Maybe Social Anxiety Is Just You Failing At Mind Control

More seriously though, I imagine two groups of people. The first ("anxious normies") would be helped a lot by this advice, because removing anxiety would unlock their social grace. The second ("non-normies") don't have much social grace to unlock, so this advice would rather hurt them by making their lack of grace more exposed. Or at least it should be supplemented by some other advice how to train grace.

[-]cubefox1mo2-2

Unfortunately I think social grace can only be trained to a small degree, for reasons similar to ASD not being curable. Some people just have a natural social grace, others are much more socially awkward, and removing their social inhibitions too much may make them "cringe" or even "creepy".

[-]Kaj_Sotala1mo30

For what it's worth, I definitely had a period where my social anxiety had gone down and then I did some dumb stuff that people experienced as cringe and creepy for a while (causing my anxiety to shoot up again for a bit after some of them reacted extremely negatively). But then after a while, it got better as I learned from the feedback.

Children usually don't have very much social grace either but then they get better at it over time, which suggests that it's a trainable skill like any other.

[-]cubefox1mo2-1

I think it's trainable mainly in the indirect sense: If someone has a lot of social grace, they can pull off things (e.g. a risque joke in front of a woman) that would be perceived as cringe or creepy in people with significantly less social grace. These latter people can become less cringe/creepy by learning not to attempt things that are beyond their social grace capabilities. (Which reduces their extraversion, in contrast to treating anxiety, which boosts extraversion.)

I think already children show significant differences in social grace. I remember a kid in elementary school who got bullied a lot because of his often obnoxious behavior. He had both very low social grace and very low social anxiety. I assume with time he learned to become less outgoing, because that wasn't working in his favor. Outgoing behavior can be scaled down at will, but social grace can't be easily scaled up. Even people who are good at social grace don't explicitly know how to do it. It's a form of nonverbal body/intonation language that seems to be largely innate and unconscious, perhaps controlled by an (phylogenetically) older part of the brain, e.g. the cerebellum rather than the cortex.

Of course that's all anecdotal and speculation, but I would hypothesize that statistically the level of social grace of a person tends to stay largely the same over the course of their life. The main reason is that I think that lack of social grace is strongly related to ASD, which is relatively immutable. It seems people can't change their natural "EQ" (which includes social grace) much beyond learning explicit rules about how to behave according to social norms, similar to how people can't change their natural IQ much beyond acquiring more knowledge.

[-]Kaj_Sotala1mo80

@Chipmonk was previously discussing how social insecurity is exactly this - trying to control other people in ways they can't be controlled (e.g. trying to control what they think of you), and how this means that there's a misunderstanding of the boundaries between people. I think "The natural boundaries between people" is the most up-to-date write-up about it.

[-]Viliam1mo70

When I started commenting on Hacker News, I was worried about karma, so I wrote carefully. At some moment I achieved 1000 karma, and also decided that HN consumes too much of my time... that it would actually be better for me in long term to lose all that karma and the account. So I started writing whatever came to my mind. Now my karma is above 2500 (but I had to check as I was writing this comment to find it out).

But this advice is trickier than it seems, because I also see some people write whatever comes to their mind, and get downvoted to oblivion, both on HN and on LW. So maybe the actual rule is more complicated, and it requires a certain degree of competence first, and then stop worrying...

On further introspection, I am actually trying to hold myself to some standards, it's just that those standards are not closely related to other people's immediate feedback. I won't write stupid shit, because that would make me feel ashamed of myself. Other than that, if someone downvotes me (or even blocks me), whatever.

[-]25Hour1mo30

Yeah, I feel very seen in this moment. I spent a long time polishing this blog post and while i think some of that was well-spent, some of it was just neurotically changing words around while being concerned about how it would be received.

I guess it feels harder in writing than in speech because in writing you in principle could spent forever polishing a piece before publication.

[-]Viliam1mo20

in writing you in principle could spent forever polishing a piece before publication.

Exactly the reason why I post articles so rarely, despite spending a lot of time on internet, even a lot of time writing stuff on internet. A certain short amount of text can be written and sent successfully before the anxiety takes over.

[-]Random Developer1mo41

This feels like "directional advice", which is excellent for some people, and terrible for others. Which category they fall into depends on their starting point. If you're socially anxious but basically well-meaning, this advice will help. If you're already self-centered, this advice will make you incredibly obnoxious.

When I was much younger, it took me a long time to figure out dating. But the one thing that clicked for me was realizing that trying to make people like me was pointless. They had probably made their minds up almost immediately, and I had no control over that. But I also realized that there were people who were interested in me. My job was to do two things:

Recognize signals of interest, and
Respond encouragingly, and put the ball back in their court. Ideally, I wanted to communicate two things: "Your attention is welcome", and "The next move is totally in your hands."

This isn't quite the classic male gender role in dating. Zvi had an essay the other day about how it was the woman's job to set up the "room", and the man's job to "read the room" and actually move the process forward. But meh, that's not my thing. I wasn't going to take the active role at every single step. I wanted a dance where both people participated. I could learn to read subtle and indirect signals, and I could return them in a very slightly less subtle but still deniable way, and make it a game of back and forth. And yes, this acted as a filter, and it meant I only ever dated women who took steps to get what they wanted. But that's my type.

But a key part of all this was realizing that I neither had nor wanted any control over how the other "player" in the game would react. If someone wasn't interested (and the median person wasn't!), no worries. My job was to meet enough people, and learn to read signals well enough, to find someone who was interested in a "game of mutual attraction." And the nice thing is that when the other person was trying to make things happen, they'd smooth over any minor mistakes on my end. I just needed to avoid panicking and accidentally freezing them out, lol. It turns out that trying to send the message, "I don't want to be too familiar and make it weird" often sends the message "Ugh, you're creeping me out, please back off."

For better or worse, however, a huge portion of the "game of mutual interest" seems to happen in body language and facial expression. And bolder moves often work best when they offer the other person a choice: "Here's an easy way to step forward," and "Here's a graceful way to step back that I'm deliberately leaving open for you." Humor can help!

And of course, this can apply outside of dating. Being confident enough to let a single interaction fall through, and doing it gracefully, helps in the business world, and in many other areas of life. You can't make everyone like you, and many people will never be interested in what you're offering. But it's a big world.

[-]CstineSublime1mo33

I'm a little confused, does embracing this new found abandonment of the compulsion to manage your appearance to others require or manifest, just like in the First Day Exercise, speaking your mind truthfully rather than manufacturing statements based on your assumption of what people want to hear?

I'm not sure how applicable that is, because I am certain that if I spoke what was on my mind more frequently, that the chief reaction would be bewildered silence, or nonsequiter replies borne out of fundamental misunderstanding of what I meant^[1]

If I may write without filter or fear of how other Lesswronger's may perceive me: At any given time I some pretty good candidates for what's on my mine is me an obscure Simpsons gag, or a scene from a Parajanov/Varda/Ilyenko/Fassbinder film. So to speak frankly about what's on my mind IRL is quite simply operationally impossible because not everyone has encyclopedia Simpsons or Film knowledge and may have no reference or handle for what particular gag or film scene I'm thinking about.

So I'm more inclined to default to silence since I have no interest in having a monologue. That silence, however, can be interpreted as rudeness, received as intimidating, or even a sign of arrogance: but if I understand you correctly the courage to remain silent, and not feel the need to speak for fear of any of the above is the lesson you've learned?

Or is the lesson just about accepting and learning not to micromanage impressions and feel responsible for the comfort and feelings of your conversation partners?

^{^}
TVTropes calls it "One Dialogue, Two Conversations" imagine something like this:
"The pastry is a bit dry"
"I agree, strange hot weather we've been having"

Except now scale up the verbiage from a misunderstanding of 'dry' to, oh I don't know, a half-remembered reference to Roland Barthes said about Greta Garbo

[-]25Hour1mo10

Ultimately the reason so much of this post is autobiographical is that while I suspect the mechanism of social anxiety that I posit is generally correct, the method by which I am resolving it is probably somewhat specific to me.

I have different challenges than other people, and so different kinds of explicit goals might work for me than you, in terms of threading the needle between "resolves anxiety by giving me explicit internal standards by which I can judge my behavior" versus "enables me to function happily as a social being without an unacceptable probability of unpleasant blowback."

I think the important thing is to have standards of behavior for yourself that are fundamentally objective (ish) and totally under your control. I don't necessarily know what that looks like in your case, though.

[-]Viliam1mo20

I think it is valid to be concerned about how other people perceive you, so I will try some synthesis here:

It is bad to assume that every "not absolutely safe" behavior (1) will be perceived as bad; and that if that happens, (2) that is a horrible thing.

1) If you avoid obviously bad behavior, some things you do may or may not be perceived as bad. Sometimes the probability is reasonably low. And the "absolutely safe" behavior actually also sometimes rubs people the wrong way. And some people will give you a negative reaction no matter what you do, e.g. because you remind them of someone they hate, or because they already came in a bad mood.

Stop trying to achieve the impossible. If you think that even a small rate of rejection is unacceptable, that's an interesting topic you can discuss with your therapist. (A possible answer could be that you need to meet more people, so that each individual rejection is a smaller fraction of your social environment.)

2) If you avoid obviously bad behavior, the fact that someone dislikes you has little impact both on you and on the other person. The next day they will probably forget that you exist. You need to move on, too.

That said, it is useful to sometimes get feedback on your behavior. You just don't need to do that every day, before speaking every sentence. That is bad timing, and it will interfere with your social interactions. Instead, you can reflect afterward about whether there was something you could have done better (sometimes there wasn't), or once in a while you can ask your trusted friends to give you feedback.

[-]25Hour1mo30

Yeah I was having a really rough time trying to find a good synthesis. I think I arrived at my current setup because my default behaviors are pretty good if and only if I'm not freaking out about how I'm coming across; I think this is broadly typical but definitely not universal.

Agreed that there is an important difference between trying to force a specific micro-scale interaction to go well (no! bad!) vs trying to set up rules in such a way that interactions go well for you in general.

[-]cubefox1mo20

Thanks, that was an interesting post, it seems like an overall plausible theory. In fact more plausible than the recent one by Chipmonk you linked to, as your theory is much wider and somewhat includes the one by Chipmonk (per point two in your list).

I think one common reason for social anxiety is still missing in this list though: Fear of being humiliated. A rejection, or a cringe comment, can feel excessively humiliating to someone with social anxiety, even if they don't believe the other person will feel awkward or will dislike them.

I think that's indeed something exposure therapy can help with. Just thinking something like "this fear of humiliation is clearly exaggerated, let's not worry about it" is like thinking "this fear of spiders is clearly exaggerated, let's not worry about it". It won't help much because the fear by itself isn't really what's exaggerated, it's the consequence of something that is exaggerated. The fear comes from correctly predicting that a spider touching you would freak you out excessively, just as you're correctly predicting that you would feel excessively humiliated if a social faux pas or a rejection were to occur. It's more a phobia than a proper anxiety. I don't think you can reason yourself out of a phobia without some form of "exposure therapy".

Though again, that's only one additional potential cause for social anxiety which doesn't apply to every case.

[-]25Hour1mo10

Yeah. Rejection sucks, social humiliation sucks.

I do agree with you about exposure therapy; I think it's important in the sense that it gets you reps on this stuff, I just don't think it necessarily functions alone without conscious reordering of your goals away from "control others' internal state"

I saw several people at LessOnline concerned explicitly about their social phobia about trying to ensure they were never boring anyone, and I don't think that is solvable without explicitly abandoning "never bore anyone" as a goal (an alternative goal structure might be "ensure I am always giving adequate space in the conversation", which is fine because that is a goal you can easily implement and verify.)

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64 Maybe Social Anxiety Is Just You Failing At Mind Control

by 25Hour

11th Jun 2025

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Maybe Social Anxiety Is Just You Failing At Mind Control

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[-]cousin_it1mo*102

To me it sounds like the dating class hired models to tell people the dating class helped :-)

[-]cubefox1mo2-2

[-]Kaj_Sotala1mo30

Children usually don't have very much social grace either but then they get better at it over time, which suggests that it's a trainable skill like any other.

[-]cubefox1mo2-1

[-]Kaj_Sotala1mo80

[-]Viliam1mo70

[-]25Hour1mo30

I guess it feels harder in writing than in speech because in writing you in principle could spent forever polishing a piece before publication.

[-]Viliam1mo20

in writing you in principle could spent forever polishing a piece before publication.

[-]Random Developer1mo41

Recognize signals of interest, and
Respond encouragingly, and put the ball back in their court. Ideally, I wanted to communicate two things: "Your attention is welcome", and "The next move is totally in your hands."

[-]CstineSublime1mo33

^{^}
TVTropes calls it "One Dialogue, Two Conversations" imagine something like this:
"The pastry is a bit dry"
"I agree, strange hot weather we've been having"

Except now scale up the verbiage from a misunderstanding of 'dry' to, oh I don't know, a half-remembered reference to Roland Barthes said about Greta Garbo

[-]25Hour1mo10

[-]Viliam1mo20

I think it is valid to be concerned about how other people perceive you, so I will try some synthesis here:

It is bad to assume that every "not absolutely safe" behavior (1) will be perceived as bad; and that if that happens, (2) that is a horrible thing.

[-]25Hour1mo30

[-]cubefox1mo20

Though again, that's only one additional potential cause for social anxiety which doesn't apply to every case.

[-]25Hour1mo10

Yeah. Rejection sucks, social humiliation sucks.

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Epistemic Status: I'm about 90% certain that what I'm saying is true as regards to me, and 10% that attempting to do what I'm doing actually leads any specific person to similar results as mine (the priors are just really rough here). Heavy on anecdotal evidence.

Summary

Social anxiety is often explained as a state of irrational fear caused by misguided beliefs about what others think of us, which can be corrected by therapy.

I have come to believe differently: that social (and some romantic!) anxiety, writ large, comes from doomed and frequently conscious attempts to micromanage someone else's internal state. This dysfunctional goal takes many concrete forms:

make them like us
make them not dislike us (as discussed in Social Anxiety Isn’t About Being Liked — LessWrong)
ensure they are not feeling awkward in any way
ensure they are not starting to secretly resent us
ensure we are not imposing on them or transgressing any unspoken boundary they may or may not have.
ensure they do not think we are awkward or feel awkward themselves
ensure they are never put in the position of having to declare a boundary against us ("if I ask to join this group of people going to a concert maybe they'll say no!")
ensure they never notice we're trying to micromanage their internal state because then maybe they feel awkward

I'm referring to all of these kinds of pseudo-mind-control attempts by the general term of "approval-seeking".

This cannot be done reliably and "social anxiety" is just the name we give to the moment-to-moment desperation of trying to accomplish any important-feeling but fundamentally impossible task. But that's actually encouraging: one implication (if true) is that social anxiety isn't just a fear, exactly, but instead is an active habit, and habits can be corrected.

My overall thesis is simple: social anxiety can, if the above is true, be effectively treated by basically any mechanism you can jerry-rig together which stops you from trying to approval-seek. (More on this later.)

I suspect more-anxious people simply care more about accomplishing their approval-seeking task at a high degree of certainty than less-anxious people. The reason exposure therapy doesn't always help is because there is no amount of exposure which will enable you to accomplish any of the objectives listed above at a 100% success rate.

The following essay is about how I came to this conclusion, and the concrete actions by which I tried to apply this new self-knowledge.

Introduction

I came to this conclusion due mostly to my experiences at a dating/intimacy workshop called Connecting With Women, run by an exceptionally blunt but generally insightful woman named Lynn. Even though the overall conclusions I'm discussing aren't particularly gendered or romance-related, how I got there is extremely gendered and very romance-related, so bear with me.

Over the six months following this experience, I've about 60% resolved my social anxiety. The workshop itself needs a bit of explaining. On with the anecdotal n=1 evidence!

The Workshop

I took this dating workshop because, at the time, I was very very stressed out around girls I wanted to date and wasn't sure how to resolve this.

This was a long series of intense emotional-intimacy exercises, the very first which was Lynn asking me to get up in front of a bunch of extremely pretty models who were paid to be there for the weekend. She asked me to select one who I thought was hot, which I did. And then Lynn asked me, placidly, in front of all the assembled men and women: “Aaron, can you tell me what’s hot about her?”

I froze.

The possible responses that came to mind— her tits are amazing! Legs! The curve of her body in her tight dress!— were all sexual and I could feel myself rejecting them immediately after thinking of them. I sputtered for a bit and eventually arrived, victoriously, at a conclusion that seemed vaguely-truthful-ish and also completely desexualized: her teeth. She had really nice teeth.

Lynn was displeased. “Aaron. That was bullshit. You clearly were not thinking about her teeth. Sit back down and think about what you just said.”

So (after a bit of pointless argument about whether this was actually bullshit) I sat back down. And actually, I felt extremely put upon. “What the fuck did Lynn want me to say? That she was hot because had great tits and a tight dress?” And immediately after the thought hit me I realized that for god’s sake, yes. That was exactly what Lynn wanted me to say because it was the maximally honest answer. Lynn isn’t the fucking Theban Sphinx and she was not attempting to pose me an impossible riddle. She was asking a straightforward question with an easy, top of mind answer: “she is hot because she has great tits and she’s in a tight dress.”

So (I thought) why didn’t I just say that? Why did I give this other, bizarre answer that was obviously not the true one?

And the answer I came to, in the middle of the workshop, was that I had discarded the correct answer because on some fundamental level I believed that it would cause the models to dislike me. I have a model in my head of socially appropriate behavior and every single truthful answer I could come up with hit smack against the wall of “that would be weird for the girls and cause them to hate me.”

And immediately after that thought formed I realized that the girls liking me isn’t the point of the workshop. Lynn would never ask us to say anything to make a girl like us; her whole shpiel as a dating coach is about speaking truth and acting from honest desire and letting the chips fall where they may. And obviously my censoring the true answer wasn’t about the models’ comfort. The models have done a ton of these workshops! For God’s sake, they were being paid to be there! They knew what they are getting into and my saying the word “tits” in response to a direct question is not going to be a traumatic experience for them!

Then I realized that this was literally the first exercise of the first day of the workshop. And that if I continued setting all of my behavior against the bar of “this has to be something the girls will enjoy me saying”, and letting that direct my behavior, then the entire workshop was just going to be an embarrassing shitshow from which I would gain nothing.

So I decided to try, as best I could, to simply… let the girls hate me. To just abandon hope that they would think I was hot or whatever and instead try and, as much as possible, simply say mortifying but true statements. To actually just accept social death, to embrace cringe as inevitable. To understand, in my heart of hearts, that I was going to say a bunch of deeply unsafe and unappealing things and the girls would (I thought) probably hate me for it. And that was hard. Because my every social instinct was, at the time, geared toward being blandly likeable.

So for the whole three-day workshop, I tried as hard as I could to simply suppress any thoughts of how I was being perceived. To come up with incredibly simple, incredibly mechanical rules for what I could say and why so that I wouldn’t just lapse back into my default behavior of “saying safe, people-pleasing bullshit.” These rules (for the duration of the workshop) included:

(1) If I had a thought that was true and vulnerable, especially about attraction, regarding one of the girls I had to say it at earliest opportunity. A longstanding crush? Say it! Thoughts re: impressive cleavage? SPEAK MY TRUTH. (These are both actual examples.)

(2) If I was like “wait Aaron that thought is super cringe” then I double have to say it.

(3) No derisking allowed. If the girls asked a question that had an embarrassing answer I would simply give the true answer without embellishment and embrace their hatred.

(4) The girls hating whatever it was I said or did is not a failure state.

And while I could adhere to these rules I was in a state of zenlike calm, saying and doing insanely bold and frankly socially unacceptable shit in any other context (at one point during an exercise, unsolicited, I picked up a girl and joyfully twirled her around) with utter tranquility. The thought was like a talisman: “the girls are allowed to hate me and are allowed to hate what I say. I am doing the workshop. My role is to say true facts and act on impulse, unapologetically, without hedging. If I have done this I have succeeded and if I am chewed out later this is fine. If the girls declare me The Worst that is fine. What matters is the experience of saying true and vulnerable things, because I will never see any of them again.”

But I… wasn’t chewed out. Bafflingly, impossibly, the girls fucking loved it. Like, before this purely-in-my-own-head frame shift I could tell I had bored them, that they found my presence in some undefinable way slightly annoying, but now that I wasn’t trying to make them like me, whenever I spoke or even approached them their eyes lit up for no reason and I had (bafflingly, impossibly) their obvious adoration. What the actual fuck.

The models, at the end of the workshop, had the unanimous opinion that before this mindset shift (which again, I had not said anything to anyone about), I was very unsexy and timid and unimpressive, and afterward I was hot as hell. Several of them reported major changes in my body language and vocal inflection, though I was not consciously aware of them. One said, I swear to God, that she would be fantasizing about me later. These girls can be brutal in their public feedback (brutality which they employed on a couple of the other guys) and I have very high confidence this was not just bullshit they were just saying for, like, reasons.

And it was obviously not a coincidence that this change coincided directly with the utter tranquility and joyful ease that came of no longer trying to alter my behavior to suit the girls’ imagined preferences.

The workshop was a highly effective but sadly very context-specific intervention: the context I was in stopped me from approval-seeking, thus the social anxiety went away.... until the end of the workshop.

Post-Workshop

So I went home and, of course, immediately regressed to fretting excessively about everyone’s opinions of me any time I was in a room with strangers.

What I’ve been trying to do— somewhat successfully!— since that workshop was to reverse-engineer what exactly happened there into a thing I could apply to every single other part of my social life. Which was hard, conceptually— the nice thing about the workshop was that there are no consequences for anything you do, and because the girls know what’s up you don’t have to worry about really stressing anyone out. I don’t actually comment on women’s cleavage in real life.

What I'm doing now (more on this later) works just well enough that two separate people commented to me, unsolicited, that I seem clearly more confident and gregarious this year than last at LessOnline, which matches my internal experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

Wait. The title of your post implies this is about general social anxiety but you spent all your time talking about dating workshops?

Oh my yes.

For me there's a mental sort of... circuit, I guess, that represents me trying to micromanage peoples' perceptions of me, and it is responsible for anxiety both with women I want to date and with random men and women I meet at parties. Which I noticed a bit later, when the methods I adopted to get a grip in romantic contexts worked equally well in platonic ones where I was also ordinarily very nervous.

Nowadays I'm mostly just not nervous!

So... what do you think happened there, exactly?

Because the whole source of my anxiety at the Connecting With Women workshop was "I want these women to like me", adopting a goal that was mutually exclusive with that-- "speak true and vulnerable things without trying to make them land well"-- meant that I was no longer pursuing that first goal and I knew I was no longer pursuing it. I literally was not trying, because you can't pursue contradictory goals at the same time. There was no anxiety, because the goal I had newly taken on was completely under my control; it required neither reading microexpressions accurately nor figuring out any kind of optimal conversation path. It was easy.

And I suspect the brain has kind of a feedback loop around "are you currently performing actions to achieve X goal" and "your subjective assessment of X goal's importance." After a little while of doing stuff that I expected to make the girls dislike me, I actually stopped caring as much about this. (With some exceptions-- sometimes a positive reaction I would get would push me back into anxiety because I'd get worried about losing the positive regard I had somehow achieved. Seeking others' approval is such a strong default behavior for me that keeping it in its box is hard.)

You will notice that sexuality didn't really come up in this explanation. I think this fully generalizes to platonic social anxiety.

Did it really require a dating workshop to discover this about yourself?

Well, it's tricky. The "teeth incident" was probably my first time noticing my approval-seeking machinery activate as a distinct and clearly-dysfunctional part of my psyche (because there was no possible reasonable explanation for what I had said), and this was also my first time really trying to suppress that machinery in any sort of organized, structured way.

And after I saw it for the first time I couldn't unsee its influence on basically all of my social interactions. Kinda like putting on those sunglasses from They Live.

How on earth did you actually make this work IRL without your insane workshop scaffolding?

Ah. Yes. So, a lot of why it is I regressed immediately after getting back home from the workshop is that while "say true and vulnerable facts about attraction" is great and all in literally a dating workshop it does leave something to be desired as an operating principle in IRL social interactions.

I think you need some kind of specific self-guidance for conversations that is not "engage in doomed vaguely-prosocial mind control", and that's the Intention-Setting intervention. I think you also need explicit recognition that the interaction could go positively or negatively and either way you are fine; this is the "Embrace Social Death Intervention".

These are explained below.

“Embrace Social Death” Intervention

I keep very close track of when I am feeling anxious in social events. Any time I do, I go through the following explicit chain of thought:

Notice who I am afraid of disliking me.
Imagine the worst-case scenario. Imagine the dismissive glances or awkward silence. In my heart, embrace this outcome as acceptable. In a tiny way, embrace social death; let go of the desire to be liked by this person.
Imagine what I would do if this worst-case scenario didn’t matter.
Know, in my heart, that I am not trying to avoid this worst-case scenario.
Do whatever thing, safe in the knowledge that if I am hated this is fine.

“Intention-Setting” Intervention

I find it also helps to build in explicit goals for my social interactions that do not involve the other person liking me. A north star that guides my behavior, entirely independent of what the other person might or might not like.

I use the following north stars to dictate what I will say or do next:

(A) Vulnerable Honesty. Say exactly the thing that I’m thinking about in exactly the terms I’m thinking about it; do not make any attempt at shading the truth or obfuscating things I suspect will be embarrassing. If I think this will make the person think less of me, that is fine because the goal is not to have my conversation partner think anything in particular about me. I use Kindness as a specific concrete filter here; if I could say something true but I know it would really stress the other person out for no good reason, I will omit it because I’m not a monster.

(B) Selfish Impulse. Ask myself, silently, what deep down I would like to say or do next, if anything. Silence is an acceptable option. Then I ask “is there any really good reason to not do or say this thing.” Important Note: “They will think less of me” or “they might feel awkward about it” is not considered a legitimate reason to not do the thing. Curiosity is one selfish impulse that I get a lot of mileage out of.

(C) Basic Awareness Of Explicit Social Mores. I don't, in fact, compliment girls' cleavage when I'm at an academic conference or whatever.

I’ve noticed that the more stressful an interaction is the more I have to rely on Vulnerable Honesty in preference to Selfish Impulse, because the stress makes it tough for me to notice what my selfish impulses even are.

At this point, the way i ask girls on dates is specifically by cutting out literally any attempt at subtlety or derisking and just saying something along the lines of “I think you are extremely cool and would love to take you on a date”, then wait for a response. Because that shit’s nerve-wracking! It is deeply soothing to simply say true facts in any particular order and allow the other person to interact with those true facts in any way they choose.

Wait, isn’t not caring if the other person feels awkward kind of sociopathic?

Short answer: Maybe!

Long answer: social awkwardness isn’t that bad and, also, cannot be avoided. If attempting to stop people from feeling awkward imposes large costs on yourself (it does) then you don’t have to do it. So don’t!

Even longer answer: people enjoy feeling valued. Indicating (even platonically) you like someone and want to spend time around them is a brutal double-edged sword because if they’re into it they will feel pumped about you saying this, but if they’re not they will feel awkward about declining. You cannot remove this risk of awkwardness and will hurt yourself by trying. Stop trying. Let them feel awkward. It's fine.

But I want people to like me! I don’t want to be cringe!

Same!

I want many things. I want the sun to come out tomorrow; I want the stock market to go up. I want my favorite bakery to be open and not closed. I would like this butterfly to land upon the tip of my finger. I do not attempt to force these things to come about, because these are out of my power.

I still want to be liked, because I am human. I am merely declining to try and bring about that state by any particular means. Which means I am no longer obligated to obsessively interpret microexpressions or build out detailed flowcharts of possible conversation paths. Being liked by someone is a beautiful accident, to be enjoyed while it lasts.

In any case, there’s a shitty zenlike quality to all this where people probably will like you a lot better, but only after you shove your approval-seeking drive into a box and cut it off from ever influencing any of your behaviors. Only then will you be maximally charismatic and, by extension, generally well-liked.

It is what it is!

But I'm worried that embracing social death might make people think I'm awkward or weird?

Maybe that will happen! Listen, the whole point is that if some people think you're weird or don't like you that is not the end of the world. There are, in fact, more important things than that, and my breakthrough specifically was around the fact that if you can settle on literally anything that's more important than your conversation partner feeling some specific way, then you will be able to chill the fuck out.

Your lack of rigor and general woo-woo vibes are killing me.

Listen.

There is a concept in clinical psychology of "safety behaviors": ways we might dysfunctionally attempt to de-risk social encounters. Safety behaviors in social anxiety research include such concrete, measurable things like:

avoiding eye contact with strangers.
staying at the periphery of group conversations to avoid notice.
holding a cup of water in group conversation (which gives you an excuse not to speak)

Safety behaviors have a bidirectional relationship with social anxiety in the literature-- they are both an effect and a cause of social anxiety, and we know this because banning those safety behaviors causes a decrease in recorded anxiety from experimental subjects in various contexts. Research on these safety behaviors tends to focus on behaviors that are externally visible (easier for researchers to measure) but I think it is extremely accurate and useful to consider that "image management via lying" and "saying what you think the other person wants to hear" and "charting out conversation paths in your head" serve a fundamentally similar function and also might be considered safety behaviors that perversely also serve to increase social anxiety.

The relationship of this discussion to my blog post is left as an exercise to the reader.

Isn't this just cognitive-behavioral therapy?

No. Cognitive-behavioral therapy as I understand it tries to improve your ability to perceive accurately what will make people like you or dislike you. I am trying to make having totally accurate beliefs around this irrelevant because you are not optimizing for approval.

Okay, but isn't this just exposure therapy?

Exposure therapy is about gradually building tolerance for anxiety-provoking situations while maintaining the same underlying goal structure.

I have found it much more useful to try and forcibly remove the goal structure where "getting people to like me" is my implicit objective, and replace it with a set of consciously-held social goals that are entirely under my control (see the How To Make This Work In The Real World section earlier.)

Okay, but isn't this just "not caring what people think about you"?

No. This is "not trying to control what people think of you", which is different.

This sounds like a lot of work to maintain. How long does it take to become automatic?

I've been doing this for seven months and it's still not automatic. The price of rizz, I'm afraid, is constant vigilance.

One key dynamic is that mindfulness around "who do I feel nervous around in this environment and why" becomes your diagnostic tool for when you've accidentally started to try and mind-control someone into liking you/not-disliking you/etc, which is your signal to execute on the two interventions listed above.

Why is honesty one of the core components? Is this a moral stance?

No. Honesty is useful here because it reduces your degrees of freedom to try and secure others' approval. The point isn't that it's nicer to be honest; the point is that 95% of dishonesty is for image management or for micromanagement of the other person's experience, both of which we are explicitly banning ourselves from doing.

Will this make me an asshole?

No.

The framework doesn't make you indifferent to others' wellbeing; it just requires you to not attempt to micromanage peoples' emotions before they have stated any explicit preferences or requests. It does require you to mostly ignore the prospect of minor social awkwardness but this is fine. It's fine.

Should I try this?

If you're in a paleolithic tribe where exclusion from the tribe means you'll probably die, this isn't for you. It's also probably not for you if you are in a profession where a single rando having a negative opinion of you actually can matter a lot, like academia.

There are, in fact, situations where being socially anxious is correct and useful, they're just not the situations that 99% of the people reading this post are going to be in.

Was it worth it?

Before I started doing this, every flirtation was Verdun, every date was the Somme, and every cute girl a looming Stalingrad.

I would very literally avoid conversations with women I might like to date because of how much I could feel my personality scrunch up in their presence. (Nowadays I still feel that impulse but see it for what it is: the desire to make them feel a specific way about me and nervousness about my potential failure in this task, which I now know how to quash so that I can go up and chat with them like a normal functioning human being.)

I have found my life afterwards overwhelmingly more enjoyable.

This essay did inadequate hedging.

Someday I will develop a browser plugin that solves this problem by making an LLM add hedging disclaimers to every claim made in a piece of writing, thereby solving this problem forever.