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naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
Am I the only one who just doesn't know how to answer "What are you hobbies, or what do you do?"
I usually respond with joke answers such as "I'm homeless, so mostly heroin" or "I research about Elephants". If they honour my advanced sense of humour by laughing at that I usually give the real answer, if they don't then they don't need to know my hobbies anyways.
It's not that I don't have hobbies, I do. But I just feel like there is no way to answer that question without sounding like a tool or that answer having no information value at all.
Yes, I want to signal that I am a special snowflake. I don't merely go on walks, go to the gym, cook, program, I do those things better than everyone else. I go on walks to unknown areas without a GPS in remote places far from home I have never been to, I kill myself at the gym everyday only doing compound movements, I cook with the rarest ingredients, I program with PEP8 in mind. Only Half joking here.
Of course the main mistake I could be making is that I am assuming this question holds a lot of weight in the first impression, and that its just not small-talk. However, I do tend to be somewhat judgy with peoples responses, maybe I shouldn't extrapolate that expectation reversed onto others? And drop the "judginess", I should know by now that words coming out of someones mouth has (informational) little value being the norm.
I went on a date with an American girl once and that was the only time I was asked “what are your hobbies” straight out in a regular conversation. Really weirded me out. Is it a normal thing over there?
Not from the US. But it's a fairly common question where I live. Asked more along the lines of "what do you do?" But the subtext is hobbies not career.
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I'd disagree with suy as taking the answer you provide as insulting. Most people don't actually give a shit. Even more than that, they don't want to hear you talk - they want to talk to you about their hobbies.
That being said, discussing many of the things you do at a higher level is generally appreciated. For instance Instead of:
I would phrase it as:
Just give yourself a timeclock of 3 sentences each time to see if the person wants to iterate. Give them openings to abandon the thread and push the conversation back on themselves. Don't mention how good you are at things - constant self-depreciation or discussing how good other people are at your hobbies is a way to deflect.
I have a similarly broad set of interests, so if I actually talked about what I do in detail at parties nobody would ever get a word in. Doesn't make sense.
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As someone with too many weird hobbies, I say my hobby is cooking because food talk is a good icebreaker for conversation and it makes me seem like an interesting and responsible person.
Anyone can talk about food.
If I heard someone answering with a flippant answer like yours I would avoid them because they lack self consciousness. Being fake or superficial to strangers is not a bad thing.
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Given that you post on the Motte, you might as well throw in that you’re an amateur writer, or you study philosophy, or something. If anyone asks you to show something you’ve written just tell them you’re far too embarrassed to share.
If it really bothers you you can always learn to dance. Even though I don’t dance nearly as much anymore, I usually lead with that as a hobby and you get a pretty great reaction across the board. Plus it’s not super tribally coded.
I know it's a joke and all but still, a long way to go on that front.
The act of writing itself, I don't find as satisfying as coding where the highs are higher. I think if I was as driven to write as I am to code, I could have produced a few actually useful pieces. It doesn't come naturally to me, I can only write if it's a proxy for a monologue or a conversation.
Hmmmm. I will refrain from commenting on this specific topic for now.
Hah I forgot we discussed dance. To each their own.
Coding is probably a more useful hobby than writing at any rate. Just doesn’t have the same status associated.
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It depends on context, but I'm going to throw out some somewhat unrelated thoughts.
-- On resumes and in interviews, when one is trying to show value, specificity is key, and people think in stories. So when you're trying to show that you do things better than anyone, be specific, and have a story to it. Not "I go to the gym" which is non-specific or "I go to the gym and work really hard doing compound movements" which has no narrative; "I'm trying to hit a 440lb back squat by this spring, I'm doing this crazy program Smolov my friend the powerlifter recommended to me, man it is BRUTAL let me tell you about the other day..." Everyone in the world goes for walks, I'm not even sure what your explanation of your walking means, everyone knows what the Appalachian or Pacific Crest trails are or what summiting a 14er means and most wish they did that and will ask about it. Reading is boring, I'm working my way through all of Proust's In Search of Lost Time is better, "You know, I just read the strangest thing in Kings 12:10 and it was so weird I went and looked up scholarship on it to make sure I was reading it right, Rehoboam really was saying his dick was bigger flaccid than his dad's was hard!" is a story people might remember.
-- If you're relying on people to get your "advanced sense of humor," what you're basically going to do is confirm people's prior judgments of you based on introductions/appearances. If I have a high opinion of you going in, I'll laugh at it. If I have a low opinion of you going in, I will give up on the interaction, not worth the effort if he's just going to troll. I'll leave it up to your own judgment whether you are consistently demonstrating high personal value in small talk encounters; it all depends on context. More than anything this applies with kids, drunks, and people seeking romantic partners.
-- As @naraburns points out, the goal is to find something in common much of the time, or at least something to talk about. I admire that you're a renaissance man, but you don't want to be too all-over-the-place to pin down. Stereotypes are nice, we can just slot new people right in next to the old people we already knew. If I see a guy at my rock climbing gym, and he looks like a classic rock climber with the hair and the patched Patagonia puffer jacket and the tattoos and the beat up Solutions I know exactly how to talk to him and what to talk about, I can probably guess his politics and his dating problems. He might also be a computer programmer or know As You Like It by heart, but I don't know how to slot those things in offhand. Ditto if I meet a guy at a church with mossy oak seat covers on his F150; he might also love poetry, but I don't know how to have that conversation with him right away, I'm more likely to talk to him about hunting. Leaning into a stereotype makes you more approachable, the more you insist on your snowflake status the more inscrutable you will be, which again is great if they really want to get to know you, less great if they're still making up their mind and think you might suck. Better to start with digestible chunks.
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This is not something I think a lot about, but it's something I happen to have been thinking about recently due to an exchange I had in the old SSC sub. The thought I had at the time was:
The idiomatic "what do you do?" is like, level 2 small talk. If level 0 is "I accidentally made eye contact with a stranger in the grocery store so I'm going to slightly nod my head with a flat smile," and level 1 is "some weather we're having, eh?" then "what do you do?" is an invitation to become acquainted, in the sense of becoming acquaintances. It's the first step to finding some connection or commonality beyond momentarily shared physical space. And yes, it is natural to wish to be impressive in such moments, especially if you're hoping to develop the relationship to level 3 small talk (friends relating recent but otherwise trivial experiences) or beyond (I don't know what level "married people small talk" is, but it's up there somewhere).
But jumping straight to "I program with PEP8 in mind" may actually discourage further conversation, if they don't know (or care) what PEP8 is. This is what might be called the autist's mistake--answering a question literally instead of using the opportunity to signal interest (or lack of interest) in further conversation. Level 2 small talk proceeds as a series of proffered openings. For example, "I'm a programmer" can be met with
or
Whereas "I program with PEP8 in mind" offers a narrower choice:
or
That you recognize the possibility of "sounding like a tool" suggests you grasp the problem reasonably well, but I think you've been too quick to dismiss simpler answers as "having no information value at all." The information people are seeking first, when making small-talk, is not exactly the same as the information they have explicitly requested, but that doesn't mean there is no value in it. The first piece of information you have to establish with others is whether you are mutually interested in developing a relationship (even just as acquaintances). Delivering a low-resolution picture of yourself, initially, allows others to decide whether they want to know more. And once they want to know more, you can give them a higher-resolution picture without sounding like a tool.
Or in other words--stop trying to impress everyone. Keeping yourself out of naked dominance contests will actually enable you to win dominance contests by default down the line.
(I myself have incredibly "basic"--in the most adolescent, pejorative sense--geek hobbies. Where I get to feel like a special snowflake is after I've established myself as fulfilling several low-value stereotypes, while showing great interest in the things others do. It helps them feel superior to me, which softens the blow and helps me to appear humble (I am not, in fact, humble) when they inevitably discover that my education, employment, family situation, etc. is actually quite enviable, in stark violation of the expectations they'd established of me. This is deliberate on my part--sociologists long ago found that the people we tend to like the most are people who we started out not liking, who later succeeded in changing our opinion of them. Conversely, the people we like the least are people who we started out liking, who later lost our good opinion. People who you like and merely continue liking, or who you dislike and continue disliking, will rarely be your most- or least-liked acquaintances, respectively. There is probably a name for the phenomenon but I no longer remember what it is. Anyway in my experience this also works with people's estimations of social value.)
I can intellectually understand that "what do you do?" is "low-level" communication by all reasonable ways to quantify that. Despite the fact that when I ask it, I actually mean the exact thing that is being asked. So it's not necessary that I am making the 'autist's mistake'. I might just as well be autistic. And not in the Tik-Tok cutesy, "I'm mentally ill" way but in the:
""" If communication as "low level" as this example is difficult for me to navigate with anything more than the bare minimum of mental processing, I might really be helpless in the face of more complex communication. And not only that but the best way I know to deal with it which is a highly decoupled analysis of the situation is just about the worst way to deal with it."""
It's not that I aim to communicate well enough, I want to communicate excellently, And the snake really rears its head when I think of that.
Agreed. But I think mode of interaction, or more aptly, increasingly how my age group tends to socialize is making this harder. For example, In online dating, you have to impress at this instant, right now, or left swipe/unmatch. 'Oh, this one hangout was boring, yeah not happening ever again, we didn't talk that much in college anyways.'
I am not one to want to impress others, My OP might have painted a different picture, but I want to do it because I intuit that for the type of social interactions I wish to have (meeting women, networking events, casting a wide but not deep social net) long term considers might not apply. I want to do it because I think it's what I'd have to do to keep my head above water. I would employ a different strategy if I was looking for long term deep meaningful relationships.
Nonetheless optimizing small talk might be not worth the time compared to optimizing other things (net worth), in this domain.
I too noticed that people who started off disliking me end up liking me more intensely if they do. Why this happens all is a total mystery to me. If it's a thing that happens in general and it's just not my mind playing tricks on me.
Is it an aspect of "I was wrong about them being not so bad/good about that one thing(s), what if there are many more like that?"(And the mind fills in the blanks) Or what, I don't know.
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I’m interested in your codification of the levels of small talk. Was that spur-of-the-moment, or is it from somewhere?
Entirely inspired by @f3zinker's post, in fact, and completely original to me here.
Google suggests I'm far from the first to think along these lines, though at a glance most of the articles out there are "levels of conversation" or "levels of communication" that put "small talk" at the bottom--or they are lists about making "better" small talk. Analytically, talk is "small" when it is about "unimportant or uncontroversial matters, especially as engaged in on social occasions" (via Oxford) but the Wikipedia article suggests there are scholars who have explored the subject more deeply (including some culture war inroads on gender and culture differences in small talk).
I may be breaking the analytic concept a little by suggesting attention to "small talk" at different levels of relationship, since most discussions of "small talk" frame it as taking place between strangers or acquaintances rather than between friends or intimates--as Wikipedia suggests that "small talk" especially "helps new acquaintances to explore and categorize each other's social position." But I do think something plausibly characterized as "small talk" occurs frequently between friends and intimates, so I felt like it was probably worth thinking about the matter more inclusively.
That pairs well with my understanding of friendship levels, and how they're all qualitatively different, not just differing in amount of friendship.
Acquaintances have shared attributes,
Friends have shared experiences, and
Intimates (ohana, family and found family) have shared purpose.
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This question is usually asked primarily to find some point of convergence with you where your interests overlap, but I'd say there's also some informational value to be obtained from even vague responses. Certain hobbies tend to correlate with certain personality traits, political views, etc, and it can be used as a proxy to easily (but imperfectly) predict what a person is actually like.
Incidentally, I'm always a bit wary of the question "what are your hobbies", since whenever I give an honest answer I think people often tend to form a profile of me that is absolutely nothing like how I actually am.
Ideally my goal is to find as much convergence with someone as possible.
So I wonder what would be the optimal number of items to mention when asked that question that gives the other person a decent approximation of things you share in common without making your tribe too obvious. Even though I admit my "not curated" list very clearly paints me as Grey Tribe. (Obviously assuming the average person and marginal utility and balancing social norms and all that.)
This is one of my trepidations as well. Which is why I try to get the joke in first to soften the blow of having the wrong set of hobbies.
If they respond with something like "Okay where do the elephants fit into all of that?", I know we have a keeper.
For me, it's not so much a problem that my tribe is obvious, rather the issue is that my hobbies paint me as a member of the very opposite tribe. Many of the items I disclose would also make people think of me as an arty, subversive and sensitive person or something along those lines - which actively makes me shudder, since it's very much not how I view myself nor how I would like others to view me.
With regards to not giving them a sense of your tribe, though, I'd say that what's more important than the amount of items you mention is keeping people on their toes by consciously including a mix of hobbies that pull their perception of you in both directions (if you're able). This allows you to disclose a lot of hobbies and interests while not giving them information you don't want them to know.
What set of hobbies are you disclosing?
And why would this happens despite you being conscious of this happening and being able to correct for that?
I meant this would happen if I was 100% honest and transparent about what my hobbies actually are. My most visible and distinctive hobby that I do a lot, for example, is making electronic music (which is often fairly experimental). It's stuff like this that would almost certainly have me pigeonholed, with all the baggage that comes with it (probably Blue Tribe, probably goes to raves, might take drugs, higher than average chance of embracing "alternative lifestyles", etc). Having spent time in communities filled with these people, I'd say these are for the most part reasonable mental leaps that I would make myself because the stereotype has merit on the population level, but they sometimes fall apart on the individual level like in my case. And there's other stuff that strengthens the idea of me as an "artsy person", like my interest in writing fiction.
There's other stuff of course that I can use to answer this question if actually asked this in a real life setting (such as board games, hiking, research into certain STEM topics I find interesting). Though apart from the last one I'd say these are mostly quite bog-standard activities, it's like saying you like reading in response to the question of hobbies.
EDIT: clarity
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