Yeah, there's no going back...My anxiety attacks

26 Apr, 2024

The title is definitely overly dramatic, but I've got some silly, but poignant Eurovision song lyrics in my head this morning.

I've noticed a trend for a few years now with some of my high achieving friends. The ones that tend to be more focused and do better are busier and have less bandwidth for everything — and everyone — else.

I can't blame them. As you get better at things, your time becomes more valuable. As you get more efficient — especially if you're around mostly other high achievers who also have internalized the norms around communicating efficiently — you have less tolerance for other folks who don't do it too.

Some groups behave that way as well. Twitter, with its 140-character limit¹ has encultured entire generations of San Fransisco tech/entrepreneurship/etc bros and brodettes in communicating-via-zinger. Nerd groups can be very off-and-on about specific topics: I've definitely been in circles where folks straight up shamelessly walk away when an "off" topic gets broached.

It's not friendly, it's not welcoming, and it's hard to feel like — even if you're spending time with those people — that you're really "friends" with those folks in any meaningful way, nor that will it be possible to do so.

And it sucks because I both

1. have been around some of those circles enough to have some reflexive fear of trying to interact in some of those groups, especially already established ones (which is going to be bad for continued social + professional growth)
2. am at the point of noticing what's going on well enough to the point that I'm occasionally the one being the jerk there too

Anyway, all of that is a balance and at the end of the day I'll figure out something for navigating those situations.

A good chunk of it probably is confidence and mindset and exposure and just a general A/B-testing-of-things-to-see-what-sticks.

At the same time, it's still a little freaky.

(And no, I can't just avoid those situations or avoid those people, at least not all the time, either. We live in a society and sometimes I need things from folks in those communities where it's not worth it to try to get things some other way.)