Something Subtle That I Miss
2021 February 15
When the pandemic started in full force in March of last year, I was in the middle of a big trip. It was supposed to be a transition trip between my life in Argentina and moving to New York. It was going to be my biggest trip yet, coming in at 2.5 months starting at the beginning of February and ending in mid-April. Instead, I had to leave in the middle of March to go straight back to my parents’ place in Iowa to experience this brave new world.
What I find from these long trips is that I become more confident interacting with strangers as they go along. I usually stay in hostels, meeting many people from all over the world, and I’m often genuinely interested in their stories, even when they start to get a little same-y (you can only meet so many gap-year Europeans before a sense of déjà vu starts settling in).
One huge benefit of meeting this many new people is that you feel less forced to interact with people with whom you’d rather not. If the hostel you’re staying in is big enough and provides good space for social interaction, it’s easy to interact with different people until there’s a good vibe. That’s not to say that I was constantly going from group to group, person to person, dismissing each interaction because it wasn’t perfect, but ending an interaction a little sooner becomes easier when there are more available people to talk with.
Weirdly, I don’t end up actually jumping from group to group, person to person when I’m in this state of mind because it makes whatever current conversation I’m in go more smoothly. It gives me the ability to confidently act more like myself. Simply knowing that I have the option to leave helps keep me relaxed.
How I feel when socially interacting with people ebbs and flows. Over the course of a few weeks or months, I feel more confident with each interaction, not caring too much about what the other person is thinking of me, and feeling comfortable in my own skin. Then, that background social anxiety temporarily reappears and I feel more self-conscious in what I’m saying and doing. This has never been debilitating for me and I’ve never identified as being someone “with social anxiety,” but it still happens to a small degree as I think it does for almost everyone (minus the psychopaths, of course). Why else would this Wait But Why article on social insecurity be one of the site’s most popular articles if it didn’t resonate with a lot of people?
Ironically, the less I end up caring about what people think of me, the more likable I become. This is basically the premise of the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, which has a lot more wisdom than it should with a title like that.
Social interaction for me is also a bit like a muscle. When I “workout” by hanging out with people for a while, I get exhausted after a few hours (or minutes, or days, depending on the people and context). But when I’m socializing/”working out” on a regular basis, I can socialize for better and longer than I’m used before retreating to solitude. To use a term that all the cool kids are saying these days, my social muscles were getting very “swoll” during that trip. Not only was I meeting all different kinds of personalities from all over the world, but I never felt obligated to try and impress anyone. If I didn’t find a particular person all that interesting, I could, without being a jerk, find other people to talk with until I found someone I found more interesting. After all, an interested person is an interesting person, so talking to people who could engage my curiosity probably made me a bit more interesting as well.
The pandemic put a drastic stop to this experience.
Disclaimer: The effect of lockdown on my social interaction “workouts” is far from the most important thing to happen in the course of last year, but all the more important things about COVID have been written about by people more qualified than me. I just wanted to write about something interesting to me and it happened to be kind of related to travel so I wrote it on this blog.
I’m looking forward to having a larger social circle again. I may not do a big trip anytime soon, but living in New York is the next best thing for meeting people from around the world. Restaurants and bars are opening up at reduced capacities, and if the vaccine rollout picks up momentum, going to various meetups and social events based on language exchange, travel, etc could become a regular thing again. Since New York is so diverse, in many ways I may as well be staying in a hostel again.
Whenever I finish these longer trips, a little bit of the not-giving-a-f*ck, relaxed “residue” remains for a couple weeks when I first get back. Things like gossip and worrying other people’s thoughts and intentions that seemed more important before suddenly matter much less and I live more in the moment. It wears off, but the more I think about it, the more I think this may be one of the biggest reasons why I travel.
Since I rarely do any of these posts without including some pictures, here I am on a hike with a group of people in Colombia. Was I too concerned with impressing anyone in particular? No. Was I more concerned with having fun and living in the moment? I believe so.
