I feel like I don’t cognitively understand a lot of things in social situations. Sometimes it’s missing social cues, but what is really troubling to me is my inability to realize when something I say is funny to someone.
Is it not an intellectual deficiency that I can’t understand how something I said might be perceived as a joke? I also can’t come up with things to say. Sure, you can always say a lot of things, but on that notes, it’s like the impact of what I say or do is completely imperceptible to me until I am outside of the situation and reflecting in it.
I don’t know. I’m looking for advice because I completely lost all my social skills. Or I should say I lost my ability to understand what would be a rewarding thing for me to do for another person in a social interaction. I’m tired of practicing the stuff in Dale Carnegie’s book. I just feel like a robot and tbh I struggle to do basic stuff in the book anyways.
2 comments
Keep in mind an oft ill-considered point. The more knowledge you accrue the harder it is to filter it when socializing. In my experience the entire social structure seems designed in such a way that knowledge is entirely counterproductive. I have talked to 3 career coaches, 2 therapists, and gained insights from crowdsourcing 3 times and none of the information I got ever refuted this understanding which although demoralizing also hints you may actually be making things worse by trying to understand it when it is actually better to try and feign ignorance socially. In fact I know many narcissists who have a predisposition to manipulate people through social skills as every single one of them habitually feigns ignorance I have actually developed a working theory that feigning ignorance is a social norm. I may not like or agree with this social norm but it certainly appears to be one.
No, if anything lack of intelligence is a help when it comes to socializing. There’s data to back this up I think too.