That conversation about PUAs earlier got me thinking about social skills advice more generally, and how (as is often observed) much of the advice that’s out there isn’t very good

I think it would have really helped me, when I was younger, to hear something like: “you are socially awkward now, but you will improve over time, not by learning any explicit rules, but simply by living your life.  There are no ‘tricks’ that other people know and you’re missing.  All you need to do is keep doing what you’re doing, and wait.”

(Of course there are people for whom this would not be useful – there are people who have trouble learning social skills without explicit instruction, and for whom it actually is useful to memorize explicit scripts and rules.)

When I was younger, I noticed that many other people were better-received in social settings than me – they had more to say, seemed more interesting, and said fewer things that garnered confused stares and awkward silences – and I worried that there were things they knew that I didn’t, and that I would never get any better unless I gained this secret knowledge and explicitly changed my behavior to conform to it.  What actually happened was that I gradually became much more like these people – and did it “automatically,” without learning any tricks or even making any conscious behavioral changes.

How?  Well, for one thing, I picked up the tacit rules of social situations in my environment simply by spending time in social situations.  I didn’t have to act confident or “put myself out there” or even talk at all; simply being in a room where other people were socializing would give me more data about how social situations worked, which my mind would integrate automatically and unconsciously.

For instance, when I was younger, I had a lot of trouble discerning which types of dark or off-color jokes/remarks were considered normal in my communities, and which ones were unusual enough to tell you something about a person.  I kept worrying that some person or other was an extreme cynic or a moral nihilist, only to find out that they only made the sort of bleak remarks that “everyone makes,” and not the kind that other people found disturbing.  I learned the difference over time simply by watching other people’s reactions.  This distinction is messy and difficult to explicitly state, and it also varies from community to community, so I never could have learned it from some explicit description on some social skills website.  But learn it I did.

The second factor here, and perhaps the more important one, is that I seemed more interesting as time went on simply because I had done more things, without needing any sort of “hack” for seeming interesting in social settings.

Eight years ago (to pick a period arbitrarily), I kept feeling like I had nothing to say worth saying; people tended to talk about life situations I had no real experience of, about subjects I didn’t know the first thing about.  How were other people so much more worldly?  Was there some sort of trick that would let one “get worldly quick”?  Maybe there was – after all, other people my age were more worldly than me.  But I didn’t, in the end, need any such trick.  I just kept living and doing and learning, as one does, and now I’m less quiet and more interesting in social situations because I’m drawing from a larger base.

Indeed, this happened even though I made few efforts to do the sorts of things I specifically thought other people found interesting.  Sure, I’ve done my fair share of those, and it’s helped.  But whatever “interestingness” I possess now comes largely as a result of being a nerdy recluse, as is my natural tendency.  I stayed inside reading books, and now I can talk about the books I read.  I’ve written two novels – while sitting alone in a room.  I’ve done scientific research – largely while sitting alone in a room.  Hell, a lot of the anecdotes and weird facts I use in casual conversation are things I got from that most ostensibly pathetic of activities, aimlessly surfing the internet.

Insofar as I can distill any real advice from all this, it’s “just do the things that interest you, even if they’re solitary pursuits” and “it’s OK to be quiet.”  Being a quiet wallflower wasn’t wasted time; it was how I learned the expectations that would be applied to me when I did start speaking more.  And doing my own thing a lot of the time didn’t hurt me; much more of my conversational fuel these days comes from nights I stayed home than from nights I went to parties.

A lot of standard social skills advice seems to me like it’s coming to this backwards.  It tells you to be confident, to talk more, to “put yourself out there.”  It’s like they’ve correctly noted some of the side effects of being interesting, but have forgotten that one actually has to be interesting.  Interesting people have more to say, but simply speaking more won’t make you more interesting.  If I’m a bit more Alexander Hamilton and a bit less Aaron Burr than I was eight years ago, it’s not just because I talk or swagger more, it’s because I’ve now done some of the million things I hadn’t done.

One of the few good qualities of PUA/manosphere advice is that they sometimes get this right: in addition to telling men how to act socially, they also emphasize the importance of doing cool things even when you aren’t socializing.  Unfortunately – among many other downsides – the manospherians won’t tell you to follow your passions, just to do a certain set of “manly” things whether you want to or not.  But other, more sensitive sources of advice are too wary of implying that the reader might not be sufficiently interesting just as they are, which is counterproductive – the important thing is that your interests are probably interesting, even if you aren’t (yet), and you can become more interesting not by turning yourself into someone else, but by becoming even more yourself.