Generation of parents who were ashamed of their kids having to swing a hammer for a living. See my comment below.
When I started working in the trades every single person said it would be hard on my body. Some days it’s hard on my body. But I honestly would break my knee again if it meant I could be assured that I’d never have the mental anguish of pretending like I cared about a computer screen for eight hours (…12 hours?). It ruined my friendships, hollowed out my family, and led me to addiction.
I don’t think that stuff happens with everybody but we all make trade-offs
I just spent the last week with the large number of digital nomads. The story that they sell me is that they’ve set up their life so that they can work from anywhere. Mostly this is possible because their jobs involve the manipulation of bits and the aligning of minds. Starlink, a camper van, and a webcam is the minimal setup. I don’t know if it’s just my small town mind, pure stubbornness, or something else entirely, but it gives me the fucking heebie-jeebies. Modern day carnies coming through town to make a quick buck an leave nothing behind.
Over the last number of years I’ve transitioned from coding database backends to physical labor. Part of this has to do with an addiction problem involving Adderall and other uppers and my choice to live clean, live in the world, and live in community with other people. But it also just feels right. I like to think that I can also work wherever, because I know how to pave a driveway. I know how to lay a foundation. I know how to frame a house. I’m learning about how to build septic. One day I’d like to build a house as a gift to my family. Instead of removing my physical self from my job so I can do it anywhere, I’ve taught myself skills that will be useful to my neighbors wherever I go.
My partner has chosen to work a very important but very “deep“ job in the local government bureaucracy. The only way his job works at all is that so many people know his face. He’s been a pillar of his community for 10 years and has proven over and over again to be trustworthy and likable around town. In pretty much every way he espouses the exact opposite philosophy of the digital nomad. His roots are so deep then if we moved it might kill him entirely (hyperbole).
I don’t especially know where I’m going with this, other than to say that there are ways forward that are not total alienation. There are ways to live where you are not competing with the machine. There is still a physical meatspace world full of people with hopes and dreams that cannot be captured digitally and cannot be replaced robotically. A world built on trust and care and mutual respect for one another. If you have a job in which you feel you are just “producing text”, I feel for you deeply. They’re coming for us all eventually, and thy started with the writers/programmers. What a strange time to be alive
I.e. the things that make people become friends and feel safe around each other.
As a fellow autistic person we should not be avoiding small talk, we should be learning how to better connect with those around us since we need more time and work to do so.
It’s easy to use a diagnosis as an excuse not to connect. But it’s a lame excuse. It is much more interesting to understand what tools we need to gain to connect with the world. Sometimes I need to be an anthropologist. Sometimes I need to be a crime scene investigator. Usually I just need to listen better.
When I was in a wheelchair I had to use ramps instead of the stairs. But that didn’t stop me from going to the movies
i am not autistic, but i hate smalltalk too. i can't bear it. it takes all the fun out of talking to people and i feel like it's a waste of time. not sure where i am going with this argument other than maybe saying that it's ok not to like smalltalk.
maybe learning to be better at it would help, because the biggest pain and discomfort for me is that i don't know what to say and that anything i can think of feels meaningless.
i "solved" the problem by moving to a country with a different native language and culture. this raises the barrier to communicate and it seems to have an effect of curbing smalltalk.
while in a wheelchair, how comfortable were you asking for help? that would be the biggest challenge for me.
As someone who used to feel like they were bad at small talk, maybe this resonates with you.
I wasn’t bad at small talk. I was bad at sharing my thoughts and feelings because it didn’t feel safe. As a result the only things that felt like safe small talk topics were the weather and sports.
Overtime I’ve become better at sharing my feelings, even if they are “embarrassing“. I ended up talking for three hours on a plane ride last weekend with an absolute stranger. We talked about the differences in our family dynamics, what cities we find it easier and harder to make friends in, the current state of our relationships and what we wanted out of them. All of that was “small talk” because we were just passing the time with someone we will never meet again. But the subjects were not small.
A side effect of feeling comfortable talking about things that matter to you is that it gives you a lot more motivation to be curious and interested in things that matter to other people as well. Even better, if you share with people more deeply about how you are feeling, they will be able to help you in ways that you didn’t even realize were possible
my experience was different. yes, i get that sharing my thoughts sometimes doesn't feel safe, and when i was younger i did have that experience too. but i had and have no interest in popular sports, so that topic is poison for me. i have absolutely nothing to contribute. if someone wants to talk about sports i am thinking, why are they wasting their life? any other topic would be better than that. and talking about weather? well, got a window? open it!
but those topics you shared on the plane, well that's not small talk to me. i totally would have enjoyed being part of that conversation. as i get older, i can speak from experience. i can talk about my feelings that i have and had, because now i understand them. and, as a bonus effect, as you get older people treat you with more respect, which makes talking about any topic easier.
so i am bad at talking about banal, to me meaningless topics, and while it is getting easier, i don't actually have any interest in engaging in those topics because they not only feel like a waste of time, they are a waste of my time that i want to spend more meaningfully, like reading a book.
This is what I suggest too, what a good way of putting it!
Some people have very funny ways at looking at the most mundane context in my mind. It would be a shame if I didnt spend time sharing my funny head in ways that can't be captured in a record!
If any one single interaction makes you have such a response, that might be a reason to see someone. I wish for everyone to be able to move through the social world with grace and ease.
Put less kindly: there’s nothing so special about you that being yourself around a new person should cause such a panic. Even if they take an instant dislike to you, that should be something you can take in stride
Perhaps,' said Darcy, 'I should have judged better, had I sought an introduction, but I am ill qualified to recommend myself to strangers.'
'Shall we ask your cousin the reason of this?' said Elizabeth, still addressing Colonel Fitzwilliam. 'Shall we ask him why a man of sense and education, and who has lived in the world, is ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers?'
'I can answer your question,' said Fitzwilliam, 'without applying to him. It is because he will not give himself the trouble.'
'I certainly have not the talent which some people possess,' said Darcy, 'of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done.'
'My fingers,' said Elizabeth, 'do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault -- because I would not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman's of superior execution.'
As a self identified autistic person, I regularly think of spooky situations as “socialization”. I went to a wedding where I only knew five people. Goddamn did I have some bad conversation. But I also made one new friend, and that’s cool! When I fuck up it’s just a chance for me to learn why I fucked up and how to be better in the future. And not everyone has to like me. I only really enjoy about 10% of others, why should I expect a greater return?
It seems like most people in this thread are more like Mr. Darcy, just assuming that they are destined to be bad at something that they’ve never practiced
Your response assumes a lot about the homogeneity of subjective human experience that the data don’t seem to support.
There is a diversity of physical attractiveness, innate and learned social grace, social environment, and phenotypic variability in psychosocial capacity that makes your comment sound extremely out of touch to some people.
I can do what you describe because I am fortunate that many of my social interactions are positive. For people I work with this is not the case and they are extremely socially isolated, and the tragedy is that every mistake they make compounds this. They are more sensitive interpersonally than I am and more socially aware in the moment, while less equipped to deal with social conventions and unattractive, becoming dramatically moreso in social situations due to their intrinsic reactions.
> and the tragedy is that every mistake they make compounds this
This is correct and I'm convinced there comes a point where there's no way out. The vast majority of social experiences in my life have been negative and it gets worse every time I have another, making it less likely the next will be positive.
Rather than continue to get hurt I have nearly 100% socially isolated myself, save for the internet. I work remote in a rural area and I only leave the house for essentials. There's no place for me socially and I've accepted that.
> This is correct and I'm convinced there comes a point where there's no way out.
My friend, things can always improve. Having mental health problems is hard, because you're ultimately using your own 'impaired' brain to analyze your own situation. Talking to a therapist is effective in breaking this, because it forces you to organize your thoughts into something coherent to explain it to your therapist. Only at this point will flaws in this reasoning become apparent.
If you cannot talk to a therapist (or otherwise a neutral person who doesn't judge you for what you say), you can try writing it down. Try to write down why you feel what you feel, what you feel when you talk to another person, what you think that others think and feel about you, how those feelings developed, how other people have been influential in your feelings, everything. Read it as if someone else wrote it down. What would you do in their situation? Do you agree with what you wrote down. If you come across holes in what you've written, try to revise that part, rewrite it to incoorporate for the criticisms.
> making it less likely the next will be positive.
Why do you think that's the case? If you throw a dice and it comes up on 1 three times in a row, that doesn't make it more likely that the next time it will be a 1 again. There's so many different people, it's as good as random what kind of interaction you will have.
Some people are just happiest being alone. I usually feel I am in this camp. I can have reasonably good social interactions but it's often awkward and even when it's not it is a lot of work and it doesn't seem commensurate with the reward, which is very little.
I like staying at home, reading, tinkering, doing my hobbies. I do not crave the company of others, and walking into a room and having to be "on" even with people I know and am friendly with is so draining.
The point is that a fully grown person (i.e. adult) should be able to regulate their emotions to the point of being able to have a conversation with 3 strangers.
You might not like it, it might stress you out a bunch, you can cry afterwards, or have a stiff drink after, but you should be able to set those emotions aside for 30 minutes, especially for something important like a job interview.
If someone cannot do that, they should definitely go into therapy for that. No matter if it was 'done to them', it's still a problem that person carries around, and the only way around that is fixing it.
Some of the people I work with have gone into therapy. The more intelligent and in touch with their emotions they already were, the less therapy did for them. For a lot of dudes it is a revelation. For a lot of others it is not, just a way to continue to surface intractable problems in conversation.
Therapy doesn’t always help, many people need more compassion from those around them. And society would be better equipped to provide that if instead to referring their contacts to specialists they might not be able to afford, more well-off people developed some minor therapeutic ability and concern for their fellow humans.
lol, go be yourself on your own time. On my time, you better be normal and happy about it.
None of the many many reasons someone may act this way mean they are broken, and therapy is not about 'fixing' someone to be the member of society you deem appropriate.
Therapy is (or at least can be!) about trying to achieve goals that you have. I’m the GP commenter above. I went to therapy twice a week for two years to get over social anxiety and my entire life has completely opened up in a new way that would never have been possible without that work.
If relating to people is not a goal of yours then I would agree that you should not go to therapy for it. On the other hand, it is difficult for me to believe that anyone with anxiety is truly comfortable, considering that discomfort is the main feature of anxiety.
It is far more helpful to others for you to share the depths of your experience than to go around telling people they need to go to therapy because it works for you.
I see the enthusiasm and that you want better things for others, but the way you are approaching this communication is not doing it justice.
Love the quote marks. Next time try a Marx quote. I mean the brothers.
To fellow humans reading: the point is that the ones who did this to you are extremely unlikely to repent. Or even to comprehend that what they did to you is wrong.
Even if you were to explicitly hurt yourself - or place yourself in a position where you get hurt very badly - with the intent to communicate "do you still not see what you did to me?"... it's just no sweat off their, you know? "Yeah that person was all wrong, had it coming anyway".
The social contract protects them better than it protects you, so an "eye for an eye" solution is also unlikely to work - or even be possible: we don't hit, do we?
Therapy is... some person's job. That they trained for, you know? To put some food on the table, you know?
That means you can "go to therapy" in good faith (assuming you can access it in the first place) and not heal at all. The therapist might be a talented and intrinsically motivated person - or might just go "mmhmm" as you try to get through to them that they are doing exactly nothing to help you heal from some very particular, and perhaps not even unclearly defined at all, mental wound (that PP has had the gall to put in 'scare quotes'.)
Point is, the therapist will get paid either way. There is no shortage of people being told to get therapy by their fellows (who are too fucked up themselves to exhibit basic human fellowship). The systemic incentive to heal people's minds is next to nonexistent in comparison with the systemic incentive to drive hurt people mad, and then destroy them for being mad.
My suggestion: read some fucking books, and I don't mean books about fucking, I mean fucking books. Then, you might begin to get a clue how to get in touch with your spite, and how to become the undoing of all that ever wronged you without turning into that thing in the process.
TL;DR: You can start with those people who taught you that "feeling sorry for yourself" is a thing, and that it's what you need to do to make those who wronged you to regret their actions. You take those people and unlearn everything that they ever taught you. If there was anything true at all in what they wanted you to understand, you'll relearn it on your own, unencumbered by association with their other insidious lies. Then you can go tell two priestly kings that the balamatom sez hi ;-)
Sadly the human need for being heard and understood is innate, and it has been my experience that books can't substitute for that need. On the other hand, there are swathes of incompetent therapists that can only aggravate one's mental state.
The only solution I see is to find the right therapist. Some people might not when their future depends on them finding one, and they give up too early. I can't see how that would be fixed except maybe having a mediator that pairs you up with therapists they recommend and asks if you feel an improvement each week. You'd be surprised, but I had nobody to do this for me. So I ended up losing years worth of time sticking with incompetent therapists because "going to therapy" like everybody told me to seemed more important than "fixing my life."
As cruel as it sounds, I was in no position to think critically about my own treatment because my mental state only allowed me to see checking off the box of self-care to get people off my back as the ultimate goal. It's the nature of the problem of mental healthcare. If I had been given a simple questionnaire to rate my treatment providers on a scale of 1-10 in various dimensions, I would have been put in front of someone else within a month or two.
You know who's infinitely patient, has read every psychology text book and is available immediately at 2am and not in a week that you have to schedule an appointment for? ChatGPT. (or Claude or any of them.)
> There is a diversity of physical attractiveness, innate and learned social grace, social environment, and phenotypic variability in psychosocial capacity
I say this with respect: the kind of attitude you're describing does more to isolate people than anything mentioned in the original post.
Bitterness or even just muted disappointment will drive people away more than any of the factors you mentioned, by a factor of 10. Have any of you gone on a date with someone who looked great on paper, but seemed unhappy to be there or resentful towards you? That's the ultimate connection killer.
You can have all sorts of setbacks, but if you're chill and have a good attitude people will want you around (barring a few assholes, but it's important not to worry about them). OTOH even if you're very good looking, no one will want to approach you if your vibes are bad or inward facing.
Respect for developmental diversity does more to isolate people?
Because it seems like you and several other people are projecting a lot of “trauma
is my identity” ideas on me that aren’t in what I wrote.
What I wrote is that telling people “get good, I did” is really unhelpful. Put more work and thought into how you try to connect with people whose experience is very different from yours.
Why do you assume my experience is so different? There are tons of people on forums like these who've dealt with extreme shyness and severe problems, yet managed to persevere. Your struggles might not be nearly as unique as you think.
I am assuming this because you are projecting all over me and not distinguishing between me and the people I was making the point about. I was pretty clear in my comment that I do not struggle with shyness. Some people experience debilitating levels of shyness, and some people have done the work necessary to understand the perspective of those people, but in my experience they do not communicate like you do.
The kind of reaction described by the GP is probably trained by a lifetime of bad experiences. One can end up going into every interaction thinking about which parts of oneself to dial down in order to have some semblance of a normal conversation, and inevitably that over-thinking just makes it worse. Ask leading questions, smile, listen careful, don't interrupt - you know, all that sort of thing that comes more naturally to some than to others.
> going into every interaction thinking about which parts of oneself to dial down
what if (a) I hate leading questions, (b) by default only smile when bad/tragic things happen (eg "train crash leaves 100 dead and maimed"), (c) I'm quite bad at listening bc if you don't say interesting things often/densely enough my mind adhd-s away, and (d) interrupting is second-nature to me?
...advice may be good, but for some of us it's like 99% of ourselves that we need to dial down in order to carry on a successful interaction - it works, but takes a hell lot of energy
You seem to have a lot of limiting thoughts about yourself. Other people do those kinds of things but just don’t mind and don’t think that they are a bother to others.
You’re allowed to be weird. Weird people make the best conversation because you don’t know where they’re gonna go
Yes, you and I are making the same point :-) There's lots of useful advice out there about how to be a better conversationalist but it's exhausting for those of us who have to constantly think about it, and disheartening when we get it wrong despite all the effort.
Well that would be silly. I would hope the diabetic would go to a nutritionist for their physical and medical problem. But a social problem is something that should probably be fixed with a social solution
There’s a lot of energy in this thread mixing up introversion and autism for an inability to relate to others. That’s not true you just have a different perspective and will relate in a different way. Autism might be a proximal cause for anxiety but anxiety is not a feature of autism and it can be overcome.
No one can stop the replay, so there's no use in seeing anyone about it. We eventually just learn to cope, and try not to lie in bed at night replaying all the day's awkward social situations.
Going to therapy can help you create a more positive and staple self image.The more you like yourself the more you would want to share that with other people and the easier it becomes. To put a finer point on it, it kind of seems like the person I was responding to has an extreme anxiety problem. I feel bad because I’ve gone through that and I feel like I wasted a large portion of my life because I was so scared that I couldn’t live it. Nobody has to live in fear all the time
Your comments feel like projection, which lead you to make an extreme (and, in my opinion, unfounded) assumption about GP. GP says nothing about self-confidence nor 'liking' onself. One can have a social interaction like GP comically describes—and still be mostly socially 'at ease and graceful', possess a positive and stable self-image, be otherwise antisocial, and not need therapy.
What does "being yourself" even mean? Obviously not "acting the exact same way you act when alone", since this would be impossible/weird/rude/illegal but also not "acting intuitively without overthinking", since the socially anxious person's intuition is to run away.
That phrase is simply inaccurate. Your "self" needs to care less about opinions of others, and it should not be scared of making mistakes. "Be yourself" is typically parsed as "do not try to be someone other, do not try to be like movie actor".
> not "acting intuitively without overthinking", since the socially anxious person's intuition is to run away.
Yes, it is exactly that, but instead of focusing on "acting intuitively", focus on that "without overthinking". Overthinking is the problem to be solved. "thinking just enough" is the optimal target.
You know the meme that goes: "Be yourself. No, not like that."
It is possible for someone to have a goal of changing themselves into a person who can fit in socially, and be effortlessly comfortable while doing so. After building the underlying skills, they know how to navigate social situations well enough to intuit how much honesty and revealing is appropriate for a given situation, and can roll back "fake it until you make it". They can accept surmountable social penalties for the comfort of less self-filtering and chance to have more meaningful connections.
"Be yourself" means to change yourself, and then stick the landing.
"being yourself" means choosing to believe that the you that is true is competent and capable of growth while the awkwardness is a temporary barrier between that is not reflective of your true nature.
I don’t mean like being “authentic” or whatever that means. In this conversation “being yourself” means literally you existing in that moment in your body.
I can’t tell you specifically what being “yourself“ means. But I can absolutely tell you that if you panic when you meet a stranger that you are not centered in your own experience. Your mind is elsewhere. You don’t know this new person, so all of the panic in the situation is panic that you brought with you from the past and is not relevant to the current scenario
For whatever reason your body believes that the stakes are very high. They might be, but even if they were, wouldn’t it be more adaptive to face the situation with the level head? Most people can do this 100% of the time and I bet that you could get there too
I don’t think most people can do this 100% of the time. I actually think if you can do this 100% of the time you’re probably a zen master.
I think most people over the age of 25 can do this maybe 80% of the time. And most of them can keep it under control enough that they only look a little dysfunctional, the other 20% of the time. (although I definitely know a few extroverts who don’t look dysfunctional, they look like the life of the party – but that’s them being dysfunctional and stressing out and trying to make everyone love them. That’s their 20%.)
You can blame million years of evolution for your bad life or you can change it right now living in the present moment. It’s fine if you don’t do it right now because later at a future present moment you can still make the choice to be happy. It might take some work but it will never be because of something that happened in the past. It will be something that you do right now. There are no exceptions or escape hatches
These cliches are just annoying to read at this point, everyone has heard this stuff a million times and yet...millions still suffer. If I'm being honest it just comes across as yet another form of bullying when socially well adjusted people say stuff like this to people worse off than them.
I can agree with you while still agreeing with parent poster that it's basically "git gud"-tier bullying.
Very very few orators can successfully pull off "just fix your problems bro" as anything beyond a generic kick in the pants for the people presently predispositioned to be motivated by one.
I regularly bully my close friends into being better people. It just so happens that I fell down the staircase of life much earlier than a lot of people do. I had to do most of my “midlife crisis” thinking in my early 20s because most of my family died and I had to come out as gay without any support.
Now that I’m in my 30s I have the joy of helping my friends along on this journey called life. Sometimes people just need a gentle nudge up the staircase. Sometimes they need to be carried against their will
That approach doesn't work for everyone. Everything you say could be correct, but if the person thinks their feelings are not being listened to, there is a chance they still won't take your advice.
One of my therapists said it was normal in her circle for people not to get onto someone's case if they're mentally unwell and have chores piling up, because it makes sense they don't have as much effort to give to all aspects of life. At the time I didn't understand this statement, because up until then my only contacts were people who, although they didn't go as far as "bullying" me into compliance, had told me in effect that how I felt about my life was irrelevant to whether or not I was fulfilling every single one of my adult responsibilities. What ultimately worked for me wasn't those contacts who said there were no excuses, but my therapist who decided not to frame my decisions in terms of "excuses".
For me this kind of thing hurts because:
1. There's not any room for compassion or slack. I'm not talking about people who take advantage of others' goodwill. Even if you try to help with this "no excuses" mentality, the other person could start to worry if the next inadvertent slip-up or setback counts as an "excuse" they'll be looked down upon for. This kind of thought will linger and reduce the effectiveness of the intervention.
2. Your feelings aren't listened to, or if they are it's only at a level superficial enough to obtain compliance. This is bad enough on its own. What might not be obvious is if the person has had a life marked by repeated instances of their feelings being shut down or not listened to, especially in childhood, this approach only backfires that much harder. These are emotional patterns that have been established in critical periods/over a long period of time that are being relieved at a much higher intensity than the average population. And most importantly, you can't know for sure if something like this applies until you get to know the person better, which is why a lot of one-off prescriptive advice towards strangers is ineffective.
3. The advice-giver is often successful/came out of hardship themselves, so by being looked down upon as irresponsible it gives the impression that you're being excluded from the in-group of mentally well/recovered people. Avoiding exclusion from a group is one of the biggest sources of strife today, as modern politics and social media indicate. And being mentally stable is often one of the most important groups to be included in for people who know they're depressed, so it hurts even more.
That’s all excuses. I’m not saying it’s right to bully someone who’s in the depths of depression. But the depression isn’t gonna fix itself and it certainly won’t fix itself because of something that happened in the past
Know thyself. The first step in being your better self. This pithy piece of advice has been repeatedly given throughout history no doubt predating its being chiseled onto the Temple of Apollo around 2500 years ago. Humanity probably has no better advice. Although "Never trust a fart" is a close second.
one interaction? some of us spent half our lives having 99% of interactions be like that - we've grown out it one way or another, but for many ppl "doing people" is HAAAAAARD ...just as for some differential equations are. we're just build veeeery differently. for many "the social world" is a hostile jungle, and we ca face it all right, but with a strong suit of mechanized armour and fully loaded weapons strapped to it.
I get that. I spent my entire childhood and the majority of my 20s as a closeted gay man. Every interaction was high stakes because if one person figured out you’re gay, then the cat is out of the bag.
I had to do a hell of a lot of accepting myself before I could actually hang with people in the moment. Realistically it took six years to be “normal “in my own eyes
I mean, obviously all the behaviors in the article are undesirable. The joke is in proposing other ones. Surely people are being amusingly self deprecating not precisely honest.
If that’s how you feel then you might have an unreasonable standard. People you might consider to be living in abject poverty might not be so downtrodden as you suspect. Even though there are extreme downsides and externalities to being relatively poor, being lonely is not one of them.
> People you might consider to be living in abject poverty might not be so downtrodden as you suspect
This is true, until they have a medical emergency that breaks them because they can't afford it, or the furnace in their house breaks, or they are reno-evicted by their landlord, or their car breaks down or whatever
You're broadly right that money doesn't exactly buy happiness, but it does prevent or mitigate a lot of unhappiness
I would argue that individualism is the root, more than the work ethic. I’m someone with a 50th percentile work ethic but a 99th percentile focus on community. I only have so much energy, but I make sure I reserve a good portion of it (say, at least 30%) on acts that have no “direct” benefit to me at all. Hosting a party and not worrying if the invitee’s contributions are equitable. Paying a nephews rent for a month so he can travel. Mowing the yard for a neighbor in need. Buying presents for people I see 2x a year. Calling up a distant friend just to remind them how much I like them.
Friendship and community are harder work than your job, because no one makes you do it. It pays off in peculiar ways many years later, if ever at all. It’s senseless effort, but only figuratively. The returns I get are incalculable, but only literally.
Who are we to say the mechanisms of biology are “overfit”? Maybe it would be nice if our personal machinery was more robust, but that robustness comes at an evolutionary cost. The greater force that is life on earth as a system for regulating planetary energy dissipation does not care about the needs of the individual. It does not care about the fashions of the millennia. Its sights are set much farther and its history much deeper than that
I’ve heard exactly the same advice re: focus groups. A focus group can give excellent feedback but terrible advice. Probably applies to comment sections in the modern day too.
So if they didn’t like your movie the movie probably is bad. But don’t listen to them about what they would change about the movie. They don’t know anything about the creative process.
A phrase I heard from a tv writer on a podcast was "note behind the note".
The gist of the conversation was about TV execs giving all sorts of bonkers notes all the time that are usually terrible. This writer tried to think about what might have triggered the exec to make a note. Maybe the characters are not engrossing enough, or the plot is too complex, or the dialogue isn't snappy enough. If the exec had been engrossed in the story they wouldn't have made a note. This writer rarely implemented any note from an exec, but did make all sorts of changes in and around noted sections.
The strength of a focus group is (or should be, anyway) that it's representative. It makes sense that their overall reception of a work is a more accurate estimate of its eventual popularity than the maker's.
However, the maker has tried many things, and among them will be things which are obviously bad (to anyone) if you actually try it.
Story time: in 2008, I went to the big board game fair in Essen and got to try the then-new game Dominion. I think most people who did, knew that this game was going to be hugely popular and influential, which it was. Donald X. Vaccarino is a really, really good game designer. And sure enough, it spawned the genre of deck building games, games where you build a deck as you play (as opposed to collectible card games, which are an important ancestor). But the first few attempts to adopt improve on the formula were pretty lousy.
What's interesting is that Donald X. posted dev diaries, writing at length about what he had tried and rejected. And although I'm pretty sure he did not follow the Dominion-likes closely (the dev diaries may even have been written before many of them), the things he'd tried and rejected were exactly what the Dominion-likes tried to add as their twist. Multiple currencies, like Thunderstone had, he'd tried rejected because it was too high variance. "Pick one of the cards on offer" like Ascension had, he'd also tried first, and found that the game was deeper and more fun if everyone had access to buy the same cards. (The "Pick one of three" mechanic would turn out to work much better in solo/computer games, however, as Slay the Spire's success is proof of!)
Generation of parents who were ashamed of their kids having to swing a hammer for a living. See my comment below.
When I started working in the trades every single person said it would be hard on my body. Some days it’s hard on my body. But I honestly would break my knee again if it meant I could be assured that I’d never have the mental anguish of pretending like I cared about a computer screen for eight hours (…12 hours?). It ruined my friendships, hollowed out my family, and led me to addiction.
I don’t think that stuff happens with everybody but we all make trade-offs
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