life is a social game

there's this urge I always get to escape. run off into the mountains, sit alone, meditate, journal, figure out ur whole life, and come back a wiser, completely different person.

i think we get this from media. some main character runs off into the wilderness and comes back old and wise, knowing exactly what to do with life and how to deal with people. it's easy to romanticize. there's an element of mystery to it, and you kind of respect anyone who'd actually go do it.

but it's not reality. I'm guilty of this + I see it in a lot of people. you can't run off into the mountains and come back a different person. we'd all love to, it's a fascinating story, but it doesn't happen. it's all cope.

and the reason is simple: life is a social game.

but first, let's think of it as a video game

(I don't really play video games lmao so bear with me on the analogy) a game has boundaries. there's a world, and you can't go past its edges. you interact with the other characters in a particular way. you get a specific set of tools, a currency, a bunch of rules. you win by progressing inside those boundaries.

real life has the same thing. we call them social conventions and social cues. you can't walk out in public and start screaming. that breaks convention, people look at you, and we even have a tool for it: shame. we shame people back into conforming with the majority. and most of the time, that's good.

nobody teaches you this directly. there's no eighth grade social convention class with a list of rules to follow depending on your culture. you just pick it up growing up, from your community, from your parents. you make mistakes. someone's sad about their pet passing away and you laugh at the wrong moment, and the embarrassment you feel is the tool teaching you that you broke a norm and need to readjust. that's how we learn it.

games also give you a role. you pick a character with a skill set and some tradeoffs, and you navigate the game as that role. life's the same, except you don't actively choose most of your roles. you're born a child, with rules set by your parents. then you're a student, where the boundary is school and the success metric is your grades. maybe later you're a parent, or a doctor, with more responsibility and maturity but less time on your hands. every role comes with its own rules.

and on a fundamental level it's multiplayer. there's competition, b/c resources are finite. not everyone can be a billionaire. and resources aren't just food and water, it's the number of seats in the med school you're trying to get into. but there's also collaboration. friends are collaboration. a romantic partner is collaboration. family, coworkers, all of it. you're not navigating life alone. earth doesn't have a population of one.

so the point I'm making is: life isn't a single player game. it's a social game, and you have to learn how to play it.

extrovertedness/introvertedness is a scam

here's a problem I keep seeing: when we're young, we get handed labels. introvert. extrovert. you make a joke in fifth grade and society labels you the extrovert. you sit quiet in the back and only talk to one or two friends, and you're the introvert. then you grow up inside that label and stop progressing.

to me, the problem isn't the label itself. it's that the label is a fixed mindset. you get told who you are, and you decide that's how you live for the rest of your life. that's so limiting.

it's a skill issue bro

I mean, think about it. when you're born, are you a lawyer? you have no clue what law even is, you're just trying to get milk and see some sunlight. but at some point it becomes a goal, and you build the skill. you go through years of education, you meet people, you pass the bar. same with romantic relationships. you're not born knowing how to love someone. you date a classmate, it ends in a breakup, and you learn from the breakup and the fights and the love. these are all skills you build.

social skills are no different. introvert/extrovert is just a label that forces you to behave a certain way. "I'm an introvert, so in social settings I need to limit myself and recharge my battery." and look, I'm not saying introversion doesn't exist. everyone grows up differently, with different experiences, traumas, and wiring. some people get drained by social environments, some thrive in them. that's completely fine, I'm not criticizing that at all.

what I'm criticizing is everything else we bolt onto that identity, and then maintain with a fixed mindset for the rest of our lives. if you want to do anything in life, you need a growth mindset. social competence, charisma, humor, empathy, bonding, even seduction, these are all skills. being an introvert doesn't mean you can't have them. I've met introverts who are excellent at every one of them. they're not handed to you at birth. you build them.

how i, the rizzler, lost my social skills

i just finished a 12 month internship. and so, ive been out of college for a while now. it made me realize that school is kind of a cheat code for social interaction: infinite people, there's no real competition, people are open and just wants to hang out and make friends.

when i started my internship, this whole system of social interaction disappeared. it felt lonely. you go to work, talk with a few millennial (or even more unc) colleagues, usually about work or some meaningless small-talk, and then they all leave. I tried hanging out with a bunch of them but they all say no. they have familes and their own friends.

for me, the situation was exacerbated too b/c all my friends had left during the summer when I did the first four months in saskatoon, and then i did the remainder in toronto where I had zero friends.

during the first few weeks in toronto, in September, I faced something shocking: i had forgotten how to socialize. b/c i didn't know anyone, I was going to public events to make friends. and i faced social anxiety!!! crazy. i had self-identified as an extrovert, and now I was akward, unfunny, and overthinking every convo for the first time in my life.

and so I realized something: my social skills were in fact a skill. b/c I didn't use them for four months in saskatoon after the semester ended, I had completely lost them!

reclaiming rizzler status

but i kept up going to public events b/c i still needed friends lol. mostly tech events, but whatever else I could find.

within about a month and a half, I had my social competence back.

the perspective shifted along the way too. at the start it was networking. everyone says applications don't work, network your way in, so okay, let me network. but after a few events I was like, bro, this is so fake. I don't want to talk to people just to get something out of them. so I stopped treating them as networking events and just went to socialize. I'd talk to the people I found interesting and skip the ones I didn't. it stopped being a numbers game, and became "this person's interesting, let me spend the next hour and a half with just them and actually build something."

I went from being a little scared of approaching strangers, which is normal, to zero friction. events were perfect for this b/c there's already an expectation that you talk to strangers. you just need one thing to talk about.

I remember this one tech event. I didn't want to talk about tech so i avoided it w people. there was this jacked guy that looked interesting and so I just went up to him and said "omg, you're so built, tell me your routine." he started giggling, b/c tech guys usually only know how to talk about php or whatever. we ended up chatting for ages, and he's like, you're so good at just talking to strangers. you really do just need that one thing. find it, start the conversation, and if both people are socially competent you bounce off each other and actually enjoy it.

so now, social competence and charisma I'm really good at. humor I'm great at. but there's still a long way to go. seduction, like, what the hell even is seduction. I can flirt but I honestly have zero practice there. opening up and being vulnerable, I'm better at that now, been working on it. asking for help, I'm bad at, probably from growing up without much of a support system. that's the one I'm working on now.

the whole point is that we're all born with a different set of skills, and we build them up over time. if life's a social game, then to actually progress and succeed you have to learn how to interact with people and navigate every kind of relationship. if you're lacking at it, which is completely normal, treat it like a skill. like your career, or a hobby, or making youtube videos, whatever you enjoy. that's how you win the game.