught to hate.

No because we all keep talking about her.

Imagine if we all broadly put a fraction of a fraction of the effort we put into performative boycotts and infighting into actually getting involved in our local communities, organizing, fundraising and getting to know our local representatives.

You know, the things that have allowed capitalism to have unfettered access to our highest offices. The things that get ZERO media coverage and less hype, even broadly made fun of as lame or pathetic. If we cared at all about our local community and who represents us closest, we would have at least slowed down this march of endless growth that has made each of us into a commodity who thinks we're winning when we talk about brands and boycotts.

Part of why we're in this current mess is because too many people thought naively that the average person has room in their lives for ideology or that the average working american gives a shit about culture war when there's not enough time or money in the day to even take a breath, much less live a life.

They don't. The well isn't poisoned, it's dried out. If we put Tesla out of business tomorrow Elon will still be wealthy enough to buy nations and people's teslas will still be sitting in their garages slowly depreciating like every other consumer good.

I much, much, MUCH rather see someone put that time and energy that they would use to sell their car into getting involved in their local community organizing or county elections. Those are the systems that allowed people like Musk and Trump to seize power in America and those are also the ones that get ZERO media hype. Not a coincidence. Same distraction is happening in the "culture war" every day and we're all losing.

Absolutely, but a lot of people don't understand that you can't arrive to that point by not ever "small talking" along the way. Small-talk is how we express to each other how we feel, how we want to be talked to, what we notice around us and so on. It's a critical component to socializing. Conversations between human beings doesn't play out narratively like in media and movies, there's no "point" to conversing with someone you're close to, you're just sharing shit.

When most people say "I hate small talk" it's because they don't socialize broadly and don't really "get" how it works, and how it's often just a way of expressing how you feel at that moment, and when two people are making small-talk, it's less about the information being shared and more about the tone, intimacy and connection, like sharing space and being open with passing thoughts.

People in a healthy relationship will "small talk" for hours about the weather or pizza prices, and then launch into a deep debate about post-modernism and expressionist art, which will dissolve as one or both get distracted by the pizza finally arriving.

When someone says "I hate small talk" it just reveals they have no understanding how human connection actually works and think two people talking has to play out narratively like media, television shows or movies.

Lotta folks on both sides of this conversation who have never been in a long-term relationship.

It's okay because when your friend decides to give you a makeover so you can be "hot" they just need to take your glasses off after they fix your hair. It's fine really. No issues at all. Why did you have them on in the first place?