On social energy
what makes an interaction energizing?
Back as a student doing cognitive science research, my advisor was a ridiculously productive accomplished academic. The moment of peak stress each week was our weekly discussion. Every time after our meetings, I noticed the world relax. My whole being sighed in relief.
Why does it take different amounts of energy to be around different people?
At some parties, time stretches on like teeth awaiting a dentist. I feel slow, stupid even. With my closest friends, hours pass like a quick stream, flowing late into the night.
First, we are constantly interpreting ourselves for others. In my mother’s apartment, I will get up out from the living room chair, roll onto the expanse of living room carpet and fall asleep. In a professor’s family home, I have to pay close attention to whether I keep my shoes on or off in the house, or whether I can place my mug directly on the wooden table.
We act in accordance with an implicit theory of mind for each person we are around. I know my mother doesn’t mind me sleeping in the middle of her living room carpet, but I also know she hates when I don’t wash my mug. I don’t know if the professor cares about footprints from outside, or if they are especially attached to the floral print on his coffee table. The more foreign the person, the more interpretation they require, and the more narrow the affordances we can take with them. Compared to my mom, the professor is an entity with very few ‘safe moves’. I can infer from normal social convention that it’s fine to come in and sit when invited, but otherwise each move risks infringing in their way of the world.
I think this also can explain how larger groups often are more draining. We have to do a lot more cognitive work to hold several models of the world in our head. Large groups of foreign people tend to be the most exhausting.
I like to think about energy expended interpreting other people as “shapes I have to hold my being in”. The further the shape from my normal patterns of movement, the more energy I have to expend. Just like being forced to walk around on point shoes would rapidly exhaust me, sitting on the couch of my boss’s suburban house means I can ask polite questions, keep my body small, etc.
All my favorite conversations feel like improvised dance. There is no careful tiptoe-ing because there is no need to hold a separation between me and friend. Together, we become a superorganism; the words that come out of our mouths are not mine or his/hers. They are an extension of us. We are able to drop the illusion that we were ever separate in the first place.
My question to myself: how can invite this in all my conversations?
There's a Newcomb Problem here.
Two-boxing is like always trying to fit in with every social group.
One-boxing is like doing more of the thing that you want to do, regardless of what they think. They might get mad at you, but in which case you won't interact with them anymore and then in the future you'll more frequently get into situations where you can be yourself.
The solution I use is mostly to just do the thing I want and let other people themselves around me. (This has some professional consequences though etc., but it also makes it such that energy is never really a concern for me. I just don't interact with people it's hard for me to interact with.)