Taking back the meaningful substance of life endeavor and interaction from the stifling mediocrity of oppressive externally standardized institution and behavioral structure

 

 

 

 

Optimal  Reciprocal  Engagement

collaboration, relationship and stimulus struggle

“All for one, and one for all!”

 
 
 
 
 
“Large-scale success today is spelled -Teamwork.” —  Charles B Forbes
 
“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”   — Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

“False happiness renders men stern and proud, and that happiness is never communicated. True happiness renders them kind and sensible, and that happiness is always shared.”  — Charles de Montesquieu

 

“The only truly happy people are children and the creative minority.” — Jean Caldwell

Thus our challenge : to forge a CREATIVE MINORITY!

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is good reason for the focus of FoolQuest.com upon social engineering (as in political science, not information security) not towards the usual sweeping practical objectives, but to reform and improve all that is so destructive, frustrating and alienating even in the more intimate mechanics of social life in every walk of life.

To begin with, it's not just singles who suffer, left out: The affiliation, however genial, of neighborhood parents with little else in common, is often fallow ground for any deeper connection. And matching couples, demands compatibility by a factor of four. Alas that we have fallen prey to an heteronymous dependency upon the stifling behaviorally structured environments of formal education and employment, to provide propinquity for forging close and enduring friendships: convenient proximity, repeated unplanned interaction, and a setting for unguarded moments to confide in one another.

Hence clichιd social, romantic and career advice typically centers upon recourse to even more arbitrary behavioral structure, such as facilitated by hanging out at the same bars, discos or gyms etc., interminably, or joining and subordinating oneself to various clubs or undertaking the drudgery of volunteer work.

But in the alternative, reliance upon spontaneity alone, is futile without actual habits and aptitude of spontaneity. For autonomous intrinsically motivated interaction to provide the same and actually better social opportunity, the participants must be responsible and indeed intrinsically motivated to continually reengage one another of their own accord, and to network and exchange social support, all even without behavioral structure of schedule or proximity for regular chance reencounter. Exactly such scarce initiative, the lost social skill set of autonomy fallen so out of fashion and into such disrepair, is especially crucial, reciprocally, for sustaining any forward momentum, interpersonally. Too long domesticated, then without any routine provided us, we degenerate into such passive, confused and mistrustful sheeple adrift!

But in the alternative, reliance upon spontaneity alone, is futile without actual habits and aptitude of spontaneity. For autonomous intrinsically motivated interaction to provide the same and actually better social opportunity, the participants must be responsible and indeed intrinsically motivated to continually reengage one another of their own accord, and to network and exchange social support, all even without behavioral structure of schedule or proximity for regular chance reencounter. Exactly such scarce initiative, the lost social skill set of autonomy fallen so out of fashion and into such disrepair, is especially crucial, reciprocally, for sustaining any forward momentum, interpersonally. Too long domesticated, then without any routine provided us, we degenerate into such passive, confused and mistrustful sheeple adrift!

Being that engagement is the intrinsically motivating beginning of the state or condition of attachment which is an ongoing, remembered or anticipated and even yearned for state of engagement, hence according to Self-Determination Theory, secure attachment is characterized by attention and responsiveness to one another's needs when turning toward one another to obtain comfort and care. Indeed, prime features of autonomy include initiative being: the forward looking vision and motivation of enterprise and determination that affords any capacity to begin proactively, or to follow through energetically, with a plan or task, together with the need for meaningful engagement fending off boredom and loneliness. Heteronomy, the ever cagey and calculating enemy of autonomy, is also the active enemy of engagement and attachment, of transparent agenda, of open passion and interest of every kind. Therefore, bullying which is heteronymous, stifles initiative. Indeed, the social skill sets of heteronomy and autonomy are so entirely different. Heteronymous social skills correlate to the guardedness and control of heteronomy in the first place, and not any unmet needs of the individual. And yet the exhortations to sublimation persist, of the former as the means to the latter. Indeed, that often seems the only game in town!

In our time, never truer spoken are the immortal words of Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” For increasingly, we find ourselves living, as is so often said, in an attention economy, wherein demand vastly outstrips supply. Bypassing means talking past one another, in blithe unaware reciprocal failure of communication. Indeed, ours is a monological world, so populated with people who scarcely even hear the themselves think, much what they themselves say, let alone what anyone else says. stimulus struggle which is the continual striving to obtain and maintain the optimum degree and kind of stimulation, including social stimulation, from the environment, for staving off boredom and loneliness, respectively. Personal happiness may therefore depend largely upon reciprocally optimal and productive exchange of attention, in best sustainable quantity, quality, type and suitability to the needs of participants engaged therein.

Engagement, visceral or intellectual, elicits the intrinsic motivation of perseverance and concentration. Underserved stimulus needs of nurture for intelligence via optimal reciprocal engagement include steady positive emotional support, exploration and fun, active participation, sensory stimulation, with opportunity for social interaction, freedom from undue pressure and dystress though suffused with a degree of pleasurable intensity or: eustress, with varied selection and alternatives of successive novel challenges neither too easy and boring nor too difficult and frustrating, promoting lifelong growth in a broad range of skills and interests, intellectual, physical, aesthetic, social and emotional.

Beware interminably irksome, obstructive  and pointlessly belabored empty vacant superficial boring small talk, a happiness killer, so often forced and awkward, only leaving one actually the more depleted, empty and discontent, all urgent need of truly important expression still mute and frustrated. That is why people secretly hate small talk. Yet so staunchly do do so many cleave to the toxic and toadying First Commandment of the ubiquitous cult of socialization: that interminably vapid small talk, empty and polite conversation drifting upon unimportant or uncontroversial matters, not even very entertaining, ever keeping it light and willfully cheerful, ever remains key to life, popularity and social success.

Loneliness is the wont of intimacy. Hence, when mass anxiety fails to challenge our very way of life or to trouble the powers that be, and thus individual dystress fails to evoke sympathetic feeling and therefore mutual aid, and if none any longer shall rally to the alarm sounded, then such only will signal vulnerability to predation and exploitation, merely endangering others as well as oneself. If as we are told, indeed keeping things light is indeed so crucial to popularity and social success, then popularity and social success must come at the sacrifice of all happiness. Popularity and social success on the one hand, and friendship on the other, remain starkly antithetical. This is because friendship is genuine, substantive and intimate in psychological visibility, while popularity or social success depend upon boring facile superficiality and ever maintaining lonely distance. Therefore the inherent contradiction remains irresolvable in very principle, and nothing but a setup for frustration, failure and craven exhortation to lowered expectations and making do with mindless small talk.

making conversation count:
And only here on FoolQuest.com is proposed actually to do anything about it!
But which is cause and which is effect?

 

Talk Deeply, Be Happy?  “...substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.” 

 

— Dr. Matthias Mehl

When all else has failed, what has actually been desired all along? I don't have what you want, but can we seek for it together?
Is socially awkward nerd-love truly the best love
?
When all else has failed, what has actually been desired all along?

•  expression or else isolation

•  Optimal Reciprocal Engagement Intellectual Stimulation & the Essence of a Woman 

"A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”   — Gian Vincenzo Gravina

Eavesdropping on Happiness

In a study by a group of psychologists from the University of Arizona and Washington University in St. Louis, it was discovered that the happiest participants as determined by personality and wellbeing assessments, spent 25 percent less time alone and 70 percent more time talking than the unhappiest participants. The happiest participants also had twice as many substantive conversations and one-third as much small talk as the unhappiest participants. Sad or unhappy people may tend not be in any mood for serious conversations, preferring to keep things light and cheery. The study suggest that happy lives are social and conversationally deep, rather than either solitary, superficial, or both at once.

Consistent with prior research, higher well-being was associated with spending less time alone, r = -.35, and more time talking to others, r = .31. Further, higher well-being was associated with having less small talk, r = -.33, and more substantive conversations, r = .28. To illustrate the magnitude of these effects, compared to the unhappiest participants (-2.0 SD) the happiest participants (+1.5 SD) spent 25% less time alone (58.6% vs. 76.8%) and 70% more time talking (39.7% vs. 23.2%). They also had roughly one third as much small talk (10.2% vs. 28.3%) and twice as many substantive conversations (45.9% vs. 21.8%).

— Eavesdropping on Happiness: Well-being is Related to Having Less Small Talk and More Substantive Conversations as cited by Discovery Magazine blog, in: Want to be happier? Skip the small talk.
•  How do your conversations affect your well-being?
 
•  Banning Small Talk from Your Conversations Makes You Happier
 
•  Why introverts hate small talk
 
•  Why Emotionally Intelligent People Embrace the Rule of the Awkward Conversation, Backed by Science     
 
•  Overview, evaluation and discussion at Language Log
 
Alfred North Whitehead once remarked that all of philosophy is a merely series of footnotes to Plato who liberally transcribed the famous dialogues of his beloved mentor Socrates. Indeed, the cutting edge scientific discovery that happy people talk more seriously, would hardly have come as any surprise to the most venerated of all the sages of antiquity, Socrates who so famously declared: “"An unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” And the intelligent and sensitive are indeed at greater risk of painful loneliness. And yet, we remain in the minority, even amongst the lonely. The lonely, by and large tending towards inept and uncaring misanthropic superficiality, eager marks for all of that popularity snake oil, seemingly reach consensus upon two fundamentals: Firstly, that loneliness is awful, just the worst thing. Second, that at all times, we must keep all conversation light! And the blithe irony entirely escapes them all. The very notion even to question such cretin norms of heteronomy that have served them all so extremely poorly, simply never occurs.

Genuine relationship first arises, rather than somehow culminating later on, only as a byproduct of engagement in substantive, free and coherent communication, exploration, and/or form purposeful interaction and endeavor, even play with its own intrinsic purpose, all replete with the dignity of social risk, with trust, security, ultimately openness in yielding to temptation, all the aforesaid that are the competencies of autonomy, along with organization and congenial social grace to manage and sustain contacts, reciprocally. Rather, genuine relationship, free and deepening exchange, tacitly agenda driven and transparent. That may be why, as has been discovered, happy people talk more seriously. Thus the true key to friendship and happiness flies in the face of all social success formula of positive attitude and keeping things light with interminable small talk. It must then come as little surprise how such arduous social success so often comes, if at all, only at the cost of all happiness, so anathema and typically obstructed by such drone-like heteronymously arbitrary social acumen, skilled incompetence and cronyism, that everywhere buttresses the tacit institutionalization and twisted value of all the most flagrant insensitivity and ineptitude imaginable, the bad driving out the good, and worse, actingout the destructive evil that is rampant bullying. Indeed, as we have seen, gregariousness and engaging personality may even be reviled as subversive and impertinent to a malagenda of sheer heteronymous group validation in sheer denial of all such profound endemic and pandemic alienation from the innate and intrinsic drives of human expression and connection. The TRUE MEANING of LIFE is that HAPPINESS is subjective wellbeing, an INDIVIDUALLY REACTIVE STATE VARIABLE to howsoever favorable circumstances, objectively. Happiness comes in Eudemonia, meeting ones needs by the Menschlichkeit of capable interaction with responsible others.

 

Happy people thrive, are more creative and productive, earn more money, attract more friends, enjoy better relationships, and even stay healthier and outlive less happy peers. Happy people are sociable, deriving fulfillment in meaningful and pleasurable engagement. Happiness comes in meeting ones needs for capable interaction with responsible others, making progress every day. Extroverted and known to reach out, embrace communications struggle and Talk More Seriously, in purposeful interaction and/or substantive communication, and make less small talk, exert effort in order to actively make things happen, attentively pursue new understandings, choose creative activities, seek new achievements, and thereby uplift their own thoughts and emotions, even improving their circumstances by centering their lives around whatever pleases them most. In the words of John Mason Good: “Happiness consists in activity. It is a running stream, not a stagnant pool.”

Stimulus struggle is the ongoing effort to obtain and maintain the optimum degree and kind of stimulation, including social stimulation, from the environment, for staving off boredom and loneliness, respectively. We are all motivated by appetites for social stimuli and interaction, and suffer in any deprivation thereof. Only engagement in high levels of interaction and truly egalitarian cooperation illicit equally high levels of sociability while curtailing antisocial misconduct and rejection. Everything else we've been told about how to function socially is a lie, propaganda obfuscation of the scam of heteronomy to a social minefield contrived to the advantage only only vested interests of cronies.

The truth is that purposeful interaction, activity and objectives supportive towards substantive conversation expressive of higher-order thinking with depth of knowledge and meaningful relevance, must all be varied and novel yet well-suited to personality, practiced diligently and successfully in a continued stream not of ever more willfully optimistic propaganda, but of actual fresh positive experience so as to reasonably outweigh the lucid survival adapted vigilance of negativity bias. Schedule and routine must also be flexible in order to avoid getting into a rut. The average person, inexperienced of anything more vibrant and meaningful, has become blithely jaded and accustomed to a profound social, emotional and intellectual deprivation in which so may of us find ourselves imprisoned.

Indeed, speaking of thriving amid more serious and substantive conversation, it has long  been observed how gifted students amongst their own true gifted peers, suddenly and mysteriously no longer require the great and dubious boon of socialization! In short, perhaps in whatever social context, it might be not only better and wiser, but arguably perhaps even healthier and more natural, actually to study and emulate gifted interaction, then deliberately taken as the new model for an intentional social functionality, in order thereby to improve and enrich life and autonomy support for all, than endlessly conniving and heteronymously bullying to make such a shining great favor of such relentlessly flagrant conditionality and peer pressure "providing structure" aimed only at dumbing down our best and brightest. Introverts Don’t Hate People, They Hate Shallow Socializing.

Elisa cites "Colangelo [who] suggests that “meeting the cognitive needs of gifted students often simultaneously meets their social-emotional needs. Or put another way (and I believe this could be extrapolated to also apply to gifted adults [indeed, why not to everyone, Elisa?]), if we are challenged intellectually, it’s highly likely that gifted adults will result in broader emotional satisfaction and be surrounded by a peer group. Those of us who are gifted know that ‘meeting [engaging] our cognitive needs’ is a high bar; however, if Colangelo is correct than he has also provided gifted adults with a roadmap for finding fulfillment."

It turns out that staying in high spirits is a actually hard work!  But then, happy people are known to place an extremely high priority upon happiness. Happiness is well known first to require the absence of excessive suffering. Pleasurable and displeasurable emotion though so often viewed as opposite poles on the same continuum, are actually supported by separate though related neurological architecture. It is also often observed how people so often tend to respond more strongly aversively to negative emotion, than by attraction to take action in response to positive emotions. This might account for the prevailing predominance of intimidation and lost opportunity. A less labor intensive and demanding individual disposition to happiness might conceivably operate by natural tendencies for excitation to negative emotions to deflate more quickly and excitation to positive emotions to deflate more slowly. But your mileage may vary!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The FoolQuest.com work ethic of trustworthy gregarious professionalism:

 

Help one another and we win!
Reciprocal logistics
 
Happiness is acceptance and respect in the course of anything compelling

 

 

 

Hard work fundamentals of: Playing Well With Others

“All for one, and one for all!”

Informal structure must give way to arising formal structure in order to assure participation In decision making by all involved. Indeed, to ever progress beyond whatever initial consciousness raising alone, eventually must require the relinquishment of complete structurelessness.  Trustworthiness ultimately may entail that anyone assisting beyond the range of solitary division of labor, thereby becomes, for the moment, more important than you are! -Reciprocally... In the probortunity at hand, here on FoolQuest.com, optimally, the entire venture must revolve around you, every time you need something, face a problem, or recognize an opportunity; and likewise, reciprocally, the entire venture must revolve around each participant in turn, any time at all, they need something, particularly from you, face a problem, or recognize an opportunity. Moreover, such virtue is little more than vested interest and job description. Everyone must be the boss, in their own specialty, and subordinate to the others, each in each their respective specialties. Because Eudemonia, let alone any possibility of eventual success, even materially, accrues through genuine autonomy and power in meeting ones needs for the dignity of capable interaction with even adequately responsible others, and making progress every day. Indeed,  competent collaboration along equals will depend upon dependability in reciprocal responsibility to one another in commitment or undertaking in rendering timely assistance to one another as needed and especially as regarding task interdependency. Task interdependency refers to circumstances wherein any particular task or tasks simply cannot commence, much less be accomplished, until a prior task or tasks are first accomplished. And the first most crucial task, even from the most tentative beginning, is simply for each participant merely holding up their end of the conversation. Too many promising ideas stall, reduced to pipedream, simply by the inertia of loosing interest. Merely sustaining interaction by keeping appointments, returning phone calls and answering emails and online posts, all on a timely, indeed daily, basis, is the first crucial necessity, especially all from scratch.

Thence, as collaboration must begin in earnest, the crucial priority participants must be to remain available, responsive and interested in helping one another. For example, as applicable, nothing can be more important to the inventor, author, programmer, etc.,  than whatever input or assistance required by the MBA, accountant. lobbyist or grant application specialist and their business models or implementation, seeking whatever requisite assistance, capital and resources, and nothing should be more important to the MBA, accountant. lobbyist  or grant application specialist, than the needs and vision of the inventor, author, programmer, etc.. And this self same principle often applies no less between any other persons or functions involved. Entrepreneurship is interdisciplinary. That should be the very appeal. Indeed, as prospective collaboration partners, neurotic prima donna rival specialists who actually resent one another's disciplines, should be confronted with reality before the work begins, that assistance to one another must take immediate priority over solitary and compartmentalized division of labor. If they refuse, better to find out before investing wasted time and effort in the futile melodrama and vicissitude of pointless struggle with their recalcitrant passive hostility and mealy-mouthed chronic ambivalence. The worst are those who are at first flattered by interest and participation in their pet projects, but then become jealous. Such megalomaniacs will ultimately prefer all of nothing to part of something.

By contrast, a  hallmark of effective teamwork is actively making each other look good! -as well as and not only simply oneself... It should be a definite thrill for all involved when opportunity coalesces, unless there are dramatic conflicting ulterior priorities, unforeseen and unresolved unless forestalled. Indeed, even the best most ruthless literary criticism to remain relevant, must studiously bear in mind authorial vision in turn seeking voice for some conceivable intended audience. Likewise in Entrepreneurial or even grass roots political new venture creation, the only at all possibly more crucially relevant consideration might be market application, amounting likewise to considerate cooperation with prospective investors or other backers as well as, ultimately, whomever the intended end users, consumers or constituent. -such being the domain of whatever appropriate marketers.

And beware, for while any well established corporation or the like, might possess the wherewithal to survive all manner of self inflicted wounds and endure the drain and recourses to spare for getting the job done at all, any business startup or other new venture in formation will thereby likely be well nipped in the bud. And this may be one salient reason why all to often, to quote Olmstead: “After all is said and done, much is said and little is done.” Even given all the virtues of preventative pessimistic caution, all purpose of evasion or withholdance will not merely reduce efficiency or injure morale, but paralyze and then dash any hopeful project that much more quickly and decisively. For no matter advance in connective communication and information technology, the challenge remains to the in depth quality of human interaction with autonomy and respect. There can be no hope of success in untrustworthy manipulative passive hostility at whatever conceivable cross-purpose or conflict of interests. Beware indeed the irrational bullying passive hostility of devious cross-purpose and betrayal. To quote Augustine, such "Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies.”  But Augustine is mistaken: The self-destructive resentment of one remains toxic for all others involved. Indeed, by contrast, even grifters outright at least might be understood in any terms of one sided rational advantage. Make no mistake: Task interdependency refers to circumstances wherein any particular tasks must be accomplished first, and within what time frame, in order for other tasks to even become possible in turn, and then accomplished efficiently on schedule. Therefore participants become responsible to one another. In entrepreneurship for the rest of us, task interdependency and therefore, beyond mere solitary division of labor, actually working together closely, ever remain crucial. Like The Three Musketeers: “All for one, and one for all!” Or else, all for naught.   

No chain can be stronger that the weakest link. And the weakest links are on the one hand any target bullying unbefriended and undefended, and on the other hand, bullies and charlatans unaccountable and with no true intention of delivering on their promises, even to whatever possible extent that they actually can. That is why bullying and recalcitrant passive hostility cannot be tolerated, and especially not in acquiescence to humor the seemingly most crucial participant(s). Inevitably whatever often worst betrayal comes at the hand of the one had so tantalizingly built themselves up as most centrally, crucially indispensable and irreplaceable. Such inevitable crisis will present the greatest challenge to fluid adaptive cooperation, regrouping to fall back to the proverbial drawing board and salvaging from the wreckage to begin anew undaunted. Only that will ever teach a salient lesson to any any untrustworthy malignant Narcissistic passive-aggressive and cowardly would be defector, ever so convinced that the world cannot turn without him! Effective entrepreneurs must learn to fail as quickly as possible and begin anew.

For autonomously and respectful freely chosen and independent collaboration outside of often Hellish and alienating institutional structured social environments and preexisting institutions of employment and education that absorb the bulk of human and material resources in society, hence given there are simply no other established resources to fall back upon and no master to lead us, hence the possibility of competition under fair play opening the benefit of honest controversy, then basic reciprocal altruistic impulses may yet channel themselves into advantageous improved individual performance and ability among closely functioning partners, equals in collaboration no less than true friends, with authentic ordinary curiosity towards one another, all at the simple cost of effort in sharing time and attention.

Conflict aversion is the timid people-pleasing adamantly defenseless inhibition of someone constitutionally unable to stand up for themselves, let alone others, at all to push back when pushed. Therefore compounding the disastrous human tragedy of conflict aversion is how alliance, in terms, focus and quality thereof, all in all, is a crucially important facet of relationship interaction, far beyond the crass and Machiavellian Existentially disgusting tunnel vision of an attachment disordered Narcissistic Popular Prick. Hence conflict aversion becomes a profound dimension of alienation. Supportive cooperation including mutual defense as applicable, is essential to survival at every level. Even love cannot conquer alliance stillborn as accrues from conflict aversion. Often the conditionality of somewhat cynical alliance, readymade, is an aspect of heteronomy. Indeed, co-validating cliques of bullies reliably achieve their malignant working cohesion very easily, simply by pandering to one another's Sadism. All the more reason then, why the good fight no less, is predictably doomed in lone struggle. After all, autonomy is quite distinct from utter self sufficiency. Notably, Ecclesiastes does not even trouble to compartmentalize: Emotional needs and bonds are assayed in no small degree as merely the endorphin warmth and comfort value experienced from practicalities of alliance and mutual support.

Indeed, it is true that networking into extended social circles is handy, indeed crucial, for anyone with so fortunate the recourse thereto. But do results accrue from the individual diligently working the social network, or how, if at all, any responsive and supportive social network actively seeking to provide the individual new introductions? All manner of
agenda, fair and foul, ulterior or on the level, can motivate introductions; but among them all, mutual assistance, alliance among functional friends, serving the needs, desires, goals as ever put forth, and unique preferences of each individual, as well as the common efficacy and defense, is the greatest blessing and the highest level of function.

“What is happiness? The feeling that power increases - that resistance is being overcome”  — Friedrich Nietzsche

“It is less important to redistribute wealth than it is to redistribute opportunity.”  — Arthur H. Vandenberg

Power: We all need it, we all want it in order to survive comfortably and to flourish. But power madness and the lust for power are indeed great woes. Cooperation achieves power. But there's the rub, for cooperation often demands frustrating compromise if not submission and the surrender of power outright, worse often in disregard of dissident better judgment. Fortunately, this is not always so. For the individual will to power and happiness is indeed often expressed in cooperation and friendship among autonomously respectful equals, if possible in helping another if only they will be helped and can be, and all the more so in any self sustainable reciprocity and exchange.

Thus, again, are altruistic impulses known to serve to enhance individual performance for each.

• Important Questions Startup Co-Founders Should Ask Each Other  

Enthusiasm and lofty dedication in the abstract are often somewhat misleading, implying but not actually committing to reciprocity at all. Alas, insecure suspicion and arrogance often insolate the individual from even the friendliest outreach, inspiring distance, defection and even covert obstruction rather than ready cooperation.

“Who so beats his horse will soon be walking.” —  Anonymous

While the rest of the book appears to be just more of ever the same motivational snake-oil, Brezsny, Rob. (2005). ‘Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.’ Berkeley: Frog, Ltd., 2005, pg. 84) quotes programmer Gary Hamilton’s rules for game-playing:

  1. If the game is rigged so you can’t win, find another game or invent your own.
  2. If you’re not winning because you don’t know the rules, learn the rules.
  3. If you know the rules but aren’t willing to follow them, there’s either something wrong with the game or you need to change something in yourself.
  4. Don’t play the game in a half-baked way. Either get all the way in or all the way out.
  5. It shouldn’t be necessary for others to lose in order for you to win. If others have to lose, re-evaluate the game’s goals.

The human evolutionary challenge of tit-for-tat is in building legitimate trust and intelligent autonomous respect essential to any howsoever at all whole hearted intrinsically fulfilling collaborative endeavor together with quick and decisive extrication from any dependence upon unreliable players and undependable bargains therewith, rather than falling back upon simple dominance and kneejerk abuse into the ersatz mediocrity of herd mentality or else complete social disintegration and empty pipedream unless provided resources for the extrinsic motivation of heteronymous punishment and reward systems of humiliating dominance, such as grading and requirements in school, wages at work, conditionality in family, obedience in the military, the lunatic faith and the categorical gung-ho of cult mentality, or just the apathetic heteronymous overjustification effect from the entire phony rat race of interminable popularity contest in what sadly passes for ordinary social life.

Otherwise, not only must each participant put themselves readily at one another's disposal without caginess or reluctance under whatever sort of simmering resentment of contractual coercion, but actually to enjoy it! -Not merely tolerating but actually the maturity for actively seeking the stimulation of creative challenge via functional interaction towards alleviation of boredom and loneliness.

Could this be you? A creative leadership niche, simply by dint of effort and initiative that will be called for, along with the reciprocal support required internally for any chance of success. Individual initiative and experience driving interdependent situational shared leadership in parallel to best Epistemological Methodology, of social attention to acknowledged expertise and capability.

Challenge and frustration  

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.”  — Benjamin Disraeli
-Action, power and trustworthy initiative!

Additionally, in order to get more out of life and give back or pay forward the most in return, for gifted, intelligent creative personalities to best relate and fully and richly meet the need for communication in order to overcome the sad, painful frustration of boredom and loneliness, exactly such volitional or intentional activity cannot merely be solitary, but must also constitute social activity or most intensely: actual substantive cooperation and actual collaboration. After all, volitional or Intentional activity is often characterized by contact and recognition between individuals.

•   The 6 Levels of Engagement in Online Conversations
 
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•  The trustworthy culture of helping and accessibility
 
•  Frontiers of automated Sociometry

As according to Aristotle, happiness is contingent upon the exercise but also the communication of the meaningful values of imagination, free will, personal choice, independence, competence and achievement, together with connection, self awareness and conscience informed by rationality. Moreover, happiness is not merely and actively experienced, but interactive expression and response, affiliation and shared enthusiasm. That is why even the journey of ongoing strategic discourse in earnest seeking happiness, can already be so involving and uplifting.  Heaven is an imagined condition of plenty of whatever has been most scarce in any given life experience. And Heaven on Earth would be any thriving association wherein individual needs are routinely fulfilled rather than frustrated. Communities vary in so far as the very nature of the association and relationship between people differs, with resultant fulfillment and frustration. Out there in TV land our fictional heroes make epic struggle and contend but ultimately unite in the face of adversity, while here in the real world we languish and despair under a veritable epidemic of bored and lonely alienation. So many hit TV shows pander and mock us, serving up vicarious experience not merely of stimulation, adventure and discovery, but in some context of true friendship, profoundly close relationships or situations that so many of us are very badly missing. Indeed, It is the simulated freedom, challenge and achievement in mastery and competence, together with social connection, that explains the addictiveness of multiplayer videogames for so many. And all such realization should be received as a call to action for urgent actual lifestyle changes. True life drama must either advance or falter. After all, how would our heroic avatars, our rτle models, rise to the challenge? 

Surely trustworthy reciprocity and cooperation, even close collaboration, are most desirable in the promotion of authentic well being and life advancement. Because autonomous individuals relate positively to one another in any suitable environment wherein to exercise free choice and develop skills. For such are the motivating intrinsic needs of authentic well being and self-esteem.  When decisions regarding endeavors beyond solitary well-formed planning with only individual resources and ability, are entrusted in due course to whomever the people with whatever specific knowledge, expertise, capacity or responsibility to make such decisions, the individuals who make these decisions experience authority, capability and autonomy. But barring extreme self sufficiency from that point forward, only if their decisions are respected and seriously followed through by others. Such cooperation is often structured hierarchically unless as considered as envisaged here on FoolQuest.com, reciprocally among equals, or then again, even imagined as remaining largely unstructured, spontaneous cooperation. But realistically, the latter dubious Anarchism may be dismissed as pipedreaming wherein the intention and striving characteristic of autonomy are despised in very principle as in Not-Doing and the irresponsibly indifferent Behaviorist heteronomy to situation

Indeed, having anyone you can count on is essential to happiness, and reciprocally, self worth comes in no small part from being counted on by others. Domineering status and toadying sycophancy are the antisocial counterfeit. Fulfilling collaboration far more demanding.

Hence, clearly optimal as any sort of wider or global condition satisfactory to individual happiness, nurturing and web of tangible reciprocal social support just such as by which ever at all possibly any conceivable collective all are for one and each, remains among the strongest known predictors of individual success.

Situationaly, precisely such intentional community holds the promise of addressing hither to underserved opportunity, utility, practicably, user support, social support, modeling (sensemaking by seeing and doing as and among others), confidence in mastery (competence) and fun of unprecedented entrepreneurial collaboration, with interaction producing the engaging and sensible daily necessity thereof to begin with.

If You Desire Anything You've Never Had, Try Something You've Never Done
"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." — Simone Weil

And so, as far as moderate and even minimal necessary expectations go, it may be well opined that in the exchange of assistance and good turns, key always is to be extra helpful simply in order to accumulate and maintain a surplus in favors owed, by cheerfully giving more than expected, thereby preserving a comfortable margin in excess of whatever assistance one will foreseeable need to call upon in return. (But who's counting?) Yeah, verily, the parable unfolds of the hereafter as eternal recapitulation of life's reoccurring game theory puzzle of cooperative good will, wherein identically in both Heaven and Hell, all are seated together about a vast, grand and opulent banquette table heaped and loaded with sumptuous feast, but the elbows of each diner are immobilized by rigid casts and splints strangely fitted with gleaming stainless winnowing forks longer than their arms However, whereas the malignant and suspicious denizens of the pit suffer, consumed with frustration, starve and vex, unable to crane those weird ungainly adamantine trenchant pokers back into the bitter emptiness of their own greedy gullets, the cheery, carefree and guileless good natured souls on high, hale and hearty, happy and sassy, carouse convivially making mad and merry sport of gorging one another with those crazy six foot long forks! (The Sadists would only feed each other at all if they could rob others, starving, and force them to watch, and the Masochists would only allow themselves to be fed food liberally spiced with gall  Meanwhile, back on Earth, cooperative souls continue wandering like Diogenes in search of one another, while conniving jealous angry serial bullies flock together with ease to scheme and thwart us.)

Indeed, just to drive home the point, for our artistic and entrepreneurial purposes, let our metaphorical feast consist of a massive heap of colorful construction blocks in a gigantic toy store, all for constructing our dream castles, thereby more explicitly putting the crucial concrete practicality of cooperative task interdependency at stake as a function of autonomy and respect, even beyond the intangible universally intrinsic value of love alone.

Knee-jerk compartmentalization, apathy compartment6alization and distance simply must not be tolerated. Indeed, according to Semyon D. Savransky's Triz theory of inventive problem solving, only pioneering discoveries are more rare and precious than innovative cross-disciplinary solutions, knowledge, skills and techniques imported from one discipline into another.All solitary division of labor must often take secondary priority to a more relevant priority of effort and creativity, namely: mutual assistance and task interdependency as functions of autonomy and respect.

 

 

Mastery (competence), achievement and social connection together engage motivating gratification.  

 FoolQuest.com strives at recruitment of prospective co-founders with integrity and responsibility, taking pride therein, intrinsically self-motivated, risk tolerant, curious, creative, problem solving, honest and capable of exchanging the most frank and brutal criticism and sportsmanlike controversy, even however heated, while maintaining cross-functional task interdependent reciprocity, coordination and assistance, healthy quid pro quo and undiminished respect for one another, honest acceptance, pursuit of happiness by volitional or intentional interaction as engenders susceptibility and stimulation of thought to euphoric exaltation of lively and spontaneous creativity; seeking together the challenge and stimulation of relevant worthwhile and demanding goals put forth and yearning to take command and control of our own lives.

 • Stages of Group Development
 •  Towards Shared Uncertainty

 

Situation and stimulus struggle

Stimulus struggle is the ongoing effort to obtain and maintain the optimum degree and kind of stimulation, including social stimulation, from the environment, for staving off boredom and loneliness, respectively.

Opportunities such as they are, that typical consumers readily respond to, consist in any part of the at least howsoever ostensibly self achievable and in any other part of howsoever at least ostensibly guaranteed provisions. Indeed, so often as we are all left to abandoned , whenever it really matters, successful entrepreneurs tend towards solitary self reliance, reluctant to delegate, and therefore stressfully overworked. Because, by contrast, the vast uncertainly of teambuilding and real cooperative investigation is always daunting. But how else can entrepreneurship serve as a creative outlet, given that to begin with, Creativity Should be Social, because creativity is a gregarious mode of expression rather than a reclusive practice of contemplation?

ideas should compete, bodies should cooperate  —  John Storrs Hall
 
 
 
 

Happiness comes in meeting ones needs for trustworthy capable interaction with responsible others.

 

Indeed, great entrepreneurs recognize not only that they must play to their strengths but to recruit for complementary strengths and skills beyond their own. Twice exceptionality is lifelong social and career learning disability among gifted underachievers. Twice exceptionality is the ongoing product of lifelong asynchronous development. The cause may be a somewhat rebelliously stunned apathetic bored and lonely deficiency of executive function including poor memory and low organizational skills, even entirely due to severe under arousal. Fully active responsiveness may be only such as arising only to howsoever valued high standards of social support towards the grievously undersupplied stimulus of true pleasurable, engaging and meaningful opportunity.

No one is lazy doing whatever they themselves experience as worthwhile. engagement, creative tension, remains more than merely productive means to whatever end, indeed, an intrinsic motivation, a fundamental human need not only for uplifting occupation but for truly satisfying human interaction at all.

 

 

And that is why FoolQuest.com in the cause of combating loneliness and boredom, remains dedicated, first and foremost, to the advancement of social engineering of more optimal social stimulus struggle: the systematic and concerted cultivation of more optimally pleasurable, engaging and meaningful interaction so essential to authentic wellbeing and human flourishing.

Success with anything at stake, will depend upon intense interdisciplinary creativity and cooperation and upon a variety of activities each with the full support especially of anyone more advanced therein, Dialectic in planning so as to break up tasks into more manageable parts, and due recognition of effort. It will therefore be crucial also for collaborating  participants be chivalrous, helpful and sociable in sharing and accepting introductions and contacts towards networking, recruitment and teambuilding. Even quite without social status to enhance another's social standing passively by association, then, better by far and without desperate sycophancy, true friends and allies will still make no secret of mutual respect and real assistance. -And all entirely without demeaning and fawning sycophancy or empty patronizingly marshmallowing either.

Allies must consult regularly, proactively attuning to one another's interests, promote and network for one another continually, and engage mutual defense in conflict and tough times. In continual substantiation of ongoing reciprocal promotion and positioning, reciprocally, true partners always makes their mutual admiration, backing and approbation evident for all to know, by rising to every opportunity to be seen fully endorsing and assisting one another's initiatives, sharing glowing introductions and integrating interpersonal networks and resources, visibly and actively backing one another's plays and looking out for one another's best interests. This is the kind of team that team players will be drawn to join in and feel empowered. As Oliver Cromwell put it, not only to strike while the iron is hot, but to keep striking until the iron heats up. To set groundwork and generate opportunity.

Whereas unfriendly non communication and evasive squeamish keeping of social distance is one among many untrustworthy signs of mistrust, reservation, and dishonest devious non cooperation, or in terms of game theory: defection, exploitative non-reciprocation.

To be fair, however, one major problem is that most commonly the result of the introduction of any valuable contact to what turns out to be a passive and unresponsive generally unreliable contact, let alone anyone actively worse, is that it will instantly reflect poorly upon you with the valuable contact, bringing summary estrangement of the valuable contact, much to the indifference of the cavalier unreliable contact. - a therefore perhaps even somewhat misdirected tit-for-tat, with the well meaning intermediary squeeze played in the crossfire! And no one wants to end up in that position. Nevertheless, excessive caginess protecting contacts is like holding cards close to the vest and never playing them. Moreover, if only possible, any number of prior good introductions may help to soften the detrimental impression made by any single bad introduction.

Relationships and networking remain crucial because all vocation involves human interaction. Other people control resources, opportunities and information. We are continually shaped by the people we spend time with. An opportunity will always be predicated upon connection to another person. Diverse acquaintances provide wider intelligence for finding opportunity. And Success or failure pivot upon lifelong learning and ongoing information management, not stockpiling inert knowledge. People and conversation, network intelligence, are crucial current information resource. Your network is more expansive than you can know, a resource never fully leveraged except by the exchange of introduction into second and third degree connections. Relationships untended by conversation, cooperation and networking, that strengthen attachments, instead will only weaken. A portion of income must therefore ever be dedicated to petty cash and expenses thereof.

So, there you are, a wannabe, an aspiring entrepreneur, eager for engaging challenge and even whatever legwork to help bring opportunity to fruition. And some fateful meeting and forging of alliance has oh so dramatically opened the door for you to position yourself, reach out and take action. So, exactly why has such a prime unripe plum fallen into your lap, oh Grasshopper? Why not anyone more qualified and accomplished? Is it perhaps because you have the initiative, gumption, vision and determination to work on spec? Or might it also be because grand ideas and golden opportunities also fall into the minds and the hands of vastly unworthy knaves and cretins, supremely unreliable contacts, only responsive while they still shortsightedly want something from you, whatever that might be or why, villains or idiots, hunter-killers of all they profess to promote, only laying in wait to exploit, waste the time and erode all hope of any so naive, unwarily open and well meaning?

 • Pipedreaming, untrustworthy roadblock to success

Beware! As a rule, rational individuals of honor ought simply to apprise one another where they stand and just talk over whatever their problems and prioritize obvious shared concerns. Alas, such seems so seldom the case. It may be generally accepted that common interests and passions remain a key factor in building relationships. But in actuality, interests in common may turn out to be the least predicator in interpersonal compatibility. Indeed, interests in common need not correlate with shared core values or character, by far more profound. Moreover, it may be generally accepted that people make friends as a result of chance propinquity by spending casual time with one another. But as shall be seen, this too simply is not true. In truth, given limited options, people have often come to accept the need to cultivate and acquiesce to tolerable relationships with whomever most continually proximate. Hence a necessity of lowered expectations and fearful timidity. A sore travail.

Six drivers of trusting engagement are sense of caring, of respect, from being valued, honesty and fairness, openness, input, involvement for all in decisions and autonomy support, assistance towards growth in competence and achievement, over all meaningful purpose, all together with trust which is confidence in the Ethics of another to consider the interests of others before taking action. The productive influence of collegial support, improves morale, efficacy, performance and engagement, and tends to be reciprocated in a virtuous cycle that, alas, only one egregious foot dragging non-reciprocator in a crucial rτle to task interdependency, can quickly erode and utterly destroy.  No system as a whole will ever run faster than its slowest component or participant. Strife amongst partners is a common problem in wanna-be start-up ventures, that reliably frightens away talent and capital. How then, might exactly such critical vulnerability best be addressed?

Answer: Rather than finally crumbling in dejection from protracted neglect, abuse and failure, ever striking while the iron is hot, effective Entrepreneurs need to learn how to fail as quickly as possible and then recover or move on, especially after defeat veritably snatched from the jaws of victory by controlling knaves and fools that'd rather keep all of nothing than take part in something. Therefore, the appropriate Transactional Antithesis, in order to preserve group cohesion by anticipating and confronting the near certainty of defection one way or another at some point down the line (probably on the part of whomever has by then or even most early on has come on board and built themselves up as the most centrally indispensible and crucially irreplaceable) proverbially pulling the metaphorical rug out from under us all by dragging their feet and passive-aggressively letting everyone else down, until it becomes onerous and impossible to cover for them anymore. This eventuality is to be addressed by simply asking for the commitment from all participants to confront and accept any such defection ever arising, to declare a vacancy due to absenteeism (that is to say: by an effective undeclared resignation for all intents and purposes), in order then metaphorically regrouping back at the proverbial drawing board to salvage, indeed, even to completely revise and redefine the venture as required or desired, even those grand designs abandoned by such megalomaniac defectors.

As a result of such a pact, any untrustworthy malignant Narcissistic passive-aggressive and cowardly would be defector will think twice about proverbially marching off in a funk and taking all their metaphorical marbles home with them, as they come to understand they cannot thereby destroy the entire venture and dash all hope, and that the only result will be to lock themselves outside in the cold looking into the warmth of a still thriving venture even back to square one, better off and stronger without them.

Obviously, business ethics is desperately important to all commerce. Therefore economics being as it is, typically an amoral and descriptive science towards practical application, and not any field of ethics, so often stands accused of depraved indifference, indeed admitting no values save those of greed and crass materialism. But how can this be? For in truth the indifference of economics is only scientific detachment towards the reality of whatever commerce actually transacted. Actually, most generally, the principles of economics pertain in whatever economy with whatever currency in play. It is even possible to calculate income sacrificed for the sake of other meaningful values even such as including lifestyle preference and altruism. Indeed, ever between all involved, all effort of interaction comes at some price of whatever kind, reflective of whatever sort of interchangeable market exchange supply and demand, often however entirely independent of authentic utility, the value whereof both of the unique satisfaction of innate and inalienable individual needs and due recognition thereby, that autonomy so struggles to reclaim and reassert.

Collaboration is an exchange of efforts, and shared success often depends upon respect and value. What often so badly undermines trust before anything can even begin, is how, no matter what and how much is at stake, respect and value for ones work often actually diminishes and declines with the all too crucial good will and generosity of spirit to give of oneself and to labor free of upfront charge on spec in brave hopes one way or another of future gain or shared success. Even unpaid interns expect a substantial interaction with others in order to learn from them. And even lawyers routinely working on contingency for percentage of future awards in court or settlements out of court, must be naturally wary of howsoever poorly motivated, timid, halfhearted or ambivalent prospective clients. And conversely, the flip side of the same problem: artificial scarcity, market value even fraudulently raised by deliberately choking supply, especially manipulation being subject to withholdance after getting sucked in by whatever promises, encouraged expectations and false hope into whatever personal investment of time and effort. Conniving bullies feel little need to respect any value which by any means they can undermine and stifle before it can even come to market, and seeking to wipe the books by howsoever first denigrating whatever they intend to steal or embezzle. 

Because what people do tend to value and defend, comes from only their own suffering travail, investment and sacrifice, often bringing profound difficulty in letting loose of the past resulting even in cavalier indifference towards the future. And that is precisely why, emotionally at least, all participants must be vested and no one exploited, neglected or dismissed. People won't eat shit for long while working on spec! Abuse can only lead to talent flight, team disintegration and public ridicule. Indeed, just as sincere contributions must be consistently honored, valued and above all, logistically supported, contra wise with all fraudulently and manipulative withholdance of value, of promised and expected contribution and effort, of vital cooperation and recognition, no less reliably dashed, quickly and decisively. Therefore, it will always be important to create and share records, for everyone to continually Cc: all partners and stakeholders, to keep records, distribute minutes and updates of ongoing work product, conversation and interaction.

Task interdependency refers to circumstances wherein any particular tasks must be accomplished first, and within what time frame, in order for other tasks to even become possible in turn, and then accomplished efficiently on schedule. Therefore participants become responsible to one another. And ideally, substantial and intimidating contractual penalties should accrue for typical endless procrastination and passive sabotage wasting another's time in disregard of well anticipated task interdependencies and reliance upon agreements made in light thereof. But that is not always practical or congenial. Then again, if only in protest as a vote of no confidence or censure, an offender might actually find themselves billed by the hour on behalf of each of those others who wasted their time and effort placing reliance upon such empty promises for reciprocal effort in lieu of short term monetary payment. In any case, there must be some balance of matching and complementary individual sweat equity among participants. Collaboration must always be reciprocated, as a point of honor before all involved, watchful and vocal with all cross-purpose or ambivalence to the contrary, confronted openly.

Indeed, aside, obviously, from expanding opportunity and vastly improving chances of success, not to mention the crucial importance and creativity of interdisciplinary cooperation, multiple concurrent even if related and interlocking projects are an excellent way to press each participant also to invest of themselves by contribution of effort towards collective endeavors beyond whatever their own solitary division of labor amounting to more than whatever their own preexisting endeavors alone. Even demands merely of token reciprocity may help to reveal the true collaborators and expose the cagey, distant and untrustworthy bent howsoever only upon the manipulation and exploitation of involvement and enthusiasm on the part of others without task interdependent reciprocity. -in short: of wasting our precious time and zeal with typical and ubiquitous empty grandstanding and passive-aggressive betrayal, instead spotting the temperamentally unreliable that much sooner for effective risk management, harm reduction and damage control.

 

 

 

 

 

Virtues in practice

No news is good news! Whatever is worst in real life is the more ideal for drama. And audiences just eat it all up.

Entropy dictates that destruction will always arise more easily and readily than construction, and that flaws and glitches more easily and more often obviate beneficial features than uncommonly beneficial features actually ameliorate detrimental or even dangerous flaws and glitches. In accordance thereto, pessimistic explanatory style is the explanation of detrimental outcomes and problems as howsoever systemically integral, situation normal, stable and ongoing, perhaps as due to a racket (all pretense to the contrary not withstanding, actually serving only an elite of cronies), even all therefore beyond personal control, and positive outcomes as incident specific and "lucky," reproducible if at all, only with considerable diligence.

Hence, it should come as little surprise that according to research, an innate mechanism of cautious defensive pessimism gradually declining with age and sagacity, the evolutionary survival adaptation prioritizing the aversion to harm over the allure of opportunity, a predisposition and greater sensitivity known as negativity bias is the tendency in the brain for negative, detrimental, unpleasant or threatening experiences and information or even brooding thoughts, is now known to more intensely and attentively form stronger lasting impression than from positive ones, all even as neurologically detectable even in the earliest stage of information processing.
 
Ill fortune is unpredictable. Opportunity entails risk management. Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha recommend the embrace of small risks on a regular basis, in order never to starve or become engulfed in more serious risks. Risk is often overestimated because of innate negativity bias. There are always unknowns and uncertainty that must be differentiated from actual risk. Avoid the most serious risks. Is the worst case scenario tolerable?
 
A less labor intensive and demanding individual disposition to happiness might conceivably operate by natural tendencies for excitation to negative emotions to deflate more quickly and excitation to positive emotions to deflate more slowly. But your mileage may vary!

What is the nature and function of virtue? Suffice for the moment, that virtues are not rules but motivation and values, an adherence to guiding moral principles in character and action demanding aptitudes of autonomous critical thinking rather that acquiescence into behavioral structured heteronymous obedience. But any attempt at recapitulation of thousands of years of controversy upon competing and all too often cross-purposed notions of virtue, well exceeds the scope of the present work. Instead, let immediate focus of discourse herein remain restricted to consideration upon the more immediately salient question: Why, as one might imagine, would which practicable virtues shared, better and more greatly abet happiness and success, living ones best? - that is, aside from autonomous intrinsic motivation of integrity, and that therefore bad faith is dystressful... After all, haven't we all seen, for salient example, morality, kindness and honesty, if anything and all too often, actually punished in life? Answer: Indeed, that just isn't fair, is it? Certainly one virtue of justice and Menschlichkeit in particular deserving of cardinal accolade, would be trustworthy reciprocity and cooperation in all relationship and attachment.

Surely trustworthy reciprocity and cooperation are most desirable in the promotion of authentic wellbeing and any desired success. Because autonomous individuals relate positively to one another in any suitable environment wherein to exercise free choice and develop skills. For such are the motivating intrinsic needs of authentic wellbeing and self-esteem.  Arκte is indeed an individual achievement in autonomy. And yet, is arκte most readily achieved in solitude? Or is not the attainment of arκte in truth interdependent? For such is the social psychology, the transmissible culture, of arκte, of mastery, meaningful purpose and optimal value maximization in all endeavor together. And for that matter, doesn't it make more sense for the gifted to play to their strengths of gifted interaction, than for the gifted instead to be prevailed upon to embrace mediocrity, dumb down and conform, often so ineptly at that? 

Well deserved intrinsically fulfilling experience cultivates virtue and progress, whereas, not just any unearned lucky break being cause for celebration, but distinctly undeserved reward, as in the ill gotten advantages achieved by cronies, foster evil and ruin. Expectations may be influenced Empirically by experience and observation. The Expectancy theory of Victor Vroom posits that cognitive decision or free choice to behavior or action is contingent upon expected outcomes, the desirability whereof for the individual, called: valence. And effort-to-performance expectations and performance-to-outcome expectations, together with outcome valence, determine degree of motivation, optimistic hope or powerless despair.

Indeed, more optimal stimulus struggle has been found to require, among other things, and to reiterate, neither Zen cessation nor motivational conditioning nor any other snake oil indoctrination to contentment in making do, but first and foremost, in order to outweigh and overcome negativity bias, engagement in enjoyable and meaningful interaction to begin with, with no less than a five to one ratio in favor of positive experiences, even in the form of frequent small positive acts. And honestly responsive positive acts can be more than merely demonstrative positive strokes, however Transactionally authentic. Positive acts can be genuinely helpful, even as shall be seen, crucial not only for autonomy support, but practical  in actually addressing vitally important task interdependencies.

“What is happiness?” asks Nietzsche, answering:  “The feeling that power increases - that resistance is being overcome.” And that is why, in the words of Arthur H. Vandenberg: “It is less important to redistribute wealth than it is to redistribute opportunity.” Because of our social needs, greater happiness often accrues from helping others; while for the recipient is promoted cheerful optimism regarding the future of the relationship or endeavor. And all that is required is for each to do their part, not merely in so far as solitary division of labor, but all importantly, reciprocal assistance, for resultant ongoing exchange of frequent positive acts, however small, in a continuous stream of fresh reciprocally positive experiences thereof, reliably outweighing negativity bias.

Thus in context of relationship, reassuringly dependable response to outreach is so prized, and any failure thereof, such a crisis. While in context of frivolity and play, real fun comes in steady and engaging streams of pleasurable distraction or encouraging stimuli, with fewer boring frustrations. And people socializing supply that for one another, when inhibition is lowered in what seems a secure and convivial social environment, bringing out all that is genuine via elicitation of the Positive Transference and feelings of acceptance that tempts unguarded vulnerability, thereby, alas, producing a prime target rich environment for bullies, unless even amid the creativity of sportsmanlike controversy and the the free exchange of criticism, bullying is simply not tolerated but ferreted out and shamefully exposed, no matter how covert and devious.

And likewise in context of collaboration, whether substantively Entrepreneurial or entirely creative, is individual initiative best encouraged by interest and follow up from others, and reliable fulfillment of task interdependencies enriches social environment and best assures enhanced productivity thereby buoying hopes of shared success. All just the reverse of heteronymous individual submission to the community, it will be determined collective commitment to autonomy support that assures any measure of cooperation and fairness. Reciprocal altruism between distinct individual parties in no way resembles simple and often oppressively amoral enforcement of heteronymous collective loyalty or consensus. Division of labor amongst various specialists is common in any any larger venture or endeavor, but substantive collaboration and cooperation often entails mutual assistance addressing cross-functional task interdependency of crucial specialized parts of another's otherwise specialized tasks or rτles therein.

All too few social groups ever actually evolve to that most productive stage of high functioning autonomy wherein their capacity, range, and depth of personal relations expand to true interdependence for action independently, in subgroups, or in the larger group, each one's rτles and authorities dynamically adjusting to the changing needs of the group and each other, interdependent in personal relations and problem solving in the realm of task functions as ever may arise, with an overall objective of productivity through problem solving with sustained time and effort. Self assured, the need for group approval is past. All are highly engaged, both task oriented and highly people oriented. Morale is high. The task function becomes genuine problem solving, leading toward optimal solutions and optimum group development with support for experimentation in solving problems and an emphasis upon desired achievement.

Competition and conflict are never truly quelled by restriction to non-threatening topics of conversation. Trust is never forged by dependence upon heteronymous  structure of patterned behavior, but by active acknowledgment of all participant's contributions, community building and maintenance, and resolution of issues as may arise.

In order to be sustained in practice, values must be reinforced, kept both in view and within reach. Heteronymous false values are typically promulgated by heavy indoctrination and conditionality, whereas the striving for true human values is awakened by sheer temptation in the form of autonomy support  and the Capability Approach together with the sociability that remains alert to opportunity to include others, especially those who seem left out, socially, in activities and conversations, let alone substantive cooperation and intensive networking of life opportunity. Or as Oliver Cromwell put it, not only to strike while the iron is hot, but to keep striking until the iron heats up. To set groundwork and make opportunity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The FoolQuest.com work ethic of trustworthy gregarious professionalism:

The good influence

 
“My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.” —  Henry Ford

The dream of bringing out the best in one another is indeed powerful, ancient and long frustrated.

"Be good and you will be lonely —   Mark Twain

But cynicism and frustration aside, hope of even relative and imperfect realization thereof, may still be gleaned in the tenure of human civilization, from extensive experience and observation, often consistent from the sages of old through to the cutting edge of modern science. This much remains clear: Be reliable so that others may count on you. Stay interested. Pay attention to one another! Keep interaction engaging. Make time for one another, but also leave space. Mutual support is crucial. Encourage one another's dreams. Reach out and be willing to follow your passions and likewise seek to be supportive of others in their decisions as well.

Thence let us craft new vision together. As Oliver Cromwell put it, not only to strike while the iron is hot, but to keep striking until the iron heats up. To set groundwork and make opportunity.

For many heads, as they say, are better than one. And indeed, there is also the uplifting personal validation of, together with others, genuinely focusing upon achievement of one's own dreams and goals put forth, and likewise reciprocating. Hence the emphasis upon collaborative creativity, agenda and planning.

Of course, the positive power of negative thinking aside, friendship nevertheless remains a trustworthy positive value proposition. Indeed, according to Aristotle, some level of friendship can found itself upon pleasure or utility. And why ever not?

Or as we generally expect, similar common interests, concerns and burdens may even be the least of complex and completing factors accounting for how close friends may uniquely relate to and identify with one another, with sympathy for imperfection. Indeed, that not only is convivial company entertaining and cooperation useful, but that true care is actually uplifting.

Indeed, again, according to Aristotle, the truest friendship manifests altruistic concern and even sacrifice for the other's best interests even to the point of good influence, care towards optimal character, the healthiest condition of the personality which is meaning as derived from purposeful active orientation of living towards value and hence the sterling character of ones life as a whole, with morality and integrity of fortitude even to withstand misfortune; indeed, hence the sharing of good conduct through ongoing relationship and the the practice of philosophy which is discourse ever extending one another's moral insight and compass (or, as according to Adam Smith, entirely appropriate enhanced self esteem in reflecting thereupon) being of greatest wholesome satisfaction.

In brief, that truest friendship is actually a reciprocally supportive good influence between rare individuals of sterling character. Better still, however, let us also recognize autonomy as morally indispensable virtues, thus perhaps even reconciling aforesaid ancient ideals with modern views of friendship as equal, private and voluntary.

And the most ideal networks of friends somehow together strive towards all their most cherished values and ideals as above. But how might such lofty ideals ever inform any realistic and practical minimums necessary to effectiveness and happiness?

The answer arises from bearing in mind that effectively regimented or else discarded, divided and conquered as we are, we all need to be needed and outside at large free from the tyranny within established institutions with extensive resources, only autonomously tight knit pooled effort, task interdependency met with
trust and respect by ready mutual assistance can ever begin to attend to and pursue aspirations well beyond all that can otherwise be self achievable for any lone individual. Also, the simple truth endures, that even in the most scarce attention economy, the most stimulating attention exchange value, with best return and most productive involvement possible, nevertheless remains for full undivided attention and in return for likewise in kind. 

For any purpose under the sun, building true community and optimizing a thriving attention economy may require more expansive involvement than afforded from pointlessly banal hanging out and making idle vapid small talk with mere acquaintance. Friendship denotes co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more individuals. And indeed, just as with productive creativity, sustaining social connection often depends upon the active attentive investment of such fundamental resources as interest, sympathy, time and concerted effort.

Moreover, all the same principles by which pleasure, engagement and meaning drive gratification, all remain applicable in sharing the  pursuit of happiness pertaining thereby no less in interaction and relationship.

Happiness requires positive self worth, control and self determination, optimism, security, outgoing expressive extroversion, adaptability, purpose and immediacy. So, is there any recipe for ever at all reliably serving up all of these cherished values? And what might be the required resources?

First of all, vital to the interaction of any productive free collaboration, coordination and task interdependency as ever arises, will always be the cultivation and preservation of  reciprocal logistical support by the honest assessment and nurture of the integrity of healthy quid pro quo, assuring that everyone's needs including one's own are met in the exchange of all prompt and diligent vital assistance, all proffered in spirit of generosity and respect received in due appreciation and trust vindicated reciprocally.

Division of labor amongst various specialists is common in any any larger venture or endeavor. But real collaboration and cooperation often entails mutual assistance addressing cross-functional task interdependency of crucial specialized parts of another's otherwise specialized tasks or rτles therein. Again, task interdependency refers to circumstances wherein any particular tasks must be accomplished first, and within what time frame, in order for other tasks to even become possible in turn, and then accomplished efficiently on schedule. Therefore participants become responsible to one another.

Passing beyond whatever pathologically insecure extremes of empty, insatiable and pathetic manipulation of Narcissistic supply, into healthy quid pro quo and even genuine reciprocity, one ought ever be positively eager towards nurture and support in assistance to aid and better equip anyone else in any tasks, after all, involved in the very life support towards fruition of one's own vision at all shared by others, and expect no less in return; all only given requisite trust and good will to actually value and even take pleasure in such an accord, and not as any begrudging or reluctant sacrifice.

For honesty remains the best policy.

Of course, on the one hand, purposeful obscurantism, or on the other hand, simply stonewalling and playing stupid in order to deliberately obstruct, must be anathema. Moreover, however, even passive non response due to sheer good faith incomprehension must be explicitly forbidden as well. In case of deadlock due to incomprehension, the uncomprehending party or parties must be obliged to coherently formulate and then to ask questions and to demand whatever explanation or assistance until adequate comprehension is achieved in order to move forward in a timely manner. Reciprocally, all others, especially the uncomprehended party, must make every effort to oblige. After all, never moving beyond whatever is immediately clear to all, means never doing anything challenging, new, different or creative and inventive in problem solving.

In order to forestall needless drama, never lie or hide issues because problems will only escalate. Never hesitate to be truthful and open. Resolve needless and painful uncertainties. Never prolong mounting tensions. Talk over any signals raising mistrust or discomfort because ultimately trust suffers in the face of nagging doubt or resentment.

Appreciate another's effort. A simple "thank you" requires little trouble. And apologize: Put pride aside and say sorry when you're wrong.

 

 

The FoolQuest.com work ethic:

Realism is job one!

Trustworthy Honestly rigorous due diligence...

For such is the positive and proactive power of negative thinking!

Autonomy and Respect!

No one should ever be pressured into dishonest bland agreeability and false smiles simply not to rock the boat. Just as we are all fallible and can benefit from criticism, likewise anyone can be a downer simply because of feeling down. And as it turns out, most important in response, is not empty denial, neither reassurance nor consolation, but simply to be heard and understood, even in bearing bad tidings or alarm. Indeed, a word to the wise, effective active listening often pays off. After all, truth ignored doesn't really vanish.

“Philosophical doubt is not the pitiable condition of the soul that timid spirits imagine. It is not pessimism or cynicism, but a cheerful habit. It gives peace of mind. Men who stop pretending can sleep o’ nights.”
 
—  Evert Dean Martin

Indeed, far short of paralytic anxiety, simple avoidance and cognitive narrowing or tunnel vision as to constrain ones repertoire of alternative solutions, introverited defensive pessimism only seeks never to raise expectations unduly, in order thereby to consistently reduce disappointment and anticipatory stress thereof, even in rising to seize opportunity. Whereas the Contrarian realistically cautious optimism of extroverited defensive pessimism is the active caution or prudence channeling even the most perpetual anxiety constructively into advance troubleshooting by detecting even catastrophic snares and anticipating even the worst-case scenario of any situation in order thereby to carry out planning so as to minimize losses and damage. Indeed, pessimism may be no more than an attention to such detail that self deceiving foolhardy optimism of determined positivity so blithely glosses over.

For example, any serious and successful investor, however necessarily risk tolerant, never simply relies upon luck, but demands the most rigorously prudent and critical extroverited defensive pessimism in formal business plans outlining the most rigorous risk management.

“Only a coward can create the best defenses.” —  Chinese proverb

Sound business plans and proposals must be simple, specific, realistic, complete, sufficient clear detail without bogging down in minutiae, tasks in particular and assignment of responsibilities, in the form of an executive summary plus assumptions and projections followed by any notes and appendices providing whatever elaboration and detail as needed.

Creative tension: Actually making the vague unknown your friend!

•  twelve differences

Two common and deadly paralytic and heteronymous de-motivators are vagueness and hesitation in the face of the unknown. And the obvious remedies are the clarification of whatever goals put forth and learning from the successful instead of always reinventing the wheel the hard way. Alas, however, all too often vagueness is such that it will not even be immediately clear precisely how to sharpen the focus, nor is whatever learning curve in surmounting the unknown always readily apparent either.

In such common event, autonomy requires actually to make the vague and unknown your friend! But this is only for people who would anticipate not merely tolerating but actually enjoying creative tension, challenge and interaction and hence alleviation of boredom and loneliness thereby accrued, all as entailed in the collaborative exchange of assistance as ever necessary or helpful to whatever common endeavors.

Defensive pessimism and criticality are the singular predicate in support of improved global conditions, crucial for the one who is for all to safeguard and to pursue whatever common best interests most honestly and effectively, nevertheless and nonetheless, to the integrity to remain uniquely individual, at one and true to him/herself.

Experimentally, in good or bad circumstances alike, depressive pessimists demonstrate more prudent realistic judgment and more accurate prediction than optimists, in performance each equal or surpass the median average or norm, but neither tend to perform well in attempting to exchange respective coping strategies.

And clearly, overconfident optimism also risks dangerous illusion under painfully debilitating pressures of suppression and denial of forced cheerfulness from which often accrues inertia and worse, all fortunately preventable, but only so long as determination is yoked together with honesty and respect

 

Design Fiction the ability to make the impractical practical.
 
•  Case study: Time Travel Venture??!

Passive denial sinks even the most modest, banal and straightforward proposition into sheer empty pipedream, whereas honest due dilligence ekes barest feasibility study at all even out from the most fantastic overreach. Because objectivity is never a secure foundation, but merely an honest intention of error detection and course correction along the way. -Rigorous business planning towards new venture creation as an exercise in extreme Science Fiction futurological scenario planning and detailed World Building even in predicting and rising to meet new needs themselves yet to arise.

FoolQuest.com is YOUR invitation, likewise, to peruse content, weigh in, and partake of collaborative brilliance, online!

As Paul Raven observes: “Science Fiction isn’t dying at all; it’s metastasizing!”

 

Towards Eudemonia, authentic wellbeing, fulfillment is achieved by  optimal reciprocal engagement, meaningful and pleasurable. For happiness, Epicurus espoused freedom, friendship and thought. All of this is paradoxically weighty stuff, for lightening the heart! But there it is. Indeed: Happy People Talk More Seriously together, freely, and with less small talk. Because otherwise, to quote Olmstead: “After all is said and done, much is said and little is done.” And to quote Benjamin Disraeli: "Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action Indeed, a key feature of serious conversation is agenda. Moving from the abstract and general, to the concrete and particular, characteristics of agenda are questioning open endedness, the practice of criticism and controversy, strategic planning into expanding collaborative action. Agenda is therefore taboo. In any bureaucracy, especially as in any way influenced by or affiliated to what passes for education, if call to agenda cannot simply be ignored or condemned, they will typically be countered with call for compromise in the name of convention and sensitivity, all amounting to the heteronymous annihilation of all the aforementioned responsible and liberating characteristics of agenda.

• Beware Malagenda: second degree pipedream

                    and heteronymous taboo upon agenda discussion

Relationship is an attachment arising either from free and coherent even substantive communication, or indeed from common purposeful interaction and endeavor or else from the seduction of play that finds purpose and substance of its own within itself, and from the dignity of social risk with trust, security, ultimately openness in yielding to temptation; all the aforesaid that are the competencies of autonomy, along with organization and congenial social grace to manage and sustain contacts, reciprocally. -

All of that is such anathema and typically obstructed by such drone-like heteronymously arbitrary social acumen, skilled incompetence and cronyism, that everywhere buttresses the tacit institutionalization and twisted value of indeed all the most flagrant insensitivity and ineptitude imaginable, the bad driving out the good, and worse, actingout the destructive evil that is rampant bullying. Indeed, gregariousness and engaging personality may even be reviled as subversive and impertinent to a malagenda of sheer heteronymous group validation in sheer denial of all such profound endemic and pandemic alienation from all true innate and intrinsic drives of human expression and connection. And all to often, the favorite mode of all such denial is willful positivity and keeping it light! 

By contrast, happiness comes in meeting ones needs by capable interaction with responsible others. And this is a very serious matter indeed. As Oliver Cromwell put it, not only to strike while the iron is hot, but to keep striking until the iron heats up. To set groundwork and make opportunity. Whereas, bland small talk is safe because there is no risk, no real self disclosure. There is also often little risk involved in reporting the circumstances, actions and even the ideas of others. All of which accounts for approximately 90% of conversation amongst the lonely. Indeed, in the famous words of Eleanor Roosevelt: “Great minds discuss ideas. Mediocre minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” The Nihilistically attachment disordered amoral a'priori dismissal in very principle, of consciousness and meaning whatsoever, all in favor, instead, of mindless travesty and mimesis that is behavioral structure, intentionally arrested development stifling of all genuine spontaneity, all quasi-legislated under tabooistic bullying mass exhortation to bogus support group etiquette, permanently arrested in small talk and idle chit chat, plus "sharing" as a craven Orwellian euphemism for reciprocal constructivist listening in uncritical bland agreeability, is no remedy for loneliness, but guaranteed perpetuation thereof. Is anywhere else, all recommended practical means and instruction more diametrically taboo from well understood and relevant abstract principle?

In blithe apologetics for the promised spoils of eager conformism, what 'You are not above small talk. Nobody is.'  actually delineates, is not the pertinent whole truth of often so toxic social reality, but the benign functions of small talk most ideally, and one might hope, in any moderation and proportion. Even putting aside social skills in construction of smooth routine and dexterous ongoing catalogue of hierarchical social position all as extolled in The Magic of Small Talk, Forbes Magazine makes the case for the interpersonal Importance of small talk, but far from passive aimless lonely boredom bereft of personal identity, even the initial small talk in question strives to relatable sympathy and empathy, while the situational assumption seems to be of how amongst serious people with so much at stake, crucially important matters ever hang in the air, redolent with promise and only ever awaiting some tension-breaking deft opening into new beginnings.

For only in personal disclosure of ideas and assessment does risk of intimacy begin, watching carefully for reaction, sharing any opinions. Only given favorable response, then escalation may ensue. In more profound emotional revelation, there is significant disclosure and fear of rejection and failure, but also unique and indispensible opportunity for individual growth. Peak Communication involves considerable commitment and trust, and no need to hold back.

Beware interminable boring pointlessly belabored superficial small talk, often forced and awkward, only leaving one actually the more depleted, empty and discontent, all urgent need of truly important expression still mute and frustrated.

“A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.”  —  Bert Leston Taylor

And that is much of why the mentality and etiquette of those bogus support groups is so oppressive: Incessant prattle of endless dustier small talk may serve as denial warding off anxiety from serious matters from consciousness, that will only render the anxious gnawing frustrated loneliness and boredom of small talk the more eerily mysterious.

“What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.”

— Temple Grandin,  ‘The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's’

Not withstanding, and somewhat to the contrary, it has even been theorized that the Neanderthals lacked Social Skills and therefore, undone by their own rugged Individualism, died out for wont of such civic-virtues as division of labor, extended networking and social support!

Perhaps among those most notably challenged in life skills of Social and Emotional Intelligence today, being individuals, even high functioning, diagnosed on the Autisms-Asperger's spectrum, are well known often to compare themselves to Anthropologists abroad in a baffling strange new land. Alas, nothing in practice seems to have emerged from that salient insight. 

A cultural feature of Individualistic democracy and autonomy along with relative equality and criticality, low-context communication style, perhaps better described rather as low in subtext, is persuasive, even ambitious, eloquently articulate, precise, direct, and specific with little need of reading between the lines, all content and no status relationship dimension, thus also useful in the minimization of cross-cultural misunderstanding.

Introversion, Intuition, Thinking, Judgment Myers-Briggs Personality Types in particular, tend even to aversive impatience often stymied and exasperated with typical socially validating small talk, favoring instead just cutting to the chase, initiating any conversational substance of ideas.

•  Conversing with an INTJ
 

 

 

 

 

 
Boredom is an acute lack of excitement and often accrues from the dire mismatch of intrinsic motivation and relevantly meaningful activity to unique individual value, given any dearth of adequately engaging alternatives often for want of authentic respect and autonomy support with the freedom and power not only to avoid and refuse boring activities, but instead to do anything more interesting. Because boredom can be more of a reaction to situation or circumstance, than a trait of indivifual character. Fun is a powerful motivation aroused by stimulation, particularly novelty, under-stimulation engenders boredom, the very opposite of fun. The despair of meaningless futility and boredom undermines hope, bringing depression, anxiety, even illness and the dangerous clumsiness of fatigue, as well as risky behaviors and addictions. Often, boredom results or is exacerbated in response to pressure. Individually purposeful endeavor and motivation is an expression of autonomy. But competence in planning, organizing and following instructions challenges both personal resources and social aptitude, often unto frustration and dystress. Observably, boredom may often both result from and exacerbate incompetence in planning, organizing and following instructions, as well as the lack of purposeful endeavor and motivation in stimulus struggle which is the ongoing struggle against boredom, just as social stimulus struggle is the ongoing struggle against loneliness.

All living beings are perpetually engaged in stimulus struggle which is the name coined by anthropologist Desmond Morris for the perpetual striving of all living things, to regulate, to obtain and maintain, the optimum kind and degree of stimulation and arousal from the environment. Everything that we do is in order to modify subjective experience thereby altering consciousness, Stimulus struggle, then is the struggle against boredom, and social stimulus struggle is the struggle against loneliness, loneliness consisting of any deficiency or discrepancy between ones own desired versus actually achieved or at all available, quality of social interaction, stimulation, arousal and communication.

“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.” – Albert Camus, The Plague

In 'The Conquest Of Happiness' Bertrand Russell argues that jaded boredom is frequently exacerbated by the very fear of boredom motivating such incessant panicked pleasure seeking and craving for excitement as may characterize just such ostensible hedonism. Be that as it may, Russell however extols a certain endurance of another kind of boredom that he calls “Fruitful Monotony” inspiring quiet reflection amid nature. But is Russell truly advancing a consistently corroborated Empirical Ontology or merely fallen prey to the bias of his own perhaps somewhat Moralistic Axiology? Indeed, aren't people different with different needs and troubles?

To quote from 'The Miracle Morning'' by Hal Elrod: “Repetition can be boring or tedious, which is why so few people ever master anything.”  In 'The Pale King,' David Foster Wallace proffers the recommendation: “If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.” In context, Wallace was talking about the convolutions of the tax code in accounting and tax preparation, and he committed suicide before finishing his literary opus, an anti-dramatic Postmodern testament to meaninglessness.  

•  : There Are 5 Types Of Boredom. Which Are You Feeling?

Confinement in nagging unfulfilled frustration is often the experience of any gifted individual whose situation howsoever fails to provide an arena for uplifting application of their talents. Depending upon all manner of statistical factors and correlates such as individual stimulus needs, coping, and self-efficacy versus helplessness, patience versus impatience, hope versus despair, procrastination and introspection, gifted underachievers in particular may even however the more flagrantly tend, seemingly by disposition, intelligent and extroveritedly seeking more variety in external stimulation, to be more greatly than others, boredom prone, indeed actually requiring a constant and changing flow of stimulation for optimal arousal and engagement. "Stimulus struggle" seeks engagement in arousing even if nonutilitarian frivolous activity or: play. An optimal level of arousal is highly correlated to intrinsic satisfaction and value, the flexible imagination towards the comparison of fresh perspectives upon experience that is called: perceptual freedom, and peak performance.

Intellectual stimulation from the social environment remains ever paramount to the endeavor of FoFoolQuest.com. The engaging and invigorating trigger of intellectual stimulation is an intrinsic need, even neurologically. Intellectual stimulation opens the way for the enthusiastic autonomy of egalitarian close collaborative creative solution finding and thereby liberation from hierarchical heteronomy. Intellectual stimulation Is an intrinsic human need. Intellectual stimulation differs psychologically with individual character, and will therefore defy precise definition. Intellectual stimulation engages thought and imagination to challenge ambitious capability to insightfully identify and find creative solutions to problems. And yet intellectual stimulus deprivation remains pandemic. Clearly, either the system is broken, or else individual failure and confusion can actually be intentional, even deliberately brutal, boring Absurd and irrelevant Zen surreal by design, brainwash to break the will, indeed as it has been since antiquity. A hallmark of the compliant and complacent conservative personality is the the boundless capacity to endure boredom. And in the annals of formal education as so readily observed in so many other social institutions such as religion, politics and employment among others,  the tradition is recorded even most anciently in Plato's Academy, of deliberately and calculatingly quashing the very intellectual freedom and Dialectical intellectual stimulation so cherished  by and fatal to Plato's beloved but impractical mentor Socrates, via the deliberate infliction boredom in order so diligently to weed out innovators, tending to boredom proneness, and of novelty that ever threatens change. For many are the sages of old in fervent embrace of the value of social stability at any cost, the maintenance of sheer conservative inertia even in the most arbitrary status quo. -And therefore concerning themselves in all gravity with the contrivance of reliable production process and systematic filters of endlessly bland mediocrity enduring to this day, bureaucratically screening out deficiency and excellence alike and entirely without distinction. Indeed such remains the function of peer review in academic publication, and worse, of the FDA in the approval of medicines. No snake oil and no breakthroughs either. Such is heteronomy and the dread of all temptation into nonconformity replete with any possibility ever of Socratic Wisdom and the acknowledgment of ignorance, error and uncertainty.

•   Psychology Today: What is Boredom?
•  Scientific American: Why Boredom Is Anything but Boring 
•  : Types of boredom  
 

Not that boredom isn't actually quite ordinary and prevalent to any dull routine. Boredom, after all, is a luxury of affluence and indifference free and secure from any actual struggle for survival. After all, as Bertrand Russell notes, the opposite of boredom is not specifically eustress or pleasure, but merely excitement without distinction, even such distress as sheer terror or any simple over arousal, because after all, diminishing returns apply even to stimulation. Boredom is known to inspire action from bad judgement, in sheer desperation for any distraction. However, aversive emotion including boredom, is valuable as an indicator of suboptimal circumstance, even spurring on productive action, even meaningful altruism, foresight and planning. One of the actually good things about boredom, is that boredom bring the mind to wander, greater boredom even more greatly increasing creativity. Which helps explain both the cultivation of even the most grinding monotony to assuage and stave off extreme anxiety, overstimulating or outright dystress, to which boredom may actually come as a relief, and then if not unexpected creativity then the lengths and heights of malignant madness and danger often undertaken even inspired out of sheer boredom.

Boredom is a reactive state to wearingly dull, repetitive, or tedious stimuli or under arousal, distress, distraction, disengagement, the lack of interesting things to see, hear, or do physically and/or intellectually arouse and engage curiosity over time. Boredom is the dystress of life inertia. Boredom is an aggravated nervous fatigue, an angst-ridden intrinsic yearning to occupy time with relevant meaningful value. Boredom is a particular restless and even irritable condition of passivity opposite to optimal arousal and active creativity, anxious and overwhelmed, powerless and yearning for escape, not liking what one is doing but neither knowing what else to do for desperate wont of any better idea; arising, as observed by Otto Fenichel, simply “when we must not do what we want to do, or must do what we do not want to do.” Indeed there have always been many reasons why it may even be deemed a mistake to strive for ultimately boring inner harmony or tranquility: Heraclites said: "All is fire!" Nature is of clashing forces, and human nature likewise, is of inner conflict and passion. Therefore, true insight is likewise thereof, honestly. And so is engaged creativity that makes even ones own company at all the more interesting and congenial, particularly as in the eustress of scientific curiosity.

• SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: Bored?

Whereas, indeed, the condition of loneliness is entirely distinct from any mere circumstances of solitude or benefit of privacy. Hence, however counter intuitively, and far from maladaptive dysfunction, the benefits of privacy, retreat into high quality solitude, refreshing volitional solitary activities and behaviors, is often actually known to at all ameliorate rather than simply exacerbate sensations of loneliness and boredom.

Similarly, adaptive introverted strategies, Existentially Absurd, Ecclesiastically futile, alienated, desperate and even somewhat standardized recreational stopgaps in lieu of crucial meaningfully relevant engagement, for coping with understimulating tedium of employment, formal education or recreation hanging out socially and waiting patiently for an opening to the most empty and banal small talk in order to advance in popularity, by in the meantime eking out any small satisfaction, include fantasy, daydreaming, mental games, self amusement via the cultivation of new interests, appreciation, skills or hobbies, striking up conversation, arbitrary variation in routine tasks and careful observation of incidental environmental detail.

After all, in order to optimize stimulus struggle by prolonging interesting events, intentional activity must be organized towards the relation of actions to objects given whatever aspects of the environment howsoever allowing and supporting whatever particular activities.

A common twice exceptionality, lifelong deadly social and career learning disability among gifted underachievers, ongoing products of lifelong asynchronous development, in even somewhat rebelliously stunned apathetic bored and lonely deficiency of all such executive function including poor memory and low organizational skills, may be entirely due to fully active responsiveness arising only to howsoever valued high standards of pleasurable, engaging and meaningful opportunity.

And that is why FoolQuest.com in combating loneliness and boredom, remains dedicated, first and foremost, to the advancement of social engineering of more optimal social stimulus struggle: the systematic and concerted cultivation of more optimally pleasurable, engaging and meaningful interaction so essential to human flourishing. And what could be better?

Just as boredom may illicit the biological defense which is disassociation, conversely inattention and therefore distraction and disturbance, be it from self-conscious inner emotional turmoil or any bothersome external nuisance alike, all do factor into boredom by undermining interest and involvement. Hence, indeed, one way or another, actually ignoring the problem by attentive Zen mindfulness towards immediate activity and experience and tuning out external static and ego distraction alike, indeed, metaphorically even running away from oneself, has indeed ever been found to help in coping with the lonely grinding urgency of boredom, but much like unto extrinsic motivation or chemical stimulants, surely only temporarily. -For such can never be enough, Existentially... 

This article extends the study of a phenomenological investigation (Bargdill, R. W., 2000) in which six participants wrote protocols and gave interviews describing the experience of being bored with their lives. This study found that the participants gradually became bored after they had compromised their life-projects for less desired projects. The participants felt emotionally ambivalent because they were thematically angry with others involved in their compromises while being pre-reflectively angry with themselves. The participants non-thematically adopted passive and avoidant stances toward their lives that allowed their boredom to spread to more aspects of their lives. The participants' boredom led them to identity issues because they no longer were actively working toward projects. They felt empty and apathetic because they felt every action led to boredom, and thus action was futile. Preliminary distinctions between the experience of life boredom and depression are considered.

—  THE STUDY OF LIFE BOREDOM (abstract)

 

•    Meaning of values: THE THIRD FUNDAMENTAL

Even transitory boredom may often be regarded as a waste of time or far worse. Indeed, subjective time seems to drag interminably when suffering from boredom because of sheer monotony, the very infrequency of notable events resulting in boredom to begin with.

“Boredom is an emptiness filled with insistence.”  —  Leo Stein

Boredom is often manifestation of exactly such dissident ennui in passive resistance as might actually stem from the depressive stressed out apathetic alienated lack of interest and self-knowledge of repressed desires under any static situation of manipulative coercion or captivity, unsettled, fidgety, helpless and out of touch even with ones own sense of oppression, likely thereby even overshadowing whatever joys otherwise experienced.

“Boredom: the desire for desires”  —  Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy, ‘Anna Karenina’

Dangerous human error is often attributable to inattentive, stultifying and debilitating boredom and frustration on the job. Indeed, boredom is a contributing factor in however sullen and deadened anger, aggression and worse: thence to all manner of folly and vice.

“A yawn is a silent shout.”  —  Gilbert K. Chesterton

“the shriek of unused capacities.”  —  Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

"Boredom is rage spread thin"  —  Paul Tillich

“Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism”  —  Wendell Phillips

Therefore:

“We often forgive those who bore us, but never those whom we bore.”

—  Maxims of Franηois Duc de La Rochefoucauld, 

Indeed:

“The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault.”  —  Henry Kissinger

Yet exactly such an unhappy and painfully distressful evolutionary trait or response even such as sheer boredom, when seen nonetheless as a quality filter and an individual protest in defense of autonomy and self determination, may nevertheless be valued as useful even if aversive, and recognized as a cry for change rather than blithely pathologized as entirely maladaptive. Indeed, one positive value of boredom is in how transitory frustration from external understimulation in solitude facilitates inner focus, inner life, imagination and creative play. Whereas, disinterest and boredom likewise in sullen protest but actually as a defense mechanism of heteronomy, is a feature of crimestop, an aspect of doublethink.

“When work is a pleasure, life is joy!
When work is a duty, life is slavery.”
— Maxim Gorky

Because:

“To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.”

—  Heraclitus

Therefore:

"The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes."

—  Saul Steinberg

 

in accordance with the Axiology of G. E. Moore, just as pleasure is only the second order desire pursuant to whatever perceived and understood good, likewise avoidance of pain is only the second order fear or aversive desire pursuant to whatever perceived and understood evil, avoidance thereof being first order desire. Desires thus are meaningful, after all. Therefore, so is living life. Because, if the aversive emotion of boredom is, indeed, to quote Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy in ‘Anna Karenina,’ "the desire for desires," then in that case, what could be more meaningful, even than the worst boredom, let alone whatever heights of fulfillment! Indeed, boredom is so intensely value loaded, as to be most greatly meaningful. In the words of Gilbert K. Chesterton: "A yawn is a silent shout." For in the words of Leo Stein: “Boredom is an emptiness filled with insistence.” Death then may end boredom, but addresses none of the outcry of boredom.

• Boredom The Movie

 

“My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.”  —  Anthony Swofford, ‘Jarhead’

Whereas, indeed, the condition of loneliness is entirely distinct from any mere circumstances of solitude or indeed actual benefit of privacy. Indeed John Paul Sartre went so far as to opine: "If you are lonely when you are alone, then you are in bad company.” All hence, however counter intuitively, and far from maladaptive dysfunction, the benefits of privacy, retreat into high quality solitude, refreshing volitional solitary activities and behaviors, is often actually known to at all ameliorate rather than simply exacerbate sensations of loneliness and boredom, and the connected continuity of grinding consciousness whereof over time. Isolation and loneliness are invisible and unseen, situationally. Much as hunger and thirst call attention to lonliness calls attention to ones individual nutritional needs to be met, loneliness calls attention to ones unmet social needs and desires. The loneliness of the isolated will be entirely unsuspected by others from whom they are isolated and hidden. But lonely isolation may arise for the stranger in any new situation, in times of involuntary celibacy, among friendly seeming people who won't just find the time to befriend, in the company of untrustworthy friends, among the quiet and detached, and often simply for one who is different and just can't relate. 

Attachment theory was the foundation for an influential psychological theory of loneliness developed by the sociologist Robert S. Weiss. Weiss identified six social needs that, if unmet, contribute to feelings of loneliness. Those needs are attachment, social integration, nurturance, reassurance of worth, sense of reliable alliance, and guidance in stressful  situations. As would be predicted by attachment theory, Weiss maintained that friendships complement but do not substitute for a close, intimate relationship with a partner in staving off loneliness.

—  Encyclopedia Britannica

As dubiously attributed  Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel): "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." But oppression is a situation, circumstance or state of affairs wherein those who do indeed mind  actout and  bully. And resultant lonely isolation is a situation, circumstance, state of affairs or experience, howsoever quite bereft of folks who don't mind.

All living beings are perpetually engaged in stimulus struggle which is the name coined by anthropologist Desmond Morris for the perpetual striving of all living things, to regulate, to obtain and maintain, the optimum kind and degree of stimulation and arousal from the environment. Everything that we do is in order to modify subjective experience thereby altering consciousness, Stimulus struggle, then is the struggle against boredom, and social stimulus struggle is the struggle against loneliness, loneliness consisting of any deficiency or discrepancy between ones own desired versus actually achieved or at all available, quality of social interaction, stimulation, arousal and communication. Common causes of social isolation and therefore loneliness include bullying and intimidation, shyness or social anxiety, living away from home for the first time, friends moving away for employment or further advancement in formal education, and simply growing apart from those with whom one has grown up with. Or whatever failure of social integration, Or because no one seems to relate to whatever howsoever unique dystress or sore travail of ones own. Or having nowhere to go, no propinquitous routine behavioral structure, moreover uneventful and leaving one stymied and at a loss for any new news to share with others. Lonely people often fall prey to their own wishful thinking and unrealistic expectations, even sheer snake oil everywhere proffered to the vulnerable and unwary. Lonely people craving popularity, may often struggle to keep themselves occupied, drift into unhealthy habits or even addiction of one kind or another, join into dysfunctional social circles or bullying cliques, even gangs and cults, and enter into generally unviable relationships.

Alas and astonishingly, across the socio-political spectrum, no matter the range of ideological perspective upon responsibilities, the authentic wellbeing and thriving that is subjective and individually variable intrinsic reactive happiness to favorable circumstances of doing what one loves for whatever intrinsic value, even the most ambitious meaningful collaboration, autonomy, friendship, freedom and thought, such being the primary focus uniquely of FoolQuest.com. are elsewhere barely even considered if not fearfully taboo from consideration at all, so really dismissed as pipedream for wont of prior foundation or justification! Nor are values of authentic relationship often found at the crux of any practical outreach, as they really need to be.

For to idle and uneventful quiet, solitude may ever at least be at all private and  tranquil, beyond sheer boredom alone, loneliness is the distress of being isolated and estranged from others, perhaps even rejected, unseen and unknown, helpless to connect, a painful awareness and important desire not being met, to feel needed, wanted and connected, and a longing not merely to interact at all, but actually however to relate to others, to genuinely react and respond to one another.

Loneliness, after all, remains the wont of intimacy. Hence, when mass anxiety fails to challenge our very way of life or to trouble the powers that be, and thus individual dystress fails to evoke sympathetic feeling and therefore mutual aid, and if none any longer shall rally to the alarm sounded, then such only will signal vulnerability to predation and exploitation, merely endangering others as well as oneself. If as we are told, indeed keeping things light is indeed so crucial to popularity and social success, then popularity and social success must come at the sacrifice of all happiness. Popularity and social success on the one hand, and friendship on the other, remain starkly antithetical. This is because friendship is genuine, substantive and intimate in psychological visibility, while popularity or social success depend upon boring facile superficiality and ever maintaining lonely distance. Therefore the inherent contradiction remains irresolvable in very principle, and nothing but a setup for frustration, failure and craven exhortation to lowered expectations and making do with mindless small talk. Because given the intrinsic human need of psychological visibility, every pretence typically buttressing popularity and social success, so antithetical to friendship, remains ever miserable and no less alien than unpopularity and more overt isolation. Either way, only set up for failure and suffering, a sore travail. And indeed all such preceding complaint, nothing so surprising, remains well known, tropic, even somewhat clichι iconoclasm: knee-jerk indignation notwithstanding, and coming as little surprise to anyone, attacks upon cherished beliefs, thrust whereof having long dissipated all true shock value, and therefore rousing ever less urgency and concern. But then, beyond just griping and grumbling, for the genuinely disgruntled, entirely just fed up, realistically, what manner of alternatives, when no one much seems to care, and the only winning move is not to play?
 
Alas that substance and purpose remain actually shameful, awkward, nerdy, uncool, socially unacceptable and taboo. For such is what is most often called: Anti-intellectualism (hostility and mistrust towards intellect, intellectuals, intellectualism, and deprecation of culture whatsoever) but perhaps more properly designated: anti-intraception (a discomfort or opposition in very principle, toward the subjective, the imaginative, the tender minded). And if indeed interminable emotionally and intellectually distant, unwelcoming and disingenuous small talk ever keeping it light, remains key to popularity and social success, then such do-nothing busywork dronelike Orwellian anti-intellectual or anti-intraceptive path of popularity and social success, remains antithetical to true friendship, because it remains in the very taboo nature of friendship, that friendship must be open, genuine and fully engaged, not cagy and mindlessly distant. Only an oppressor demands of one never to think or to speak out. And in the words of Barbara Sher: “Isolation is the true dream killer, not your attitude.”

Expression or else isolation: Meaning and by implication, engagement, is most noted for assuaging not only boredom but loneliness even during solitude, and solitary pleasure with no one to share it, for most quickly wearing into loneliness. But eventually meaning too yearns for expression and communication, for the most passionate engagement will ever be, of course, with others.

And that is why FoolQuest.com in combating loneliness and boredom, remains dedicated, first and foremost, to the advancement of social engineering of more optimal social stimulus struggle: the systematic and concerted cultivation of more optimally pleasurable, engaging and meaningful interaction so essential to human flourishing

 

 

“You know I had troubles with depression in my early adulthood and I never really got it, I never really understood what was wrong; I didn't know what to do to fix it. Whereas when I was lonely, when my loneliness lasted I knew exactly what I needed and I needed more connection and I understood that if that increased connection came into my life my loneliness would go away. So there wasn't that sort of mysteriousness to it, I knew what I needed and it just wasn't there. And I think that's what is so frustrating about loneliness, is that you can picture and intuit and you are very acutely aware of what it is that you need but you just can't get it.”
 
—  Emily White, 'All In The Mind' interview with Natasha Mitchell
ABC National Radio, Australia  
 
 
“Loneliness breaks the spirit.”   —  Jewish Proverb
 
“Isolation is the true dream killer, not your attitude.” — Barbara Sher
 
“No man is an island.” — John Donne

The human brain is neurologically structured so as to equate loneliness with danger and death. Hence the aphorism of killing socially, to describe covert relational hostility and bullying, shunning and mobbing, and the sheer fair game gaslighting terror all therefrom. One feels adequate, secure and comforted in friendly company, the more so as love deepens, and especially following protracted absence. For loneliness is dystress in response to whatever kind of separation or isolation. Loneliness, rightly dreaded, therefore, alas, is shunned and despised. Loneliness, rapidly contagious and pandemic, actually propagates. Loneliness and attachment disorder is often a worsening Component of Psychiatric Disorders and conditions, sufferers feeling isolated and alone, just when they need social and emotional support more than ever. Indeed, a common twice exceptionality, lifelong deadly social and career learning disability among gifted underachievers, ongoing products of lifelong asynchronous development, in even somewhat rebelliously stunned apathetic bored and lonely deficiency of all such executive function including poor memory and low organizational skills, may be entirely due to fully active responsiveness arising only to howsoever valued high standards of pleasurable, engaging and meaningful opportunity. Loneliness may even accrue simply from values, frustrated yearning and vision of any conceivable way of life howsoever more open and genuine between individuals. -As exhorted by Epicurus, freedom, friendship and thought. Moreover, according to one study, sad, lonely people more likely to become ‘natural’ social psychologists. Indeed, melancholic introverts are often more perceptive than others in understanding how people act in social groups.

"Have no friends not equal to yourself."  —  Confucius

Because:

"Loners, by virtue of being loners, have at their fingertips the undiscovered, the unique and the rarefied; innate advantages when it comes to imagination; concentration; inner discipline; a knack for invention; originality, for finding resources in what others would call vacuums; a knack for vision."
 
—  Anneli Rufus

Therefore:

"Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate to others the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible . . . If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely."
 
—  Carl Gustav Jung, 1989, p. 356.

“There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.”
 
—  Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

 
“Philosophers, writers, artists, even scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking. If Defoe had really lived on a desert island, he could not have written Robinson Crusoe, nor would he have wanted to. Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.”
 
—  ‘Conversation with a Pacifist’ by George Orwell
 

Loneliness, social and emotional isolation, dystressfully consists of any deficiency or discrepancy between ones own desired versus actually achieved or at all available, quality of social interaction, stimulation and communication. Loneliness accrues not from separation from just any companions, but separation from preferred companions. All therefore, so paradoxically, feelings of painful isolation are often actually triggered in the presence of and by interaction with others. Loneliness is the wont of intimacy. The most wretchedly abandoned, confused and damaged, lack even concept of intimacy. Moreover, social support as ever may remain amongst the foremost predicate of capability and success, hence deficiency or mismatch to whatever actual needs of social support, the very recipe for failure.

Attachment theory was the foundation for an influential psychological theory of loneliness developed by the sociologist Robert S. Weiss. Weiss identified six social needs that, if unmet, contribute to feelings of loneliness. Those needs are attachment, social integration, nurturance, reassurance of worth, sense of reliable alliance, and guidance in stressful situations. As would be predicted by attachment theory, Weiss maintained that friendships complement but do not substitute for a close, intimate relationship with a partner in staving off loneliness.

—   Encyclopedia Britannica

“People think being alone makes you lonely, but I don't think that's true. Being surrounded by the wrong people is the loneliest thing in the world.” 
—  Kim Culbertson


Religion
typically blames loneliness upon separation from God. Some people become lonely without an animal pet. Indeed, according to psychologists, there are six types of loneliness:

  1. Interpersonal loneliness: This is the result of lacking or losing a significant, or intimate, relationship.
  2. Social loneliness results when a person is on the fringes of a group, excluded from a group, or is actively rejected and even bullied. But even in the midst of seeming sociable congeniality, to quote Mark R. J. Lavoie: “Life dies inside a person when there are no others willing to befriend him.”
  3. Cultural loneliness: This is where a person belongs to a different culture and feels that they don’t fit, or belong, in the new culture.
  4. Intellectual loneliness: This is where a person feels intellectually, or educationally out of synch with their peers, their family or their social group.
  5. Psychological loneliness: This is where a person has experienced a trauma, to which others fail to understand or to relate, and which therefore separates said person out from others around them.
  6. Existential or cosmic loneliness: This is an isolating loneliness experienced by a person who is confronting death. Indeed we are all mortal and therefore prone to terror management.

—  Are You Lonely?  Agnostics.com 

Loneliness is entirely distinct from solitude or seclusion even by preference or choice at any given moment. Loneliness, even in a crowd, is an emotion or experience, a powerful hollow feeling of emptiness and isolation, beyond merely the desire for company or human interaction, a sensation of disconnection, cut off, even alienated from others, an experienced difficulty and frustration even in forming meaningful human contact, separate and isolated from the world.

Dutch researcher Jenny de Jong-Gierveld defined loneliness as “a situation experienced by the individual as one where there is an unpleasant or inadmissible lack of (quality of) certain relationships. This includes situations in which a number of existing relationships is smaller than considered desirable or admissible or situations where the intimacy one wishes for has not been realized. Thus, loneliness is seen to involve the manner in which a person experiences and evaluates his or her isolation and lack of communication with other people.”

“Motherhood is so consuming and exhausting that it almost has to be lonely. Who has time or energy for anything else? After a day in the trenches with my kids I don’t feel like going out. Or calling a friend. I don’t even have the energy to have a real conversation with my husband most nights.” 
 
—  I'm Lonely - MyLifeSuckers 

The perceived or evaluated insufficiently rewarding quality of existing relationships, therefore fails to buffer from stress. The lonely are restless and often sleep poorly. Loneliness is a threat to life and health.  Just as stimulus struggle to begin with, is the ongoing struggle against boredom, social stimulus struggle is the ongoing struggle against loneliness.

Eleanor Rigby might have been in worse shape than the Beatles imagined: not only lonely but angry, depressed and in ill health. University of Chicago research psychologist Cacioppo shows in studies that loneliness can be harmful to our overall well-being. Loneliness, he says, impairs the ability to feel trust and affection, and people who lack emotional intimacy are less able to exercise good judgment in socially ambiguous situations; this makes them more vulnerable to bullying as children and exploitation by unscrupulous salespeople in old age. But Cacioppo and Patrick (editor of the Journal of Life Sciences) want primarily to apply evolutionary psychology to explain how our brains have become hard-wired to have regular contact with others to aid survival. So intense is the need to connect, say the authors, that isolated individuals sometimes form parasocial relations with pets or TV characters.

Publishers Weekly review of:

'Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection' by John T. Cacioppo

 •   Encyclopedia Britannica: psychology loneliness
 
 •   Multifactor Dynamic Loneliness Model
 
 •  Loneliness: natural affinity for the internet
 
 •  How to spot a loner 
 
“Loneliness is the first thing that God's eye nam'd not good.”  —  John Milton

Worse, none dare call out dystress straightforwardly, for the pride in self reliance engenders a stigma upon loneliness and shame of rebuke for unpopularity even since childhood. For, whereas the familiar community of old was so stifling, the modern world ofttimes seems simply estranged and obdurate!

“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”  — George Eliot

Rather than trustingly reaching out sociably, lonely people, often long traumatized in whatever hostile insecure upbringing, may tend instead mistrustfully retreat from potential threat. And leave us face it, there is no end of threat, worst of course from bullying, open hostility and abuse outright, but from every sense of pressure conditionality in order to fit in, instead of genuine acceptance or even simple tolerance, the repellant and perpetually frustrating alienated travail of eking out whatever crumbs of emotional sustenance on the social minefield, as do so many others indeed as is increasingly deemed appropriately remedial if not actually even entirely normal and sufficient, amid the vast and phony social wasteland of ever more tedious unfulfilling frustration, the waste of time that engenders only greater aggravation, boredom and loneliness actually in company even than in isolation and solitude. -salt rubbed in the wounds, not any healing balm of comfort.

Furthermore, failure to relate to all manner of seemingly senseless and tediously arbitrary customary interaction, is not uncommon for those who have not been made to feel included, or simply for those who, having undergone positive disintegration and broken the indoctrination under the pervasive cult of socialization, thence forth evaluate for themselves.

To make things worse, the ordeal may elicit mounting sensation of social inadequacy and incompetence.

Beware interminable boring pointlessly belabored superficial small talk, often forced and awkward, only leaving one actually the more depleted, empty and discontent, all urgent need of truly important expression still mute and frustrated.

Loneliness is the wont of intimacy. Hence, when mass anxiety fails to challenge our very way of life or to trouble the powers that be, and thus individual dystress fails to evoke sympathetic feeling and therefore mutual aid, and if none any longer shall rally to the alarm sounded, then such only will signal vulnerability to predation and exploitation, merely endangering others as well as oneself.

Yes, discouraging depression, according to loneliness actually propagates like unto a virus and even promotes the animism of religion.

Rightly and responsibly then, do we hesitate to reach out to others in distress of any kind. Because even though need is the motive ever to reach out at all, neediness is only cloying. Because loosing might rub off emotionally and socially! Because excessive burdens of responsibility to others often only drags down a life of promise. Because of compassion burn out. Because unconditional selflessness only invites the sucker's payoff. Because one never knows what desperately manipulative and neurotic pigheaded wretched bully or unfeeling confidence trickster will only bite the hand that feeds them! -And with utter impunity...

Hence, all the more, loss, decline, disappointment, unhappiness, grief and suffering of any kind, so needlessly shameful in society, are all often isolating and lonely in their subjective intensity and hence introversion. Indeed, loneliness is also associated with mortality. Indubitably, loneliness is formative, for some people exactly opposite as for others, motivating some, for example, to incisive empathy whist others to insecure withdrawn babbling egotism, making some more self sufficient and others exactly less so. And so, it will be in loneliness, whether as abiding in actual solitude or even whilst thronging amid the madding crowds, that are all conundrums and struggles of individuality contemplated, confronted and discovered, the separation and distinction of the self from the world beyond, with all personal longings and on whatever ones own terms.

“There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.”  —  Eric Hoffer

For loneliness is a quality that defies simple objective measurement, even such as the frequency and duration of social interaction, but also of the nature, preference and kind. Loneliness may typically result from the dearth of an engaging social network and activities or interaction towards social integration and/or opportunities for emotional intimacy. Causes of loneliness are, most obviously, bereavement, longing for another absent or unrequited, abandonment, social rejection and abuse, isolation, neglect, not fitting in, discontent, alienation or individual dissatisfaction, reciprocal failure to relate, incompatible values, sheer irrelevance, the unsympathetic helplessness of society in denial before the powerless individual in crisis and tragedy, but also stress, overwork and underutilization of skills and deficiency of stimulating challenge and hope.

The outsider is the reject or unbeliever apart from common activities and purpose. Reciprocally, pandemic alienation and the boredom and despair of wage slaves and students, not even permitted the release of just giving up, is the result of sheer grinding busy work that has has lost all meaningful and satisfying initiative.

The adaptive modes of acquisition include achievement, productive creativity towards fulfillment of desires, even competition, aggression, force or power to simply take whatever one wants, and influence via succorance, reaching out where achievement and aggression are inapplicable, specifically, in solicitation of attention, sympathy, concern, affectionate care and support, to nurturance, the desire to help, reciprocal and complementary to succorance in any healthy give and take. However, without trust and respect, insecure reliance upon threatening and domineering social situations, even however actually unpleasant and stressful, only exacerbates needy codependent frustrated yearnings and bottomless emptiness.

Alas, the social incentives and disincentives so stifling of individual creativity, opinion, controversy and creativity, cheat us all of expression conducive to autonomous interpersonal interest and engagement in return for heteronymous non threatening conditional approval, learned helpless emptiness, boredom and loneliness.

No, loneliness is not resolved by the mere presence of others, marshmallow-throwing touchy-feely encouragement or commiseration on cue, mortification, bullying and scapegoating, nor any other empty social grooming and consensual validation, nor even necessarily by intimate acts, much less any interaction the more superficial or heteronymous. -such as shallow and perfunctory political activism that fabulously promises us each a place at their table, but only really means to say (as in that wonderful line from 'The Last Emperor'): "Join us comrade, or fuck off!" Because volunteerism of any kind will never actually get you anything but someone else's' chores. -Drudgery such as typically does not involve the high levels of interaction and cooperation such as to illicit equally high levels of sociability while curtailing antisocial conduct and rejection.

Rather, loneliness is only ever truly resolved by someone else who relates and responds so as to move you, uniquely, with challenge and variety, compatibly and reciprocally, ever the better to understand one anot

“A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the lyrics.”  —  unknown

And since emotion finding outlet thus becomes motivation, meaningful common goals put forth or inquiries actively pursued may greatly facilitate the aforesaid resolution of loneliness. Indeed, in substantive co-operative endeavor may the flame of just such affection be most readily be fanned and nurtured. And loneliness is but the starvation thereof.

All of this is precisely why simply hanging out aimlessly or meeting others for recreation and consumption, online or even in real life, striving so determinedly only to relax and seek for oblivion from the grind, is so completely boring, futile and irrelevant ever to finding new beginnings and connection out from the sterile void.

Better dead than mellow!

Indeed, healing loneliness requires more than merely satisfice, making do with ordinary casual social contact, even acquiescence to the safest and dullest small talk, conditionality, towing the line, generally going along to get along, but rather, true investment in others and any genuine and meaningful engagement into their individuality. For the deeper and more intense the longing, the keener the deprivation and frustration. And, to complicate the problem, there are many needs of immediacy that are simply ill served by the abstraction and remoteness of interactivity online. That is why truly engaging interaction online best plays to the highly cerebral strengths of the medium, at which the fundamental electronic tools of the Internet even excel.

The traditional Four Levels of Happiness are laetus: material physical satisfaction and immediate gratification, felix: the ego satisfaction of personal achievement, the Beatitude of contribution making an impact or difference beyond oneself, and lastly, the sublime fullness of goodness, beauty, truth and love, possibly so much as self realization.

And we may hope that the fulfilling involvement of interaction and relationship enters somewhere.

But even the precious pursuit of happiness is never guarantee even of hope and opportunity. All manner of daunting obstacles remain. But perhaps some measure of freedom may yet at all permit the involvement of stimulating intellectual challenge in practice and experience towards better decision making.

As, one way or another, primary needs still tend to call for attention first, even barring immediate threat to physical survival, economic requirements are often experienced as the most palpable barrier to self-actualization or at least freedom and autonomy in modern life. And as a solution, many yearn for recognition of their true potential and best opportunity for fulfillment thereof, via some capable and dedicated mentorship to success and fulfillment in a situation facilitating due compensation.

Alas, the deck is so often stacked against us at every turn. Certainly, there may be readily available general guidance in pursuit of the conventional expectations of others. But assistance towards one's own ends is by far the harder to find and often deficient if not fraudulent outright. Only compromise and snake oil remain ever abundant, barring the most extreme and resolute self reliance indeed.

Hence, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness increasingly are quickly reduced to an ongoing invitation to bang one's metaphorical head against the proverbial wall! And at a certain threshold of sheer frustration, the realization must dawn that compromise has spared no aggravation, nor do increasingly outmoded expectations manifest any greater efficacy than any other inane sycophantic vogueing cargo-cult mimesis of success.

In the end, only truth to oneself is even worth the trouble. Internet conversation is often so repetitive and of greater quantity than quality. Honestly, how often is there anything new that we all haven't heard before again and again? Conventional thinking about overcoming loneliness and isolation is largely a waste of time. Only FoolQuest.com presents something new and different, worth talking over and not found elsewhere, a project proposal for together addressing loneliness for what it really is and what it really needs.

 
 
What if one's social needs are differently more substantive?
 
 

"The penalty for success is to be bored by people who used to snub you."   —  Lady Nancy Astor

 

The very norm itself is entirely dysfunctional and untrustworthy!

There is severe introversion turning one's back upon the world, there is cliquishness of self isolating peer groups, and bullying often manifests as overt ostracism and shunning against targeted individuals specifically, but there are also more subtle lesser degrees of distance. Indeed the most normal distance between strangers and casual acquaintances is expected to nurture deeper acquaintance and blossoming intimacy and familiarity in due course. It’s a perfectly natural process, but quite unreliable. People can be unfriendly. Having entered into whatever social situation of propinquity, of repeated regular contact, the question remains how to obtain openness and cooperation in advancing any relationship. Especially in social life and most especially as opposed to career pursuit, people tend to react unconsciously: viscerally, habitually and prejudicially, "on autopilot," rather than in thinking considered response. People are not rational agents of self interest. People are not even driven by sheer Pleasure Principle. Rather, people are often cagey and driven by perceived vested interest in social integration and standing. To be outgoing and personable, to offer or to elicit value, all this does not help. Humor, insight and intelligence do not help. Care and compassion do not help. Particularly, being interesting does not make friends. Or so goes the prevailing common sense social advice, becoming ever more arcane, ego-dystonic, alienated and alienating. The social context is not a conduit but a barrier between individuals.

There are two kinds of Psychiatric patients, indeed, two kinds of people: those who are unhappy because they do not fit in, and those who are unhappy because of the lives they must lead simply in order to fit in. Is there any third alternative? This remains extremely unclear. Alas, the very question is taboo. In truth, successful mitigation of the dilemma is uncommon, poorly understood and seldom discussed. The same unserious answers abound. They often have to do with how one ought to feel, rather than how one does, rationalizations rather than addressing intrinsic needs.

Even if none dare say it, typical heteronymous willfully positive behaviorally operant social advice of agreeability in order to fit in, called social skills, really all boils down to their true unacknowledged epitome:

 

The Ten Commandments Of Con Men  

  • Be a patient listener (it is this, not fast talking, that gets a con man his coups).
  • Never look bored.
  • Wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them.
  • Let the other person reveal religious views, then have the same ones.
  • Hint at sex talk, but don’t follow it up unless the other person shows a strong interest.
  • Never discuss illness, unless some special concern is shown.
  • Never pry into a person’s personal circumstances (they’ll tell you all eventually).
  • Never boast — just let your importance be quietly obvious.
  • Never be untidy.
  • Never get drunk.

"Maria said, “Is someone who follows this advice a con man? Again, depends on intent.” I looked at the list and got scared anyway. I felt like a con man."

Logically, even in acts of the most flagrant manipulation, there indeed need not actually be any malicious intent whatsoever, but conceivably even benevolent aims, as unlikely as all of that may seem. Indeed, Machiavelli advised his Prince that it is necessary to know how to be good and how not to be good. Be all that as it may, not many benevolent people are naturally so guileful in temperament.

At the risk of extreme oversimplification, conceivable benevolent confidence manipulation includes even such as those of cultivating transference love in nondirective Psychodynamic Psychotherapy under tightly controlled conditions. Ideally, in consummate conduct within dharma in order to control and curtail all potential for abuse, the Psychotherapist does no evil, because he or she is selfless in motivation, pursuing no agenda, overt or covert, of Behavioral compliance no matter how well meaning.

Otherwise, no matter what, any such a regimen of willful alienation, is facile, ego disyntonic, extrinsically motivated even if just for fitting in. Indeed, the dedication, investment and learning curve are considerable, a bore and a chore. A person who regularly provides sex in exchange for money is a prostitute, and a person who cultivars the habits and function of a confidence trickster becomes a confidence trickster, a hollowed out phony. Why then has there always been such an industry in the rationalization and justification of everything fraudulent and soul crushing?

Sun Su said: "War is deception." Deception is an act of aggression and exploitation, suitable only against dangerous malicious enemies, and quite inappropriate to friendship. Again, heteronymous social skill and the autonomous and democratic capacity for friendship, so often come at odds, intrinsically. The heteronymous prevailing willfully positive behaviorally operant social advice of agreeability in order to fit in, in all of its abidingly profound cynicism, so lonely even in a crowd, is actually hostile and suspicions as so completely appropriate for reconnaissance behind enemy lines, exactly the dispiriting wasteland that social life has been reduced to.

Gentle reader, if you find yourself yearning for anything different and better, then you are hardly alone. Acceptance encourages psychological visibility and the open exchange of honest free expression. But the conditionality, secrecy and  and invisibility of fitting in is bulwark of "An unexamined life , as Socrates warns, not worth the living for any human being, putting every intrinsic value far out of mind.

Arguably, even trying to make friends may be the mistake, when the real game is to attain social approval, access and inclusion. Always keep it light and upbeat! Keep opinions to yourself. Follow sports. Make innocuous small talk. Pander to collective identity. Bah, humbug! Conditional acceptance is only another form of rejection. Social success then becomes just another job we hate in pursuit of whatever hoped for eventual pay off or extrinsic reward. Such is conformist mediocrity and heteronomy filtering out inadequacy and excellence without distinction. Engaged Emotional Intelligence and capacity for friendship frequently comes at odds with social intelligence, conformity and sheer tolerance for boredom never rocking the boat. That is the test of loneliness in a crowd. And that is why the advice actually ever fulfils the lowered expectations of shy and withdrawn people, for whom a modicum of distance and passivity is actually congenial.

Pandemic loneliness is often blamed upon the breakdown of traditional close-knit social order. But the historical truth is that humanity could not escape those stifling conditions quickly enough, once the opportunities presented themselves. Alternatively, pandemic loneliness is often blamed upon the architectural illusions of the social network online. But the truth is that Facebook, in all of its runaway popularity, was consciously and deliberately invented as the IT for the previously existing paradigm of colligate social life, absorbed in all of its brutal superficiality. The problem runs deeper, and the true culprit remains, as ever, heteronomy.

Relationship is an involving attachment growing from intrinsically motivating reciprocal engagement. But the recommended process of social outreach is not a facilitator, but instead an arduous, forced, alienated and alienating obstacle course, a social minefield, an extrinsically motivating punishment and reward system as desperately joyless as formal education and employment, and likewise systematically thwarting all that is genuine, spontaneous or reciprocally engaging. Indeed, engagement being the natural beginning involvement growing into relationship privately, is held forth as the furtively hoped for end product of the common sense seeming yet bass-awkward and barking mad oppressive recommended standard paradigm of social life and recreation, the punishment and reward system of the social minefield, annihilating all vitality of intrinsic motivation.

It is often recommended to socialize constantly and indiscriminately, in even the dullest interaction with the dullest people. Key to fitting in may be active enthusiasm and validating approval for whatever collective activity, sports, changing location, even eating and drinking with gusto, but not too heavily. The object of social skill, in such dreary undertaking, is a balancing act of approval seeking, upon which the individual will be tolerated or scorned: being out going yet exceedingly cautious to sense when anyone else does not want to talk to you. Moreover, it may be necessary at the same time, not to stand out in any way, to escape notice and blend in, to offend no one and please no one either. In other words, society is seen as essentially inhospitable. Alas, how true. -And the most divisive, in all obsessively conformist demand for harmony in mediocrity. And yet it is also deadly to withdraw, and become a wall flower, never taking initiative to interact. Active validation of status quo is expected. What to do?

Being nice may only be taken advantage of. Worse, curtailing the freedom of one to one interaction, there is the approval or disapproval of third parties. Indeed, even encouraging results one to one, may incur jealousy and third party resentment, thus unpopularity. Particularly, not just palpable awkwardness and anxiety, but even, for example, actually charm and humor in men in order to to talk to women, entertainingly, is typically fiercely resented. Instead, connection must be all but covert, and even then, only after first winning peer approval. And an opinion, observation, complaint or criticism aired, that wins the sympathy or approval of one or few, may quickly provoke the ire of the many. All in all, even resounding social success in this mediocre rat race, to paraphrase a Gian Vincenzo Gravina, will boorishly rob one of solitude without providing much in the way of good company.

Which is to say: The very punishment and reward system of socialization process so fervently recommended, simply cannot but stifle intrinsic human social needs, even when it works correctly by its own cretin terms. Yet we are assured that gaining trust and social integration by so precarious, tentative, tedious and onerous a process, will one fine day accrue opportunity for more genuine private relationship. -Much as we are assured that drudgery and conformity are the first step on the road to self realization.

Alas, it's all much the same punishment and reward racket. A racket, after all, is any dishonest scheme or ongoing transaction, all not as it contrives to present itself and as is tacitly accepted or endured by the majority of those involved, but in actuality a scam or fraud, a deceptive practice of coercion and manipulation conducted for the benefit of a few cronies at the expense of the many. Get with the program: The program never fails. You fail the program! The masses will always comply in ever greater effort and diligence jumping through hoops and fighting amongst ourselves for scraps, believing and rationalizing just about anything, all in order to obtain whatever artificial scarcity or bait-and-switch, no matter how plainly contrived.  For bait-and-switch is when the chimerical allure of one good and howsoever advantageous terms, is dangled out to beguile and ensnare the mark into resignation, defeat, and Transaction for some other, lesser and more costly approximation entirely.  

It is often cited as crucial, how social skills must become instinctive, second nature, habit without deliberation. And there are different reasons: Most often emphasized, sheer information overload in dealing spontaneously with bombarding social stimuli on any conscious level. Because thinking is so slow and tedious! But perhaps the greater importance of the process of osmosis, of socialization that none dare call: indoctrination or brainwash, is that conscious perception risks redeeming Existential disgust and alienation. For it is only oppressors, who discourage the masses from thinking. -for our own good, of course!

If sheer obliviousness of anti-intellectuality and desperate emotional repression cannot be cultivated and maintained, then rationalizing heteronomy will be no less crucial. The individual socialized and subsumed into the collective identity, must embrace the ideology of socialization in order to judge others and themselves in constant suspense of anxiety and even hyper vigilance, never to achieve positive disintegration and growth into autonomy. And as we shall discover, the slippery apologetics for the ideology of socialization shift ground readily between ideology and pragmatic expedience.

But pragmatic expedience, after all an appeal to extrinsic motivation, is no more genuinely persuasive than the craven ideology of socialization only given sufficient individual autonomy, simply because, in the first place, interpersonal engagement should not be sought only as the long deferred bored and lonely end product of ever more empty, grinding and superficial extensively networked long term interrelationship, the much glorified subsuming and subjugation of the individual into the body politic, that Hobbes called: 'Leviathan.' Rather, autonomous yet no less and indeed actually all the more truly close knit social embedment actually needs to progress exactly the other way around: Extensively networked long term relationship should branch out as a byproduct from the growth of intrinsically motivating interpersonal engagement into close attachments, itself a byproduct of howsoever meaningful interaction.

Being that engagement is the beginning of the state or condition of attachment which is an ongoing, remembered or anticipated and even yearned for state of engagement, hence according to Self-Determination Theory, secure attachment is characterized by attention and responsiveness to one another's needs when turning toward one another to obtain comfort and care. Indeed, a prime feature of autonomy is the need for meaningful engagement fending off boredom and loneliness. Heteronomy, the ever cagey and calculating enemy of autonomy, is also the active enemy of engagement and attachment, of transparent agenda, of open passion and interest of every kind. Therefore, bullying which is heteronymous, stifles initiative. Indeed, the social skill sets of heteronomy and autonomy are so entirely different. Heteronymous social skills correlate to the guardedness and control of heteronomy in the first place, and not any unmet needs of the individual. And yet the exhortations to sublimation into insipid headgames persist, often seemingly the only game in town, and even purportedly as the means somehow to anything different and not just more of the same.

Even putting aside social skills in construction of smooth routine and dexterous ongoing catalogue of hierarchical social position all as extolled in The Magic of small talk, Forbes Magazine makes the case for the interpersonal Importance of small talk, but far from passive aimless lonely boredom bereft of personal identity, even the initial small talk in question strives to relatable sympathy and empathy, while the situational assumption seems to be of how amongst serious people with so much at stake, crucially important matters ever hang in the air, redolent with promise and only ever awaiting some tension-breaking deft opening into new beginnings.

For only in personal disclosure of ideas and assessment does risk of intimacy begin, watching carefully for reaction, sharing any opinions. Only given favorable response, then escalation may ensue. In more profound emotional revelation, there is significant disclosure and fear of rejection and failure, but also unique and indispensable opportunity for individual growth. Peak Communication involves considerable commitment and trust with no need to hold back.

To quote Socrates: "'"An unexamined life is not worth the living, for the human being."  -And not just in entirely Phenomenal inner private refection, but particularly, by way of the Dialectic together. - friends, freedom and thought as espoused by Epicurus. Indeed, Happy People Talk More Seriously, and make less small talk. And surely that does require an enviable situation of secure social network embedment and good friendships.

Otherwise, if social success really does come so cautiously cagy and disingenuously, by never making waves and keeping conversation light, then it should come as little wonder how, just as the rich can be as monumentally unhappy as the most desperately impoverished, that the popular are so often as lonely and miserable as the most socially isolated and alone.

“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

The sheer toadying sycophantic duplicity of popularity, being an intentional deception only entirely conscionable and comfortable in clear conflict and self defense against an unambiguously threatening foe, can easily become increasingly demoralizing and alienating: ego disyntonic to anyone but a complete schemer, Malignant Narcissist or outright sociopath. Social life has increasingly become ever more cowardly and paranoid, oppressively akin to recognizance under enemy surveillance, furtively ever searching out, like some latter-day Diogenes undercover, fellow secret heretics or deviants! -even when whatever heresy or deviance, as it were, turns out to be in the majority, as with all manner of taboo socially awkward yet entirely normal drives and opinions, etc.. Indeed, all the more so, no thanks to mounting social pressures and sheer bullying, replete with the most capricious and petty abuse of power. 

Purpose defeating: The alienating superficial common sense advice upon social outreach simply does not actually work, or at least it can't without the prevailing approved techniques on how to fit in socially. But together, the latter exhortations to such drearily endless discipline, for all intents and purposes typically oppressive punishment and reward systems no less than as in school or employment, likewise explicitly contradict both ancient wisdom and the latest scientific findings about living in happiness or having any fun. For while an intrinsic motive such as of the latter, is one that finds both its source and its reward in its own exercise for its own sake even life long, whatever extrinsic motivation as of situational expedience as in the former tends to be short term, ending in discouraged ennui of boredom, distress and loneliness, indeed even the suppression of whatever if any intrinsic motivation because of overjustification effect. And so, in the pursuit of ha[[iness, the extrinsic Behavioral motivator of expedience remains something of a red herring.

“The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win
                                                                           ….. you’re still a rat!”  —  Lily Tomlin

Otherwise with all the whimsical romance of post nasal drip, the real appeal, if any whatsoever, of all such vapid meat puppetry as extolled by the likes of Popular Prick, is to the hostility of sheer Malignant Narcissism, insecure, desperate and voracious for validation from others, constantly. -hence the extroverited behavior from introverited drives.  Lacking full adult emotional development, the Malignant Narcissist self-servingly crafts a false persona by imitating the thoughts and actions of others. And like all self-made, self-reliant, self-sufficient and self-satisfied, he worships his creator! "The narcissist seeks to be admired for his ability to integrate and ingratiate himself without the efforts commensurate with such an undertaking." [''How to Recognize a Narcissist']

The purported expedience of a popular prick then stands exposed as mere sickly vanity masquerading as mighty Nietzschean will to power.

Hence only because the Narcissist simply lacks sufficient intrinsically motivating genuine interest, the narcissists expertise and ability generally turns out insubstantial when probed, his intellectual grasp as simplistic as his empathy is weak. Indeed, after all, Popular Prick prides himself as the expert on shallowness! 

Not surprisingly, then, the core dispute is over reciprocal irrelevance, given such distinctly different motivating stimulus needs and incompatible values. The authentic true human burning issues all such cynically dogged pragmatism promulgated by the likes of Popular Prick tends so blithely to sidestep -being so simplistically ingrained with the cynicism of Nihilistic value destruction, fails to relate, missing the point entirely, all pass beyond tactical efficacy into the field of intrinsic values informing objectives to begin with. Thus, even given consummate social skills and every manipulative advantage, all such brazen empathic failure is just vulgar and even ends in real insipid stupidity. For along with the requisite sensitivity even much to care, the poor wretched malignant Narcissist so often lacks the insight and interest at all, even to imagine the many splendored, varied and frankly more human needs, drives and preferences that so differently motivate others, much less howsoever cogently advise pursuant thereto, failing to grasp how demoralizing and ego-dissyntonic the tried and true methods of the malignant Narcissist are to anyone except other malignant Narcissists who would probably never consider seeking anyone else's advice in the first place!

“I don't think I've ever run into a man that wanted to be a prick that did not already posses the necessary skills.”  —  mahalotm

Emphatically no, Popular Prick's tactics seem only entirely suitably motivating for his fellow malignant Narcissists, indeed, who have probably already mastered them already anyhow. Bullshit self-help hucksters are typically ignorant and indifferent to the actual needs and circumstances of others, often complex and varied.

Even assuming for the sake of argument, the efficacy of advice such as that of Popular Prick, then well may one ask: Even given the sheer triviality and stupidity, nevertheless as matter of practical expedient, why so onerous? Because of the intensely shallow and therefore lonely -even in a crowd, exhaustive time and attention required for something so painfully  boring and repugnant, effectively locking out more fulfilling engagement. Not that a popular prick could relate, but then, they never can.

“Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.”
  — Margaret Mead
At long last, I have been given to understand that with soul crushing effort and in abnegation and unspoken public disavowal of who I am and all that I value, I may yet hope to do better socially and romantically.
 
Of course, the subtext of conformist anti-intellectual peer pressure, seldom so open forth right, instead leads along a certain slippery slope: Many say, and some even believe, that the key to social integration is to eliminate all even the most trifling of idiosyncrasies of appearance and presentation simply in order never to stand out. -Even by whatever necessary means of Behavioral conditioning, to suppress all awkward mannerisms such as betray discomfort and vulnerability, Also, most especially, to conceal all talent, great and small, so as never to incur the jealous wrath of one's social betters. Indeed, to favor both in conversation and in writing, the simplicity of vernacular and forever to abandon the love of language and them big words. Never to be opinionated, negative or critical, To remain complacent and keep silent amid the sheeple, only ever bleating along in their dullardly unthreatening incessant prattle about major league sports. A small sacrifice, so we all assured. In truth, under heteronomy, such is actually perceived as the release from a burden, and no sacrifice at all.
 
Indeed, the sheer restrictive and trivializing irrelevancy of online dating, just for prime example, typically exacerbates human superficiality. But in truth, anything genuine has become so dreaded as dangerous and uncouth, and therefore  sheer stultifying  bland superficiality so prized as innocuous, as therefore to be deemed deserving of all human art and diligence. Hence, even barring the nastiest and most manipulative Machiavellian social climbing and exploitation or the notoriously ludicrous gambits of self-styled seduction community and the intimidating hyperbole of such self promoting latter day gurus as Popular Prick to overwhelm the vulnerable and insecure into buying their books, nevertheless, all the well intended pragmatism of somewhat heteronymously robotic even if purportedly reliable procedures for fitting in albeit howsoever the more submissively, and how-to's for meeting new people, limp and patiently going with the flow as like unto dead fish carried along in the fetid effluent and the patience of hanging out interminably, all as exhaustively expounded quite free of charge, on the most coherent and straightforward among similar websites: succeedsocially.com explaining that poplar people dressed casually in blue jeans, patiently and quietly amusing themselves in the empty passive boredom between standardized and actively benumbing behaviorally structured opportunities for social interaction, conversant in sports and automobile engine repair (playing the guitar is a plus), do also have other interests and opinions of their own, though keeping those interests and opinions to themselves in public.
 
The goals put forth are never questioned: The succeedsocially.com consistently reinforced message, in not so many words, is all about how social success accrues from skill at conformity. -especially as predicated upon hanging out and positive attitude, both of which, as we have seen, can be so cumulatively toxic to have pressured upon the individual. Naturally, cynicism about others is disparaged, and differing individual relationship stimulus needs are never so much as mentioned. But all such vigorous and enthusiastic extol of the utter meaninglessly bleak exigent utility of adherence to such standardized behaviorally structure of social expectation all entirely at the expense of relevant beneficial intrinsically motivating end user values, the very recipes for crushing alienated loneliness even in a crowd, are all well known, actually thereby, even if it works, to vastly exacerbate boredom and dystress, such being the inevitable pitfalls of interminable shallow small talk.
 
After all, mere shyness is not the only possible reason for boredom with just hanging out interminably, and simply condemning perceived snootiness and cynicism with humanity often only amounts to more extol of satisfice in willful positivity towards superficial, stultified, artificial, impoverished and unfulfuling interaction. Outgoing people can also be chronically lonely. And the roots of relative social isolation and loneliness go well beyond whatever personal inadequacy, flaws, talents and quirks on the one hand, or the most egregious stumbling blocks such as bullying on the other. Even taking into account the necessary awkwardness of time and effort cultivating contacts into acquaintance, let alone howsoever relationship, there are greater fundamental problems confronting and even simply accepted by the most ordinary people. Indeed, quite rightly complaint regarding the social cold and empty Existentially Absurd, Ecclesiastically futile, and meaningless alienation of recreation, night life, the bar scene, family, what passes for education and the wage slavery slavery of employment, are common place pervading our milieu.  
 
It even seems that there was a time when chance conversation and continual reencounter on the street corners and in the parks, was overture in a natural process of veritable courtship drawing neighbors closer into one another's lives and homes. But now neighborhoods are less homogenous, folks are no longer so seriously and substantively involved therein, people are snobbier, strangers maintain distance interminably, and all therefore, one must either cultivate and rely upon whatever existing and embedded social networks and affinities, if any, or else endure social isolation.  
 
“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”  — George Eliot


•   America’s Trust Fall the decline of trust in America • rebuttal

 

Malignant propinquity

Propinquity is recurrent proximity, even at random. And propinquity becomes malignant, in a predatory social environment. It's not just singles who suffer, left out: The affiliation, however genial, of neighborhood parents with little else in common, is often fallow ground for any deeper connection. And matching couples, demands compatibility by a factor of four. Alas that we have fallen prey to an heteronymous dependency upon the stifling behaviorally structured environments of school and employment, to provide propinquity for forging close and enduring friendships : convenient proximity, repeated unplanned interaction, and a setting for unguarded moments to confide in one another. Indeed, the reason traveling is typically so ineffective forging new connections, is because chance contact is consistently superficial, transient, often untrustworthy, and it will be unlikely that they will be living anywhere near you or that you'll ever encounter them again.

Once upon a time a prospective business partner procrastinated for so long in simply providing his resume, that the other prospective business partner just gave up and opted out, never to be heard from again. I was exasperated. So I phoned up the former and asked him to explain. And he told me that he figured that eventually we would just run into one another at the corner store. To which I replied: "I am in Boston, you're in New York!" And the moral of the story is: Bah humbug for Not-Doing. Because there can be a certain helpless over reliance upon propinquity and just going with the flow. While the destructiveness of such lackadaisical conduct becomes manifest in the context of doing business, such behavior remains entirely normal in personal social life. 

By analogy, small businesses cannot offer the same pay, benefit and career advancement as larger and more powerful institutions. In order to stay at all competitive, small business can be more flexible and easy going in order to accommodate employees comfort and schedule. This fills a niche need in the job market. Major institutions of government, industry and academia, expend the bulk of human resources, leaving only the dregs for small business to scrape from the bottom of the barrel. Personal life remains in a similar circumstance as small business. Career, employment and formal education are survival priority, exhausting and all consuming for most waking man hours. The struggle for survival banishes all else and better. And this is reflected in social behavior. Paradigmatically, women are often known to pass by men with whom they experience moments of happiness, devoting themselves instead to marry well, financially secure and miserable, whatever that takes. In general, work and career contacts are followed up with every responsible and competent due diligence, while incompetent personal life and happiness is irresponsibly left to chance. It just happens! So we are told.

In the words of  Wolfgang Goethe: “Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least”  - particularly  applicable to people who only waste ones time. But like the tasks before us, the passersby settling into ones orbit, are often fairly trivial. And urgency is all too often more bourn of time sensitivity than of long term importance. How awful then the tyranny of propinquity without opportunity or bereft of motive mindful to be any more proactive.

Alas then, how clichιd social advice typically centers upon recourse to even more arbitrary behavioral structure, such as facilitated by hanging out at the same bars, discos or gyms etc., interminably, or joining and subordinating oneself to various clubs, registering for classes or undertaking the drudgery of volunteer work. But in the alternative, reliance upon spontaneity alone, is futile without actual habits of spontaneity. For autonomous intrinsically motivated interaction to provide the same and actually better social opportunity, the participants must be responsible and indeed intrinsically motivated to continually reengage one another of their own accord, and to network and exchange social support, all even without behavioral structure of schedule or proximity for regular chance reencounter. Exactly such scarce initiative, the lost social skill set of autonomy fallen so out of fashion and into such disrepair, is especially crucial, reciprocally, for sustaining any forward momentum, interpersonally. Too long domesticated, then without any routine provided us, we degenerate into such passive, confused and mistrustful sheeple adrift!

Indeed, reliance upon propinquity customarily inspires membership and participation in groups in order to artificially contrive propinquity. The self-discipline to follow up is essential in establishing new connections and forging relationships. But such remains futile when unilateral. It must be reciprocal in order to accrue any results. Groups provide routine and enforce behavioral structure of regular contact, thereby removing the burden of individual self-discipline of following up. But removing the burden of that which is essential, removes essence and becomes pointless so that nothing happens. 

Being that engagement is the beginning of the state or condition of attachment which is an ongoing, remembered or anticipated and even yearned for state of engagement, hence according to Self-Determination Theory, secure attachment is characterized by attention and responsiveness to one another's needs when turning toward one another to obtain comfort and care. Indeed, prime features of autonomy include initiative being: the forward looking vision and motivation of enterprise and determination that affords any capacity to begin proactively, or to follow through energetically, with a plan or task, together with the need for meaningful engagement fending off boredom and loneliness. Heteronomy, the enemy of autonomy, is also the active enemy of engagement and attachment, of transparent agenda, of open passion and interest of every kind. Therefore, the social skill sets of heteronomy and autonomy are so entirely different. Heteronymous social skills correlate to the guardedness and control of heteronomy in the first place, and not any unmet needs of the individual. And yet the exhortations to sublimation persist, of the former as the means to the latter. Indeed, that often seems the only game in town!

Popular Prick holds forth on another of his many marketing front URLs:
"Normally people make friends with individuals in their proximity – people they work with, study with, etc. Social psychologists have called this “proximity theory”, which sounds a little like glorified common sense. Practically speaking, it is important to understand that you need to arrange your life
situation in a way that causes you to be around other people."

Therefore poor people, just lacking privacy, tend to have greater Residential Propinquity and therefore more relationship connections because of high population densities, residentially, communally and at work, as well as reliance upon public facilities. Interesting. But the happiness and quality of relationships and social embedment even amongst the poor, varies widely. After all, sheer proximity, and random lowest hanging fruit of low quality connections generally remaining distant, only wastes time, increases boredom and isolation. -To paraphrase a Gian Vincenzo Gravina, boorishly robbing one of solitude without providing much way of good company.

Alas, even those fairly proximate, may remain busy, disinterred, confused, inhibited, or just dull. Worse, the most readily available may be not merely a little needy, but actually fairly predatory. For especially in relative isolation, propinquity is the often the origin of dysfunction and exploitation. Indeed, all to often, the most readily propinquitous actually may be hostile intruders systematically driving out all others, bullies in one's life, indeed all the more dangerous amongst the poor, pressed together so bereft of privacy. Desirable friends are seldom discovered amid simply the most readily proximate and available people. All in all, proximity and thereby: propinquity effect, being the tendency to form  relationships with those whom they encounter frequently, can be to disastrous, often resulting in social destiny by default, either for wont of other opportunity of by lack of any greater initiative, opportune spontaneity and/or proactive strategy.

Hanging out interminably, lurking, actually, relies upon the cultivation of seemingly innocuous proximity and propinquity. If only proximity and propinquity could be better controlled, directed and constrained, to selectively qualified leads for better prospects. Indeed, limiting proximity and propinquity selectively, is a common group strategy of self appointed gatekeepers, exploitative relational bullies and cockblockers, maintaining proximity and hijacking propinquity by whatever means necessary.

Indeed, in most any situation, so much of what anyone may rationalize and imagine as chance propinquity, is all too often no more than the product of social circles acting as social filters, others remaining in control, exploitation however subtly or blatantly, unless the individual takes any responsible agency Worse, there is all manner of pathology, so easy to get sucked into, the more so given boredom and loneliness. Worse still, all manner of factors conspire to make the worst of humanity most omnipresent and readily available, while keeping the best out of view and out of reach.

Much self-help material is premised upon assumptions of crucial access to social circles or else cursory and simplistic advice how to gain or build said. The most cogent and relevant criticisms in rebuttal to all of the above seemingly sensible strategy of those networking gurus, are first of all, of the most blithe oversimplification, promotional puff more than viable instruction, indeed that it is all so extremely advanced, labor and time intensive, and most every element of this process as outlined, is all so much easier said than done, no matter the investment of time and focus, especially starting from scratch in relative naive isolation. What then, for the rest of us (at least pending the dawning of automated Sociometry)? Social support as ever may remain amongst the foremost predicate of capability and success, hence deficiency or mismatch to whatever actual needs, of social support, a dire gap and the very recipe for failure.

Indeed, "the main cause of homelessness is widely accepted as being relationship breakdown [...] social isolation preceded homelessness and the experience of homelessness then exacerbates that isolation. [...] One in four formerly homeless people find themselves unable to sustain a tenancy, with loneliness and isolation the main causes of this."

"Similarly, for those people who are forced to live their lives on the street there are few practical alternatives to their lifestyle. Employment is often an unlikely option as an immediate solution and many activities that we take for granted – visiting a friend’s home, having a hobby, going to the pub, or joining a club – are out of bounds for those who live on the streets. Homeless people themselves often speak of the frustration that they feel when they are faced by whole days with nothing to do, nowhere to go and no way to move on."

 
But even barring such calamity as bereavement and homelessness or for that matter, bullying with impunity, backbiting, covert relational hostility, ostracism, orchestrated harassment and even organized group stalking, can be so utterly and completely socially disruptive, even not entirely unlike, indeed at all analogous to, actual homelessness. Point being: One way or another, situation is often daunting and seldom so rosy and ripe with opportunity as any picture typically presented by those networking gurus, no matter the effort and technique ever invested.

 

 

Futility: the outcomes gap
Social advice that is so antisocial!

 

To quote Henry Louis Mencken: “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” And not just dead wrong, but fractally wrong! Manifestly Absurd, dead wrong in examination and scrutiny from every conceivable perspective or Point of View, and at every possible scale of resolution from macro to nano and everywhere in between! Indeed, pessimists may be on to something: Experimentally, it has been discovered that people who are depressed, more accurately gauge reality including what is called: locus of control, ones own own control, or lack thereof, over circumstances, than others do, This phenomena has been dubbed: depressive realism, sadder and wiser, less susceptible to manipulation and deluded wishful thinking. For the big lie of willful positivity rosily distorts perception, and no good will cone therefrom. In the struggles of social life, bored and lonely, all too many experience an outcomes gap, meaning: no results no matter one one does. But why so? Because, tautologically, there can be no unilateral well-formed plan defined as a plan wherein an individual all alone has fairly complete control over every well defined step in execution thereof, and thereby assured of success.

Owning a nightclub or just walking a dog is often recommended as a conversation starter with strangers. But starting conversations isn't the only problem. Otherwise, life would be easier. How to find others who are looking for you, that want to meet you? You don't. They repeatedly approach you. Fat chance, right? Completely unpredictable and irreproducible. But otherwise, then the only option is the sheer imposition to pursue those who are if not disinterested, then nevertheless for whatever reason, unresponsive, in the hopes that this will change somehow. Madness!

There is one general criteria of social success and connection for every purpose. And that is when someone else that one might care to interact with, reciprocates, even into the long term. This applies which regardless of which party takes the initiative. This then, is nothing under individual control. No individual can take collective action unilaterally. Cooperation is required. And even then, logistics and random circumstances remain ever daunting. Add to that, rejection and hesitation. Hence the Absurd futility of all social outreach. It truly is that simple and Empirical. In marketing, a 1% response is considered excellent. - not sales, but response at all. And the circumstances are scarcely any different in marketing oneself in life: Even at all favorable response, tends to fall short of closing the deal. It doesn't work because it cannot work. Most commonly recommended social success strategies amount, in marketing terms, to repeated exposure and focus upon whatever target demographic, with whatever marketing appeal, blatant or innocuous, fair or foul, honest or dishonest. But the odds remain appalling, like a deep and dry well. The hopelessness of the situation is mocked by very exhortation to positive thinking and even prayer. All too often, people just don't seem to want to mingle, much less to connect.

People can be so unavailable to one another and inhibited, disorganized, guarded and afraid, alienated and not without reason. Not only do all manner of facile and manipulative predators, often lionized, roam about with impunity, but the social environment is so sterile and hostile to begin with. Few can truly attain the security that we all need for growth in human flourishing. The reason that social life is no conduit but actually a social minefield and obstacle course obstructing networking and outreach, is simply because all the heteronymous facile and introverted predicates to popularity and successful social integration are completely at odds with relationship and the autonomous values of open and genuine friendship. In the words of Neil Gabler: “American society is a society in which individuals have learned to prize social skills that permit them, like actors, to assume whatever rτle- the occasion demands and to "perform" their lives rather than just live them.” Indeed, so many are raised to believe that sour grapes, pretending you don't want it, is the key to all of ones desires, and to struggle for acceptance being conditional upon disguising oneself according to social expectations. For prime example, the allure of chastity, so we are taught, is the key to sexual  success. Indeed, cockblockers are self-appointed to chaperone decorum and keep the rest of us in line. Chronic suspicion is romanticized: Women mustn't be easy, therefore men mustn't be obvious. Any truth therein accrues by way of paranoid self-fulfilling prophesy. It a classic prisoner's dilemma: Who can position themselves to denounce the other, first?  In building relationships, the result is insecurity, suspicion, tacit hostility, resentment and codependency. In encounters, the result is anxiety and self-medication to enable sexual  function at all. In every more Platonic interaction, the situation remains analogous: Don't be obvious or needy, patiently amuse yourself, smile and keep it light. All the very opposite of genuine intimacy as defining true relationship and friendship. And how can the latter ever accrue from the former? Only if at all, in the course of veritable recognizance under enemy surveillance, covertly and despite overwhelming obstacles. 

A meta-analysis of different strategies for remedying loneliness, studied in randomized controlled trials, showed that they all had only a small effect. The trials consist of evaluation before and after the different interventions. There is no longitudinal study of any ongoing program. And yet the trial remains both unique and obscure. Why are burning questions that should be shouted from the roof tops, so blithely bypassed? We remain at the mercy ubiquitous common sense snake oil, dishonest conformism and denial. As in any other cult recruitment, the cards are never just laid out on the table before anyone gets sucked in ever deeper, waiting for it all to finally begin making any sense at any later date. It never does. 
 
By analogy, consider all those books and courses for sale, for making money in different business arenas or ideas. Perhaps they aren't actually just complete rubbish. Rather, what is deceptive are the claims that anyone can do it. In truth however, there is a somewhat blithe presumption of all kinds of tacit background knowledge and acumen from experience, extensive preexisting competence and so-called common sense or "street smarts " of "knowing the ropes," so that the information from whatever sort of training or publication in question, may afford even any actually marginal added utility to an industry insider, a well prepared professional or someone already fortified with extensive research on their own, not to mention already well involved in execution of an extensively developed course of action. -in short anyone by no means so green, and with any idea just what to expect, and even then, still very little.
 
These dishonestly simplistic and gennerally1half-baked books, courses, self-help, not only all of those dubious business opportunities but the vast chorus of general hand waving and popularity pipedreams offered for sale, typically feature the much touted and so-called  "roadmap" to success, whatever the Hell that actually means. Even beyond whatever upfront purchase price, considerable, if not indeed completely open-ended expenses and personal investment is elicited in order to follow through. Therefore what is truly called for is nothing less than enough information and wherewithal for a rigorous formal business plan replete with assumptions and projections, risk assessment, cost/benefit and more, even to begin understanding required background knowledge, character, temperament and aptitudes along with prediction at all, cost projections in time, money and effort to be invested thereafter, let alone profit and loss projections. And make no mistake, that with no pertinent background information or projections, any enterprise of social outreach easily becomes an open ended investment, either half assed or over extended, time and money being the least of it. Unlike the typical so-called "roadmap," a business plan can predict and thereby forestall costly failure. In other words, the buyer into these dubious opportunities, has been promised adequate guidance to success, if only one sustains faith and determination to persevere. and just keep at it. Otherwise, like most people, they just haven't got what it takes. Or so we are told. Get with the programs! The program never fails. You fail the program! But actually, those who buy in are only once again abandoned once again to our  own devices. with any vague apprehension that there is more than meets the eye - As the per the aphorism, feeling like a mushroom: left in the dark and fed bullshit!
 
Point being: It may indeed be that the usual common sense bad advice for all those dreary chores purportedly requisite to social success and meeting new people beg all much the same questions as in business planning in order to make any kind of rational and serious projections and expectations: What skills are first requisite? What extensive background knowledge and experience? What are the expectations? What is the realistic investment? Is there the wherewithal? What will the experience actually be like? And what best results must one be willing to settle for? For example: How many personals posting must be answered and followed up, even to get that first cup of coffee?  At what cost in time and money, much less self esteem? And in truth, the skill sets and expectations are even more unspoken, particular and extensive, than in any lifetime employment or career experience. Worse, the pertinent tacit knowledge is taboo, never transparent, expectations therefore imparted and poorly expressed by the blithely least self-aware and empathetic most blithe conformists, and only inductively by evasive and dishonest manipulative socialization that none dare call: indoctrination, Behavioral Conditioning or most honestly: brainwash.
 
Hence under such an assault of veritable psychological breakdown, a deluge of sheer obscurity in angry and punitive expectations, the investment on every front in whatever was supposed to be so reasonable and just common sense, straight forward and such a sure thing, becomes crushing and unrelenting; effort neither appreciated or reciprocated. Of course its discouraging and confusing! There isn't even the closure of having tested something that doesn't work, because one tends in frustration and confusion to drift away from the endeavor. Worse, that makes the failure yours! The program never fails. You fail the program! Results are only guaranteed if you stick with it, after all, well disciplined and compliant, reading between the lines as necessary. The experience is oppressive with even the best results to be realistically expected, demanding open ended saticefice and that tolerance for boredom and stress both characteristic of, and systematically tested and filtered for, by heteronomy.

Individual self-esteem suffers under the injustice of any social system that presses the individual to feel responsible for circumstances that most of us simply cannot possibly even begin to control, and remedies, such as they are, that are all so very dystressfully ego disynchronic. Indeed, social influences takes control out of the hands of the individual nevertheless treated as fully responsible for what becomes of them in society. Perhaps the worst such oppression is pandemic bullying and victim blaming.

In truth, social life is no conduit to the individual needs of the masses, but a filter for the exclusion of strangers, a social minefield, an obstacle course of stumbling blocks serving like unto peer review, screening out deficiency and excellence alike and without distinction, thereby assuring uniform mediocrity and preserving status quo. Thus does each individual struggle for their place in the social hierarchy, and thus are the disruptive, constructive and destructive alike and without distinction, outcast, left by the wayside.
 
No wonder then, that the greatest treasure that can be bestowed is socialization, that which none dare call indoctrination or brainwash, so that all rituals may be performed capably, tirelessly and without thought or hesitation, and whatever results eked out will be accepted with just the right positive attitude of upbeat and cheerfully servile gratitude. Not to overstate the case, bust such fake fun is reminiscent of the best well meaning yet pitilessly tyrannical vocational advice blithely proffered to miserable prostitutes: How to be charming and feign pleasure, even amid the most soul crushing degradation.
We are all pressed to wear masks for the comfort of our oppressors, and thereby make ourselves and one another miserable. Indeed such is the submissive faithful attachment to socialization that is called: heteronomy, undermining autonomy and simple friendship.
 
In short, social life is frequently even more hellish than formal education and employment. And that is given that one succeeds on their terms, let alone in case of failure and exasperation. More and more people achieve less and less reward for ever more eager-beaver investment, in doing everything expected of them. And this applies in every walk of life, from formal formal education to employment and career development, not to mention, yes, social and romantic life. It may be time to honestly reevaluate such cult like dedication and commitment to convoluted superficiality. Ubiquitous social advice serves only towards additional behavioral reinforcement in the service of status quo, not of the individual recipient of advice.   
 
Connection and influence, one to one, especially towards new contacts, utter strangers, can certainly be daunting. And then there is the most laborious self promotion, ongoing outreach and cultivation of presence and connection within any community, so completely undermined by bullying and backbiting. What is best is the great good fortune to be included in networking that is friendly, reciprocal, with professionalism, and free of dysfunctional exploitative ulterior agendas. Another approach is that of ever innocuous caution, social dexterity and standing in social circles, may be seen as key to the achievement of status, social and romantic success. But do you want a friend who is good at meeting expectations just  in order to fit in, or do you want a friend who relates to you personally? Is it unrealistic expectations that cause loneliness, or entirely realistic needs unmet that leave us so lonely? When realistic needs cannot realistically be met, then  society is failing and change is long overdue.
 
What follows endeavors catalogue and evaluate prevailing unworkable social advice in greater detail and specificity.
 
'11 Ways to Turn Strangers into Friends' offers yet more Pollyanna completely unrealistically reasonable common sense advice upon just being sociable, that simply does not work, regardless of outgoing nature and proficiency. '32 Ways to Easily Make New Friends at Live Events' also doesn't really work as advertised for the loner abandoned to our  own devices. But there might just be a Bizarro twist, working together. Thus, as ever, social success is required in order to maintain let alone achieve further social success. Connection and influence, one to one, especially upon new contacts, utter strangers, can certainly be daunting. And then there is the most laborious self promotion, ongoing outreach and cultivation of presence and connection within any community, so completely undermined by bullying and backbiting. What is best is the great good fortune to be included in networking that is friendly, reciprocal, with professionalism, and free of dysfunctional exploitative ulterior agendas. Another approach is that of ever innocuous caution, social dexterity and standing in social circles, may be seen as key to the achievement of status, social and romantic success. But do you want as a friend, a real pillar of the community, so facile at at meeting expectations just in order to fit in, or do you want a friend who relates to others personally? Is it unrealistic expectations that cause loneliness, or entirely realistic needs unmet that leave us so lonely? To quote Hennery David Thoreau:
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” When realistic needs cannot realistically be met, then  society is failing and change is long overdue.
 
The supposed secrets to mastery of social circles, according to the social success gurus, inevitably turn out to be all of much same weak and weasely advice as ever: The trick, you see, is somehow to cement the acquaintance of the right people in order to enter whichever social circle from the top, instead of the futility of social climbing entering from the bottom unknown, which is almost as futile as approaching strangers, cold. Am I the only one who finds the entire paradigm so repellant?
A quick survey of public discussion established that I am not. And nothing here is new or surprising.  
 
Indeed all such grinding futility of the heteronymous conditionality and institutionalized cycle of attachment disorder as what passes for education, subsequent employment followed by the desperation of the Existentially Absurd, Ecclesiastically futile, and meaningless alienation of recreation and night life, are nothing but the standardized publicly available user-hostile dregs of social resource left to the socially disenfranchised, friendless and disposable people, daunting obstacles and pitfalls, not useful conduits at all as reserved for the socially integrated and well connected elites. Indeed, much as with Multilevel Marketing Pyramid Schemes and scams, the delivery system is broken by design. The marks feeling nowhere else to go, carry the entire fraudulent system of the racket and its folly on our backs! Needs are unmet and human resource squandered. The world is full of lonely luzers not merely because life is so competitive, but additionally because the game is fixed anticompetitively. Opportunity is viewed as zero-sum, and monopolized. The entire rat race of enforced mediocrity amounts to Behavior Modification directed towards wholesale sublimation into heteronymous attachment disorder.
 
Even the most prudent advice upon filtering the good from the bad in relationship prospects, first depends upon being in any demand and having any options at all. Therefore futile truism upon drawing and winning companionship and forging relationships, ranges from goody two-shoes wishful thinking focused upon virtue howsoever deemed deserving of friendship, often then conflated with venial agreeable positivity, to sympathetic magic outright or the cynical manipulations of would be Machiavellian popularity gurus. And so, all the same, the socially isolated are ever exhorted never to rock the boat but always to think positive, stay cheerful and upbeat, and even to force oneself: Hang out anywhere, in bars, online, talk to everyone, everywhere, go out, walk a dog, get roommates and live with strangers, pursue common interests, schedule activities, winter sorts, travel, learn a craft, take a class, go to seminars, attend religious services, join a singles group, a support group, a women's or men's group, a Business Association, an Investment Club, a Book Club, a health club, a yoga, Tai Chi, play a sport, take up acting, go to acting workshops and help create scenery, go to High School/College Reunions, museums, wine tastings, sporting events, Flea Markets and Antique Shows, change employment, volunteer, become politically active, have a party: Invite your friends and have them invite two friends and so on and so on. Go to every party you are invited to even if you don't want to go. Why, you too can have an instant social life by just showing up at MeetUp groups, if one remains unparticular about the experience, any hoped for results, wasted time, effort and empty frustration, doing exactly as expected and receiving exactly the social experience to be expected, of gabbing with strangers and aimlessly passing the time. Nothing will come of it. But at least it may be innocuous.  

In howsoever also selfishly instrumental, extrinsically motivated and perhaps somewhat cynical application of old fashioned civic-virtue, a variant and seemingly plausible elaboration upon such above advice simply to become a joiner, an at all just conceivably more effective but laborious strategy, of course all the more easier said than done, might be to extensively research and seek out a suitable group to join in order then to climb into a leadership position by volunteering for whatever dreary chores of helping to run some or other understaffed small group in dire need thereof. An experience all too often rife with petty cronyism, to promote not only sheer propinquity, but in order to cultivate power and a secure social position of institutional authority and power necessary for effective networking. But how effective is this strategy, actually, and for whom? It all remains at all somewhat nebulous: How is the requisite preliminary research to be conducted? What are the requisite skills, aptitudes and temperament? What is the expected personal investment? What is the anticipated experience? What will be the expectations in order to be accepted? And so on. Barring the no less elusive intrinsic motivation, the whole process will be joyless, a demanding, grinding chore and a bore. The advice is all therefore typically simplistic and requires extensive further study. Not to gloss anything over, but there is everything that can go wrong or just go nowhere, beginning with even locating and identifying whatever target group or club in your neighborhood. Indeed, precisely how does anyone absorb such all consuming cycles of social behavior from life? And don't we want more?

      “Never confuse motion with action — Benjamin Franklin
                         [-or for that matter, even with fun.]   
 
     “Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight."  — Thomas Carlyle

All such above exercise of Community Skills is just prevailing superficial and simplistic common sense advice for meeting new people in order to locate and cement new contacts, social and professional. But once again, the real situation comes to light under application of pessimistic explanatory style: Barring functional social embedment, most commonly available social life often tends to be joylessly competitive, insecure, not a passage but a filter, not a conduit but an obstacle course, a calculated discouraging waste of time, a bastion of vested interest if not a minefield of exploitation and bullying outright. All therefore leave us face the ugly truth: it simply does not work because it cannot work, instrumentality equals zero: there is no relationship between performance and outcome, nor is it any fun but completely senseless and alienating, no matter how personable and gregarious one may be. Because that's the least of what it's all really about at all. Those are the wrong skills!

• 6 Reasons Why Meetups Fail to Find New Friends 

In the words of Coco Chanel: "Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door."

Don't chat up beautiful women, because no matter how slick you start out, you'll still end up a babbling idiot. (Chances are better by joining in her group to chat up her less attractive friends, while ignoring her completely! Your mileage may vary.) Don't show interest or flirt and hope they'll come over, because they won't. Don't compliment their looks. (Common interests may be at all better appreciated.) Unless you're actually a good dancer, don't dance. You'll only come off spastic! -And it gets worse with age. Don't be  be nice, because women prefer manipulative and abusive assholes. And having a dorky given name is no help either.

So says 6 Things Men Do To Get Laid That Science Says Turn Women Off refreshingly and informatively revealing the deceptive inadequacy of naοve Empiricism towards romantic success, laying bare the futility of prevailing common sense, and the hapless frustration of any engagement in virtually every standard, ordinary, natural and normal social interaction that only accrues the Existentially Absurd, Ecclesiastically futile, and meaningless alienation of recreation.

 
 
Let's all stop barking up the wrong tree:
               The true crux of the matter
 
Again: Functional and relevant relationship, even in the most transitory sense of immediate human interaction let alone attachment in the long term, remains oppressively impossible from the sheer cargo cult mimesis that is mere social intelligence into arbitrary behavioral structure instead of anything more compelling.
 
Rather, genuine relationship first arises, rather than somehow culminating later on, only as a byproduct of engagement in substantive, free and coherent communication, exploration, and/or form purposeful interaction and endeavor, even play with its own intrinsic purpose, all replete with the dignity of social risk, with trust, security, ultimately openness in yielding to temptation, all the aforesaid that are the competencies of autonomy, along with organization and congenial social grace to manage and sustain contacts, reciprocally. Rather, genuine relationship, free and deepening exchange, tacitly agenda driven and transparent. That may be why, as has been discovered, happy people talk more seriously. Thus the true key to friendship and happiness flies in the face of all social success formula of positive attitude and keeping things light with interminable small talk. It must then come as little surprise how such arduous social success so often comes, if at all, only at the cost of all happiness, so anathema and typically obstructed by such drone-like heteronymously arbitrary social acumen, skilled incompetence and cronyism, that everywhere buttresses the tacit institutionalization and twisted value of all the most flagrant insensitivity and ineptitude imaginable, the bad driving out the good, and worse, actingout the destructive evil that is rampant bullying. Indeed, as we have seen, gregariousness and engaging personality may even be reviled as subversive and impertinent to a malagenda of sheer heteronymous group validation in sheer denial of all such profound endemic and pandemic alienation from the innate and intrinsic drives of human expression and connection.

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.”  — Yogi Berra

Of course there is far more to such an apparent wild goose chase. There must be. The incompleteness theorem surely applies. So perhaps the advice is over simplistic if not outright dishonest, taboo and even Faustian. The problem to begin with, even in setting out to cultivate new relationships or to maintain existing ones, is that, increasingly, such simply is not the game that anyone else is playing. People often tend to remain ambivalent about connecting with others. And often, their default, decisively or indecisively, will tend towards rejection instead of forging connection. Worse, giving others the benefit of the doubt, can be dangerous. Easygoing people are exploited. Loneliness often motivates attempts to salve the problem that generally all fail. leading only to frustration and often to bad decisions. New people interact superficially if at all. They do not bond. Attachment fails more often than not. They often don't really warm up to strangers, and often effectively lack the autonomous executive function to follow up systematically, even in opportunity for promising connections and greater happiness. Insiders tend to be closed off, while outsiders become depressive and withdrawn. And many people are simply overworked. Excessive obligations often tends to suck up human resources leaving desperate exhaustion and alienation in their wake. Communities disintegrate and neighbors are barely if at all acquainted. Depressive and increasingly discouraged passivity rubs off and propagates within social networks as the sheer credibly gap of community at all widens. Initiative has atrophied and learned helplessness prevails. And this significantly undermines all hopes of any effective alliance in the face of whatever of life's adversity.

And what may be missing from the social environment, is not only propinquitous chance or routine repeated contact, but facilitation and positive reinforcement, in short: social inclusion. So social inclusion is necessary in order to attain social inclusion, and often conditional and inauthentic to the point of becoming an intensely boring soul crushing chore, all consuming irrelevant bait-and-switch purpose defeating of any natural individual social stimulus needs of expression and engagement, after all the true unstated and frustrated human motivation in meeting new people to begin with.
 
Violating taboo and getting to the point:
 
Just hanging out under any pretext, such as browsing in the public library or taking a meal in an outdoor cafι weather permitting, really only advances the hope of making oneself visibly approachable. More proactively, pretexts or context both for initial contact and then follow up, even as, for perhaps an innocuously silly and superficial example, taking photographs in public and then offering to share the photos afterwards, requires real time onsite contact with the subject in order to acquire contact info for follow up with the photos. Opportunity to develop therefrom ongoing contact, is another challenge of further inventive pretext, and all hit or miss for compatibility anyhow. And any structured regular event demands encounter with the same people repeatedly. But such is no more than hit or miss with commitment, either way. And commitment to a miss is only the more aggravatingly irrelevant, lonely, boring and alienating.
 
So, is that all there is? Surely there must be anything better, more fun, any quality interaction to begin with, at all engaging in the meantime, let alone thereby better engendered towards real communication and attachment! What would that constitute for you, gentle reader? Alas that such very agenda cutting to the very heart of genuine friendship in recognition of the actual social needs of autonomy, remains so heteronymously taboo from open discourse and strategy, being so readily dismissed as pipedream for wont of prior foundation or justification: Given the ongoing colossal failure and inadequacy of bland routine interpersonal superficiality, why does precisely such futility remain the cornerstone of all stock advice and publically available avenues of outreach? If instead, the greater intensity of meaningful substance and depth of exchange are truly key to fulfilling interpersonal engagement and attachment, then where is the advice in practice, and where are the publically available avenues of outreach thereto?
 
 
Only more of the same relentless poverty of discourse:
As we have seen, among the many dimensions of mass alienation, in particular, pervading anomie of lonely frustrated heteronomy engenders such tremendous cultural appetite for any simple paint by numbers procedure towards social success by just going through the motions and endlessly barking up the wrong tree. 
 
How To Build Your Tribe - Finding ‘Your People ’' compiles yet more disappointingly superficial common sense that simply is not true, that simply does not work for everyone, and may thereby make the reader feel at all foolish and somewhat inadequate. To begin with, the general principles may not readily suggest any concrete plan of action. There is also the same fallacious reliance upon common interests, and worse, the extol of (anti)social media that so often seems so useless for garnering anything more than the legions of superficial FaceBook friends and Twitter followers, in short, deploying no glimmer of data mining into automated Sociometry and offering little more than the latest shiny new vector in aggressive ever renewed dissemination of ever more irrelevantSPAM
Whereas, to reiterate, typical hierarchically institutionalized and alienating tightly behaviorally structured volunteerism and activism may often accrue nothing more than somebody else's chores, any active enthusiasm of others if only at all ingenuous and straightforward, may actually share any at all more fulfilling engagement and human interaction in creative problem solving, beyond any shared interest only in the abstract. Drudgery of volunteerism typically does not involve the high levels of interaction and cooperation such as to illicit equally high levels of sociability while curtailing antisocial conduct and rejection. But as ever, beware all manner of headgames, dysfunctional ulterior agenda, ambivalence, exploitation and cross-purpose, malignant narcissism and decidophobic heteronomy, that all motivate conflict and true to life drama, the worse the more important, the more at stake with outcome in doubt, dire deadlock as according to every Technique of Suspense plotting. -Everything so riveting in fiction but so miserable in actual experience.
 
The 9 Skills Needed to Be a Super-Connector offers an approach that seems by far the more direct and to the point than the urgings of so many other success gurus, sparing us the endlessly oblique ulterior social agendas. Nevertheless, all remains easier said than done, and fraught with much similar pitfalls as ever. A fairly extensive network of existing and promising relationships tends to be assumed, for scheduling business meetings and hosting social events.
 
There are two diametrically opposite networking styles: Monopolistic, funneling power and information as much as possible only into one's own hands, Vs. the very opposite, actually maximizing beneficial throughput for others, seeking them out in order to help, thus building reputation for value. The implicit hypothesis is that the rat-race is redeemable, by the import and application thereto, of intrinsic value. knowledge and creative ambition. But that never turns out to be enough to reduce the all that tiresome networking to a reliable byproduct taking care of itself. Individualistic communication and relationship styles do not result. The problem remains however, that the rat-race remains and quickly crops up again, demanding nigh crazed enthusiasm, after one has already been optimistically and incautiously drawn in. Once again is exposed, behind whatever cache or mystique of subversion, the same impossible endeavor to integrate autonomy into heteronomy.
 
Invest in your own learning, exhorts Tim Ferriss: Choose your new field of learning. Showcase your learning by blogging. Then network: Give free advice. Begin by inquiry relevant to how you might be able add value in their particular circumstances. Inquire into the prospective contacts situation, pains and aggravations. Then pursue by implication, their needs. Instead of pressing your point against reluctance and resistance, with good  Socratic Dialectic, the other person should actually end up explaining to you, talking themselves into, how what you have to offer can solve their problems and suffering. This is somewhat pretentiously called: spin selling. Thence initiate your own internship: Within your budding social economy: start working for free. Then develop case studies of your work on your blog. Then develop relationships with mentors: reach out to authors of the books you read and blogged about, and then network them to good contacts, thereby providing value and drawing them into your orbit. Finally, sell and deliver your services within your social economy.
 
Don't network just to network, but purposefully and selectively to whatever specific aspiration and always collect names. "[Keith Ferrazzi] has call sheets by region, listing the people he knows and those he'd like to know, and when he's in town, he phones all of them." Don't wait for the need to arise, but build relationships well beforehand of foreseeable needed favors according to plan. Never eat alone. For invisibility is a fate worse than failure. And ping constantly, quick emails and voicemail, in order to keep in touch.
 
Popular Prick holds forth upon on another of his many marketing front URLs: "While standing out may lead people to believe you are an interesting person, it won't make them want to be your friend." From that, it would logically follow that true friendship, Indeed as Eve Tushnet expounds in ‘Eros and Education Eros bridging alien difference,  tautologically predicated upon difference and engagement therein, would lack any conceivable human motivation and never come about! Fortunately, hope endures: Because Forbes Magazine seemingly disagrees with Popular Prick, actually recommending: In order to meet interesting people, be interesting. But then, Popular Prick fairly explicitly prioritizes quantifiable popularity as sole indirect key to howsoever, by whatever bloodless criteria, whatever quality contacts.  
 
But from an entrepreneurial paradigm, Forbes Magazine begins from a more direct individual outreach, more sympathetic and reciprocal: Once the pitch is perfected, getting attention is never a problem. Always ask. Most of us know the people within our own profession and social group, and little more, as opposed to networking optimized by connecting others hitherto unacquainted, thus widening the diversity of relationships as well as quality or quantity, bridging as many different worlds as possible. Ferrazzi developed his theory of the anchor tenant: "What you do," he says, "is find somebody in your peer set who has a friend who is two levels above -- the big swinging dick of the group, the anchor tenant. You get them to come and, in all invitations subsequent to that, you use the anchor to pull in people who otherwise wouldn't attend." Indeed, according to Semyon D. Savransky's Triz theory of inventive problem solving, only pioneering discoveries are more rare and precious than innovative cross-disciplinary solutions, knowledge, techniques and skills imported from one discipline into another. Lastly, as applicable, especially in courting the most prominent and powerful, the need may arise even to somewhat manipulatively finesse the gatekeeper.  
 
Will any one cynically convenient relationship be summarily discarded once thoroughly pillaged of opportune connections? What manipulative lengths of devious and unscrupulous self-serving advantage finally skirt the boundaries of covert relational bullying? With the requisite, of course, of any personal acquaintance for access to begin with, perhaps the most cynical approach to networking more often subject to approbation than occasionally, even actually recommendation, is sometimes called: "friend thievery", beyond ambiguity of manners and mores, raising every specter of dramatic and ethical conflict from motivations of jealousy, dishonesty and exploitation and depending upon what lengths one goes to, even simply for excitement just to forestall sheer boredom.
 
In truth, the ruggedly Individualistic social animal that is the idealized entrepreneur, is but the latest incarnation in the lineage of Nietzsche's superman, Plato's philosopher king and Lysenko's Soviet man. As ever, what is presented is nothing less than glittering generality in promise of Individualism, autonomy, success and fulfillment, all via sophisticated adaptive accommodation to convention. How genuine and realistic is all the previous networking advice, then, actually?
 
Indeed, it is confusing even trying to precisely pin down the many complicated implicit assumptions. Business publications seldom address themselves to the real beginner. Indeed, in particular, as to pinging in the real word, often no amount of courteously contrived diligence can cement even initial superficial connection and relationship, unless the other party plays along. People quite simply drift apart more than they bond. And it helps if whatever pinging interaction is customary and businesslike in whatever milieu, and even then may depend upon some cultivated perception as an insider at all, indeed that clear professional circles as applicable, even exist, for networking and mentorship, as likely they will not, for any truly broad innovation. Or else they may be tightly closed.
 
And it can be frustrating to network any two important contacts, both of whom are already overworked and overwhelmed. You'll never really get the ball rolling. Worse, to reiterate, introduction of a promising contact to another contact, even as the initial draw, who's subsequent conduct only reveals them as unreliable, only accrues that the promising contact will be lost forever. And again, that is why I have so stressed how a pact of persistence, committed to regrouping, reevaluation and prospecting to replace the inevitable irresponsible partner within whatever new venture, is foreseeably so crucial to long-term cohesion and survival.
 
In selling oneself, so-to-speak, much as with sales cold calling and network marketing, most accepted sources of prospects in networking and connecting, again much as in referrals prospecting at all, include "satisfied customers" even so-to-speak, others who are pleased with their interactions with you, and who'll therefore even find themselves prone to talk positively to their friends and associates about their interactions with you. You can also consult them in prospecting for specific eligibility criteria. And prospects beget prospects for further networking. Even prospects that only advance to fairly tentative acquaintance, might still turn out helpful and resourceful for further important leads and referrals. Set and determine the conditions of qualification in a checklist of important prospect factors and characteristics. Decide when to initiate contact. If only one is perceived as being credible, trustworthy and any sort of a mensch, why then any prospect should have no qualms whatsoever about referring others. But be sure that they also readily pick up on the benefits your acquaintance has already afforded others. So: How could it possibly fail? Every way! What could possibly go wrong? Everything!
 
Even in open condemnation of the disingenuous cross-purpose of popularity, the time and project management approach taken by 'Friends: How to Make, Keep, or Leave Them', emphasizing location, schedule and the investment of personal availability, time and attention, at all removes failed generalities of superficial common sense instead into more narrow and specific relevant logistics, as for example, of the importance of similar attitudes in ongoing harmonious decision making as to shared activity, as distinct from merely common interests and tastes in the abstract, being as the latter is, of course, such a hopelessly inadequate superficial criterion of compatibility. -All of which already raises no small challenge. Not to mention how to begin with, time and project management is not concerned with resource acquisition or opportunity, but simply takes any such as at all given and already specified. 
 
In simplistic theory of superficial prevailing common sense, if regular social contact, propinquity, is not adequately provided as byproduct of whatever structured routine, canvassing and networking in order best to market oneself, remain nevertheless simple though labor intensive. Productivity in networking requires raw material, and to be a "people person" in order to maintain a steady flow of prospects through whatever available channels. Why, the very sources of prospects are so extensive, that many actually may even find them overwhelming because having too many choices often makes decisions more difficult! -or so we may be assured. One need only be be well versed in all the proven methods of obtaining prospects before choosing your best strategy in order to generate a virtually endless number of new prospects. Then one need only sally forth in order to make acquaintance, and steadily make rounds to renew and reinforce said acquaintanceship. Such much.
 
All the combined thrills of vagrancy and ice fishing

 

There are of course those better adapted, but to what? 
 
Will any one cynically convenient relationship summarily abandoned, as another rung on the ladder of opportune standing and influence? What manipulative lengths of devious and unscrupulous self-serving advantage finally skirt the boundaries of covert relational bullying? With the requisite, of course, of any personal acquaintance for access to begin with, perhaps the most cynical approach to what has been described as: social circle mastery, indeed more often subject to approbation than occasionally, even actually recommendation, is sometimes called: "friend thievery", beyond ambiguity of manners and mores, raising every specter of dramatic and ethical conflict from motivations of jealousy, dishonesty and exploitation and depending upon what lengths one goes to, even simply for excitement just to forestall sheer boredom.
'Guide to Building a Social Circle from scratch' is another notably clear, concise, common sensible exhortation to occupation in arbitrary activity and dishonest meaningless extrinsically motivated checklist of chores for social outreach and cultivation, therefore doomed to ego alien and lonely boredom even in socializing, dystress instead of eustress, all hence ultimately only failure. The one good point at all, however still falling short: "If you’re starting from ground zero, your best bet is to find others who have also recently moved into the city, or others that are in transitional periods in their lives." Promising that: "You’ll invariably meet people like this if you build an active routine." -arbitrarily from meaningless extrinsic motivation... [*sigh*]
 
Indeed, no less than Popular Prick holding forth upon the same how-to topic of hanging out on another of his many marketing front URLs, Chris, the ever optimistic webmaster of succeedsocially.com, utterly fails to recognize in his recommendation of being able to amuse oneself whilst, leave us face it, endlessly lurking, hanging out alone in bars until social opportunity finally arises, and all the restricted innocuous conversation he prescribes when it finally does, not to mention that sad counterfeit of extroversion, the exceedingly well delineated rτle, skills and props of the archetypal popular guy, a confession of the boring, lonely and distant and crushingly stultifying artificiality of it all, perhaps because precisely such introverited layers of defense may actually be quite comforting to someone like Chris, webmaster of succeedsocially.com, a shy man suffering as he has from such distinct social anxiety.

•   Web Promotion: Research and then amalgamate Popular Cool Interesting Profiles

 
But as an enthusiastic procedural recommendation for just everybody else, the above advice nevertheless presents great frustration that those who proffer it seemingly fail even to perceive or comprehend. Where is the line between selling one self and just selling out unless of course one actually buys in? The requisite doublethink of cynically willful credulity is sheer heteronomy. Indeed, as Popular Prick insists, being yourself really often can be the cause of all social difficulty.
 
Then again, in fairness, though pitched and appealing to whatever desires that might conceivably be fulfilled by social success, the advice of Chris, webmaster of succeedsocially.com, is then presented explicitly for overcoming shyness rather than for combating loneliness most broadly, in terms of any other obstacles or needs. Can Chris, webmaster of succeedsocially.com, then truly then believe that shyness is the only true social obstacle confronting either the individual or the masses, or that individual yearnings are fairly identical and minimal, so that his own  personal satisfice is universal for all? For it remains, in truth, that all too often, our real needs are simply not being met! One metaphorica;l "size" does not proverbially fit all. Again, clearly, there are of course those better adapted, but to what? So at what point must it become prudent just to wonder if are even framing the problem insightfully, much less acting productively? Can fulfillment of motivating social stimulus needs ever truly become achievable as a process end product, like a good grade in school, the paycheck from employment, or the consumer goods coalescing and the end of the assembly line? Or rather, is not pleasurable engagement in meaningful interaction where it all needs to begin in the first place? Not according to prevailing thought, so it would seem.
 
Give off the impression that you already have a social life Show similar interests, values, and lifestyle: Existing friends are required in order to seem desirable as a new friend, so just lie shamelessly. -Everyone does. - so recommends Popular Prick.
 
Indeed, much as it may come as a shock to the likes of Popular Prick, not everyone derives any engaging pleasure or meaning but only phony, joyless, unhappy, boring, lonely and irrelevant interaction; no more than an alienated and protracted chore in which to engage any active cognitive process, indeed much as with any other extrinsically motivated punishment and reward system and no less fearful and de-enervating of real inner passion towards anything at all more interesting on one's mind. And if all the above sounds familiar, it should: For such exactly is the mentality and very paroxysm of our excruciatingly boring stultifying dullardly factory standardized educational system in preparation towards subsequent oppression and continued overjustification effect in the workplace.
 
Indeed, that's Why Nerds Are Unpopular: Because nerds so often have authentically meaningful time consuming genuine intrinsic interests and values of their own to share, with neither the time nor passion for being "cool". Indeed, in the very words of arch-nerd Albert Einstein: "A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."

Beyond all pretensions endemic to runaway evolution and engorged cerebrality, we are still only pack mammals after all. But does that mean all detail of information content exchange, including whatever personal depth of meaning, is all mere trifling nuance and decorative embellishment to crucial interaction on the animal gut level of emotion as salient to all exactly the same social politics, struggle, dominance and submission, just as among any other primates? -Indeed, how every expression tickles others, always reflects upon each individual and determines the persuasiveness, individual standing, position, leverage and influence! And there's the rub:

For, while to remember that we are pack mammals is all fine and good, to forget that we are sapient, means the abandonment of rational persuasion as ineffectual and futile, and hence the surrenders of any hope of seeking the truth for soundly crafting plans and cooperating in considered action, of Epistemological Methodology towards any salient agenda.

Also, the incessant demands of arbitrary social politics must inevitably come into irreconcilable conflict with the six core polemically purposeful and authentic dramatic motivations of dialogue, because preoccupation with effectiveness of social manipulation, endless social grooming and approval seeking, together quickly become all consuming and debilitating, soon to devolve, subvert and defeat all effort at ever conveying any honest and intelligent thoughts, feelings and values, let alone planning and acting thereupon together.

But let's not be pigheaded: Not all compromise is moral compromise. Compromise is often essential, constructive and consummately skilled. But even in any seemingly sensible acknowledgment towards the exigency of compromise with an imperfect world, the advocates of such conventional and normative paradigms of learning and embracing social skills, the veritable champions of heteronomy, all quite fail to appreciate how Faustian a tradeoff they often exhort, how alienating and demoralizing for the intelligent and sensitive, any simplistic reduction of whatever human outreach to any uninspired patient systematic procedure, a meaningless unfulfilling lonely boring alienating and dullardly chore, even excluding the most abusive and destructively dishonest manipulation.

There has always been the traditional heteronymous credo of popularity as a rugged striving of committed individual responsibility, skill, effort, zeal and involvement, wherein one is owed nothing and owes everything. Hence at best, society only offers some tools to the diligently attentive and opens any field of play to the devotedly intentive, nothing more. Indeed, as far as ever making good enough for attaining togetherness, one is all quite on ones own! And after all, the directly opposite view, demanding society coddle the manipulative bullying and emotional extortion of the chronically fragile, is if anything, even worse! 
 
All such given, then surely better a carefree well esteemed prick than a sickly self-loathing groveller, better to know the game and keep others in the dark, than to be the one left in the dark, better to play others than to be played.
 
And what comes of this?
 
That one way or another, conditional approval substituted for true acceptance seems the most conventional social arrangement, followed in prevalence only by compensation neurosis as manifest in all manner of compulsive substitution to fill the void of the unloved.
 
But can this be all that there is to life? No, it shouldn't be! For in truth, knowing how to fit in often comes at odds with the courage and acceptance of true and authentic friendship. Indeed, popularity may even be known to drain personal resources and spread one too thin for the effective cultivation of any true friendship. Aside, for good or ill, from networking within whatever fateful social embedment, there remain whatever readily available alienating and lonely avenues of futile outreach that truly only exist for whatever socially institutionalized ulterior agendas and rackets. -A racket being any dishonest scheme or ongoing transaction, all not as it contrives to present itself and as tacitly accepted or endured by the majority, but deception, coercion and manipulation conducted for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. In particular, heteronomy and the impersonal behaviorally structured social rτles as of bogus support groups that have rigidly institutionalized and also popularized their sad, sad travesty of friendship and psychological visibility.
 
In the alternative, for autonomy, an entirely different social skill set or aptitude of transparent and open ended deliberation upon agenda explores direction in defining voluntary collaboration and participation in whatever discourse or relationship, engagement or attachment in quest of happiness that heteronomy can never achieve or provide.

"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."

 

—  William Shakespeare, Hamlet  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Human Domestication
The insidious cult of socialization:
             exhortations to heteronomy for the sake of social success
 

“False happiness renders men stern and proud, and that happiness is never communicated. True happiness renders them kind and sensible, and that happiness is always shared.”

 
— Charles de Montesquieu
 
Fake fun is such inane mimesis as wherein two or more individuals strive mightily in somewhat desperate pretence and exhibition of having great fun, often according to social expectations of good cheer, positive attitude and group validation, and quintessentially as in any group of luzers, utter tools, messing around, jumping on each other's backs and forced laughing uproariously all the while painfully yearning and casting about for approval in order thereby to realize all such mimesis of happiness in social success. All in such desperation to get on the same wavelength, matching the other person’s emotional state and sharing any common objective. More often than not, anyone conspicuously and ostentatiously whooping it up, just overselling it, is deep down bored silly and working overtime psyching themselves up into having a good time and a positive attitude in order thus to demonstrate peer group validation and thereby gain social approval, and especially, y'know, so's that chicks won't smell the needy desperation! Arguably, we are all typically somewhat guilty of fake fun in making silly expressions and goofy poses for group photos in recreational social gatherings and outings.
 
Although, the less painfully over the top than fake fun or peacocking, according to  6 Things Men Do To Get Laid That Science Says Turn Women Off item # 5 "your best bet at getting a girl is walking up to her group and completely ignoring her, while chatting away to her less attractive friends." Then again, in the eyes of a woman, to gaze upon a man completely engaged in an involving task, may be quite attractive, especially playing a musical instrument. As ever, your mileage may vary.
 
Beware the insidiously heteronymous and ubiquitous cult of socialization replete with exhortations to heteronomy for the sake of Socialization is the process of Behavioral Modification by which norms and expectations are not so much informed or explained but, well, to be honest, indoctrinated into the individual, in order that by means of uncomprehending behavioral motivators, extrinsic motivation, attitudes, values and taboo, are all blithely internalized. -Ever so crucial in order to function in society, so we are all assured. "It's for your own good, dear!" But what if one gets socialized by complete douche bags? Well, that is where utter tools come from: the memetic propagation of complete douche baggery! Therefore, never be socialized by complete douche bags!
Beware Skilled Incompetence, the consequent dishonestly heteronymous adaptation by gutless executives marshalling information Inductively, and thereby manipulatively avoiding any relevant productive outcome of conflict on any level from controversy and never changing the course of action, fixed malagenda under predisposition to heteronymous Cohesion-Norms of Groupthink team traps of Stockholm Syndrome (to whatever degree)!
“American society is a society in which individuals have learned to prize social skills that permit them, like actors, to assume whatever role the occasion demands and to "perform" their lives rather than just live them.”
 
—  Neil Gabler 
  • "Fake It Till You Make it:" Soul-destroying Pipedreaming bad policy
 
 
 
Congratulations! You have discovered FoolQuest.com
 
Other websites proffer the most trivial advice or blithely over simplistic and flawed solutions that will never help you. Do not be taken in by people in a rut who really cannot be bothered to make time simply for paying attention to one another!
 
Alas, engagement more than merely productive means to whatever end, indeed, engagement is an intrinsic motivation, a fundamental human need. Yet everywhere one turns, there is such indifference, indeed timid contempt and malignant hostility towards engagement in very principle, as can be seen forever spawning industries of travesty bait and switch marketing exploitation via social obstacle courses of tantalizing frustration and grindingly alienated purpose defeating sublimation. Not only are there no guarantees of course, but there is no vested interest in our happiness at all. Service to the customer, student or end user is barely a distant second in priority. We are all abandoned to our  own devices in anything that truely matters.  
 
Even viable success strategies can more quickly make you miserable, much less all manner of debilitating and evasive scams. As ever, marketing often strives to confuse and inveigle the consumer in to compensation for unmet needs, via the elicitation of positive associations and mystique all seldom actually substantiated in whatever goods or services. For such is the shameless peddling of false hope, taking advantage of epidemic alienation! Hence, in flight from exactly such worldly vexation and deception, many claim solace in religion. Indeed, there are even those myriad disciplines and sophisticated techniques, ancient and arcane or bleeding edge modern, all utterly to cease caring. And others still, ever exhort a willfully positive attitude towards sheer determined drudgery as the path to success, or likewise fitting in socially at any cost, typically either ruthless Machiavellian social manipulation of all others or else just going along to get along, quiet submission to the herd, if not, actually indeed, even both all at once.
 
Under the dubious umbrella of Behavioral Medicine, myriad other services including social work, social skills training and various support groups, all heteronymously ever jockeying to "provide structure" and extract patient or client compliance and convenient docility in what can only amount to treatment of dissidence. There are no qualifications or professional associations for social skills training, submissive compliance being the primary social skill and single value imparted.
 
But the hypothetical true guru of social skills truly fit to educate the rest of us, to gently guide and protect us all from the snares and illusions of demeaning and convoluted dominance and submission, has him/herself need neither of submission nor domineering exploitation in order to become, indeed, supremely influential. In truth, even at all any genuine true seeker of social skills is compelled to quest for any less grotesquely simplistic approach to what amounts to personal practical applied Cultural Anthropology.
 
Alas, however, only precious few of us have ever actually been happy, trapped as we are in our travails amid the rat race under such typically oppressive punishment and reward systems as school or employment. -Nor, for that matter, politics and lip service to revolution or even in the Existentially Absurd, Ecclesiastically futile, and meaningless alienated travesty of leisure that is recreation.

Not selling out, just buying in: Isolated loners are often very ordinary and normal. In social life much as economically and career wise, it's not just any clearly disadvantaged luzers, but indeed, so many of our best and brightest, even actually the most sociable and gregarious, that are failing or underachieving, falling into obscurity and isolation. And many of those who are better socially integrated, much as do the more affluent and secure, can tend to look down on those less successful, forgetting both whatever fortuitous advantages and all the uncritically committed sacrifice that together fuel acceptance into upward mobility, so often more by relentless social climbing than by excellence in any competitive open market on whatever proverbial level playing field.

If we could do it, they grumble so heteronymously, then why should those slackers be exempt? In other words: Ya gotta put in your time / pay your dues. "Service guarantees franchise!" Well, you can have it.

Therefore, let us all pause for a moment to recognize those among us who demonstrate such adequate and indeed superlative social aptitude and natural grace, transcendent of the woes endured by the rest of us typical well meaning but inept nebbishes. For few of us can be so blessed as our most socially adroit. Indeed, many have had to rise to the challenge nevertheless. Therefore, particularly, let us acknowledge the consummate conformists, and all that they have sacrificed deep inside, simply in order to adapt and survive. We whiners and luzers, who have fallen so far short of the bar that you have set, do, nevertheless, rise to salute you and your fortitude!

So, be kind to yourselves: Do not wear your hearts upon your selves like us luzers do, but nonetheless, know thyselves, that the truth will set you free. And then, no longer so scorn those of us who can't or simply won't buckle down they way that you all have.
 
Rather, unlike derisive Popular Prick, only wish us all luck in seeking our own difficult paths.
 
Popular Prick, perhaps little worse than the average educator, is basically a shock-value fictional archetype or persona, perhaps an amalgam from reality, representing the simplistic howsoever workable dishonesty of a similar ideology of life priorities even beyond the workplace and throughout social life, created by a manic marketer in search of billable sycophants, and for purposes here providing such a perfect foil and veritable avatar of the world that thwarts and  mocks us so! Indeed, amoral frankness always deserves reciprocation via serious and cogent rebuttal.
 
Popular Prick, in his egotistically bombastic sales pitch, represents himself as the life of the party and center of attention resented by the teaming masses out of envy for his brilliantly dickish social success. Who can say? But then many others point out the superficiality of the connections garnered by a popular prick, instead prizing quality over quantity, and can only dread the lonely and superficial existence of a thriving lowlife popular prick even despite all clear and tantalizing utilitarian advantage of popularity and connections garishly touted and confidently promised.
Many ridicule and moralize against the likes of the self-styled Popular Prick, often failing to consider sheer Existential disgust at the empty impoverished meaningless unfulfilled lonely alienated boredom, among even better motivations for ever balking at social success but only and specifically on the terms of any smug and self-absorbed popular prick.
 
Indeed, Popular Prick provides a wonderful foil for the entire Axiology of engagement of any and every kind. Popular Prick is unsophisticated, and shows little motivation of genuine curiosity even in regards to his favorite topic of Behavioral manipulation. Nor does his constant attention to the ongoing social demands of persistent Behavioral manipulation, appear to stir even his own emotions of any meaning in the deeper sense whatsoever, anymore that they can be expected to be any more fulfilling for anyone else. Indeed, there is no sign that Popular Prick experiences, values or takes pleasure in either such engagement.
 
It must come, then, as little surprise, how Popular Prick fails to address the Existentially repellant emptiness and loneliness of his preferred way of life. Implicitly, Popular Prick is suggesting that it is wrong or misguided to concern oneself with such intrinsic needs. And consistently with such implicit anti-intellectualism, Popular Prick does not bother himself with such trifling abstraction.
 
Nevertheless, when Popular Prick asserts that "being oneself" is the problem, the unbidden implications go beyond merely any behaviors by which individual character ever presents itself to others out in the world. The problem isn't merely "being oneself" in scare quotes, as ever conceivably reducible to behaviors and attachment in the illusion of self identification thereto, but actually in literally being oneself at all in even experiencing drives beyond Reductionist Materialism or the validation from others of personal Narcissistic supply and vanity. But Popular Prick is a figurative Solipsist in his cavalier indifference and sheer failure of imagination why anyone might ever be different than he himself, except in misguided attachment to behaviors of self expression. Implicitly, Popular Prick recommends Zen non-attachment. He can have it. Popular Prick, no matter how proficient and self-absorbed, remains no less an utter tool.
 
For in addition to the sheer boredom of endless facile primate politics, conscience rises along with one's gorge at the prospect of a life of dishonest manipulation. Were, however, Popular Prick to exhibit genuine interest by engaging intelligently and sympathetically with any such profoundly personal reservations, why, then he would be stepping jarringly out of character. Instead, Popular Prick can only dismiss the shortcomings of his own way of life by scornful hand waving. Therefore, staying well within character and true to persona, Popular Prick simply attacks ordinary human sensibility as weak, defective and unrealistic, thereby leveraging to his own ends of manipulative persuasion, the very critical sense of self doubt that helps keep sensitive and intelligent people honest, all in order to press home his Machiavellian point of how much better adapted he, with any possible validity, claims to be, in the ugly real world, regardless of all thinking and feeling sensibility that he therefore so scorns in such contemptuous pragmatism and Nihilistic value destruction
 
And arguably, an even heavier responsibility may reside in the value of persuasive social manipulation skills in reaching out and protecting loved ones, when honesty and sensitivity are plainly ineffective. Popular Prick's sales pitch, for all of its simplistic vulgarity, may touch upon a reflective nerve of an all too common sensation of powerlessness in the human condition. And so, behold, the ancient Zen snake oil of conduct within dharma contemporarily repackaged yet again, sallying ever forth in renewed quest of futility.:
For to paraphrase Nietzsche,a king of fools is but a fool himself. And actual content of his eBook aside, in his ongoing cavalierly hostile sales pitch, typical self-promoting Machiavellian social manipulation guru Popular Prick does not actually recommend authentic extroversion in terms of whatsoever any true, abiding and disingenuous outwardly directed interest in others, care or concern, but only in terms of specific and calculated extrinsically motivated outwardly directed behavior, with oblivious and apathetic detachment from all else in authentic and compelling intrinsically motivated human interaction the more moving, interesting, engaging and involving.
 
"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket." —  George Orwell
 
"Being "yourself” [in scare quotes] is not the solution, it’s the problem" declares Popular Prick, who defines a prick not, perish forbid, as per common usage and thereby in any sense of the requisite sheer hostility, but rather merely as someone mindful of superficial aspects of human interaction, even to exclusion of, and unsympathetic indifference towards, all most profound motivation or howsoever substantive emotional and intellectual content of human communication and interaction. For it is mastery of exactly the most shallow that Popular Prick extols as crucial to social success and therefore worthy of rτle modeling via the application of modern Behavioral science -or more specifically: Neuro-Linguistic Programming obsolete no longer plausible cult snake oil, because of all the concrete and tangible advantages to be gained; in a word: expedience. After all, what can be wrong with anything anyone calls shallow or even disingenuous, if only it succeeds and all pays off when emulated, right?
 
Indeed, it may well be best to overlook presentation style, Popular Prick's shock value obnoxious hyperbole after all just to get our attention, and focus instead upon responding to message content so frankly proffered. To wit: It is all is easy to extol compromise as reasonable and realistic. But in the end, it's all just bait and switch. It's becomes a moot question how to do as others who have their own way, unless what they seek even much appeals to begin with to you! Having one's own way is only desirable in order thereby for wining ones own unique true heart's desire, often entirely distinct from what everybody or anyone else strives for or values. So don't be manipulated into empty sublimation! As ever, one way or another, status accrues from buying what you don't need, at expenditure beyond one's means, to impress people you can barely stand. Only the transaction varies: Buying in or selling out!
 
Any solutions to all manner of unhappy circumstances, ultimately involving playing an expected social rτle predictably won't work for people for whom playing social rτles simply does not work or becomes objectionable and demeaning. For the one fine point remains regarding social strategy of any kind, is that whereas strategy to begin with may typically be motivated by whatever extrinsic and even sensibly concrete utilitarian goals as ever put forth, by contrast, intrinsic stimulus needs including social interaction, rather, are met by likewise intrinsic if not ineffable quality of experience, a profound paradigm shift from ordinary pragmatism, intrinsic needs in turn promoting entirely different and far more complicated strategic considerations.  Only values meaningfully focus visioning to put forth relevant goals and motivate growth in human flourishing. 
 
  
Indeed, the pursuit of happiness often demands all manner of utilitarian sacrifice in favor of other values such as color experience and the satisfaction of intrinsic stimulus motivation towards social interaction and the wherewithal thereto. That is the true self-realizing will to power and autonomy so blithely ignored in simplistic reduction of successful social interaction into any mere utilitarian practicality. Little can be duller and lonelier than relating to others merely as tools! Certainly, it is all too easy to trivialize compromise of identity and integrity, exactly as Popular Prick recommends. And it is even easier, with glittering generalities, to promise the moon! In truth, however, with the sacrifice of autonomy, in exchange for our last best hope one surrenders oneself to the authoritative mercy of strangers at random, with self alienation only compounding social isolation. In the alternative, let those of us less pliant, helpless, desperate and gullible, rise and seek together for more rewarding, optimistic and dignified alternatives perhaps from the daring and effort at howsoever the less simplistic social models. Because, as for those rare occasional few actually indeed so readily and easily manipulated, are they really such a desirable influence? Can such shallow acclaim attained thereby and therefrom, truly be called friendship?
 
What the likes of Popular Prick peddle is only a hermit's indifference and disinterest towards others, nothing more or less cynical than a way if life necessarily bereft of everything that would ever engagingly involve and connect human attachment, even with nothing tangible over which to connive or get the better of one another. Consider, indeed, what a sad thing and nothing to take lightly, to regret of a beleaguered, vulnerable and foolish loved one come to harm: Was I indecisive? Perhaps I should have been more manipulative! And yet, rather than Machiavelli in recommendation of socially well integrated and powerfully positioned and ruthless exploitation of other individuals, perhaps a better guide is the sensibility of George Orwell, who recognized the subversive nature of true interpersonal connection under conditions howsoever and in any degree, of oppression. The requisite social dexterity must then be likewise subversive. But no one teaches anything like that, because of the presumed indoctrinary nature of formal educationn hoped for any less debilitating alternative to the endless cynical maneuvers of a Popular Prick, there can be nothing naive in yearning for the wherewithal to achieve any better exalted and truer sense of personal security far beyond even sheer imagination and desire to begin with, of all the world's popular pricks, in reaching out, sharing the resource and empowerment of any somehow more functional circle of support and genuine abiding and autonomy supportive respect to lighten and mitigate the weight and the snares of any such untenably and fraudulently open ended sense of unrealistic ultimate responsibility and dedication implicit in the demands of the quest, even however amoral only for power and unflinching individual dharmic mastery sans trust, reliance, or honest cooperation. Therefore beware! Manipulation is Faustian, even in the very beguiling thought! The facile sycophantic expediently amoral approach to social interaction merely for whatever calculated personal gain, is sometimes disparaged as: playing politics. The allusion thereby follows from a certain dim view of politics. And in First Alcibiades, Socrates warns of the dangers of all such unprincipled expediency. Indeed, one particular nd salient danger of interminably playing politics is, again in the parlance of Socrates, "An unexamined life not worth the living for any human being sans any meaningful value and sympathetic human connection of psychological visibility, only protracted and futile meaningless unfulfilled lonely boredom, even amid the boundless and heady Narcissistic supply as guaranteed from the expected admiring throngs of a Popular Prick.

 

 

 

 

 

Situation analysis:
CONFRONTING ALIENATION
Is this really all there is?!
 
 
Relationship is indeed an artifact, a byproduct, but of what events?

In 'The Social Life of Information' John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid argue that information acquires meaning only through social context that is stripped from much online communication. In truth, however, the actual important social context, which is not merely such as non verbal nuance and biographical background, but rather any autonomous social point at all of interaction, that long before our computer age, has already been starved and annihilated from heteronymous conventions of social outreach. Non verbal nuance, biographical background, etc. and such, indeed have become all too often veritably co-opted to provide and reinforce, indeed assail and overwhelm, only with senseless social cues and irrelevant behavioral structure even entirely extraneous to, stripped and bereft of, relatable and engaging meaningful individual Intrinsic motivation to interaction, in a word: agenda (aside from sheer heteronomy), all too often thus becoming irrelevant and paradoxically alienating, even while addictively providing ever more direction and promise of inclusion, precisely as so often so heteronymously hungered for.

Functional and relevant relationship, even in the most transitory sense of immediate interaction let alone lasting attachment, remains oppressively impossible from the sheer cargo cult mimesis that is mere social intelligence into increasingly arbitrary behavioral structure. Rather, genuine relationship first arises, rather than somehow culminating later on, either by reciprocal engagement in free and coherent, even substantive, communication, exploration, and interaction, indeed from common purposeful endeavor and interaction, or else from the seduction of play and the dignity of social risk with trust, security, ultimately openness in yielding to temptation, all the aforesaid that are the competencies of autonomy, along with organization and congenial social grace to manage and sustain contacts, reciprocally. Rather, genuine relationship, free and deepening exchange, tacitly agenda driven and transparent. -All that is such anathema and typically obstructed by such drone-like heteronymously arbitrary social acumen, skilled incompetence and cronyism, that everywhere buttresses the tacit institutionalization and twisted value of all the most flagrant insensitivity and ineptitude imaginable, the bad driving out the good, and worse, actingout the destructive evil that is rampant bullying. Indeed, gregariousness and engaging personality may even be reviled as subversive and impertinent to a malagenda of sheer heteronymous group validation in sheer denial of all such profound endemic and pandemic alienation from the innate and intrinsic drives of human expression and connection. All of us therefore experience some intimation of the masses of humanity lost in a maze of neurotic forgetful confusion in strange societies of power mad violence and manipulation, all somehow alien.
 
According to the World Health Organization, depression became the leading cause of disability in the world during 2010. People are so guarded and afraid, alienated and not without reason. Not only do all manner of facile and manipulative predators, often lionized, roam about, but the social environment is so sterile and hostile to begin with. Few can truly attain the security that we all need for growth in human flourishing. The reason that social life is no conduit but actually obstructs networking and outreach, is simply because all the heteronymous facile and introverted predicates to popularity and successful social integration are completely at odds with relationship and the autonomous values of open and genuine friendship. In the words of Neil Gabler: “American society is a society in which individuals have learned to prize social skills that permit them, like actors, to assume whatever rτle the occasion demands and to "perform" their lives rather than just live them.” Indeed, so many are raised to believe that sour grapes, pretending you don't want it, is the key to all of ones desires, and to struggle for acceptance being conditional upon disguising oneself according to social expectations. For prime example, the allure of chastity, so we are taught, is the key to sexual  success. Indeed, cockblockers are self-appointed to chaperone decorum and keep the rest of us in line. Women mustn't be easy, therefore men mustn't be obvious. Any truth therein accrues by way of self-fulfilling prophesy. In building relationships, the result is insecurity, suspicion, tacit hostility, resentment and codependency. In encounters, the result is anxiety and self-medication to enable sexual function at all. In every more Platonic interaction, the situation remains analogous: Don't be obvious or needy, patiently amuse yourself, smile and keep it light. All the very opposite of genuine intimacy as defining true relationship and friendship. And how can the latter ever accrue from the former? Only if at all, covertly and despite overwhelming  obstacles. 

Alas, it's all much the same punishment and reward racket. A racket, after all, is any dishonest scheme or ongoing transaction, all not as it contrives to present itself and as is tacitly accepted or endured by the majority of those involved, but in actuality a scam or fraud, a deceptive practice of coercion and manipulation conducted for the benefit of a few cronies at the expense of the many. The masses will always comply in ever greater effort and diligence jumping through hoops and fighting amongst ourselves for scraps, believing and rationalizing just about anything, all in order to obtain whatever artificial scarcity or bait-and-switch, no matter how plainly contrived. But when it all finally comes crashing down with nothing to show for it all, only the depression and despair of alienation with the futility of the entire meaningless exercise, remains.

Because most social outreach has degenerated into such a meaningless chore not a pleasure, predicated upon pretense rather than expression, lonely boredom and routine rather than creative reciprocal engagement, aloof restraint rather than flirtation, conditionality rather than curiosity, disordered indifference rather than attachment, controlling snobbery rather than egalitarian hospitality, and situationally: the quailing heteronymizing decidophobia of humiliation and faux pas rather than the rugged and autonomous dignity of risk in the quest for acceptance and understanding. Intrinsic motivation is first aroused only then to be systematically thwarted, punished, conditioned out, heteronymously bullied, sublimated, suppressed and unfulfilled all in hopes of whatever extrinsic rewards that are long if ever in coming. What is there at all even conceivably any less playful or gregarious?

 “In time, most of us join the enemy... against ourselves."  

Such is the great treasure that is socialization. -It's all for you own good, dear! And they ask why intelligent people are so often alienated and unhappy! As with most anyone, our needs remain unmet.

Alienation, estranged emotional disassociation and consequent depression, can be so disorienting and even paranoid as to bring on nausea and rage, or perhaps more often, the desperate defense of sheer denial. Alienation is the even surreal situation wherein the individual can no longer discern meaningful value or relevantly useful propose in any feature or contents of an inexplicably hostile or indifferent surrounding environment; in the words of Jean Baker Miller: “inability to find ways of organizing society for human ends.”

For happiness, the challenges of social life, as with any other personal responsibility, ought to fall within individual power, resources and capability. Engagement in social interaction should be available, bully proof, reasonably transparent, actually welcome, varied, stimulating, diverting, valuable, substantive and fulfilling, leading via growing acquaintance almost as a matter of course, to longer term interpersonal attachments. Whereas, alienation is a product of frustration with daunting social challenges in the navigation of ever more senselessly dystressful and barren social mazes and minefields into ever more vast and boring robotic social wastelands.

Capitalist crass consumer materialism makes for such an easy and popular target. After all, in order to market goods, services, and especially recreation, all with precious little distinction, advertisement panders to sublimation via mystique of association to every desire, not only with social status and popularity, or even basic id drives as greed, gluttony and lust, to luxury and soothing comfort where joy is already forgotten, but frequently to such human needs as the exaltation of freedom, the warmth of friendship and even the peaceful satisfaction of quiet reflection which is indeed a practice of thought and intellect, the ego. But in truth, all the aforesaid is more instructive than it is actually malignant. For is anyone nowadays really deceived anymore by advertising clichι? In truth, as the saying goes: "Money is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master."

The worse satisfice and far more destructive, remains the rat race of social skilling in pursuit of heteronymous social success, that has so poisonously tabooed all true fulfillment and human flourishing, keeping genuine happiness even out of mind as well as out of reach and readily dismissed as pipedream for wont of prior foundation or justification. And in order to be sustained in practice, values must be reinforced, kept both in view and within reach. Heteronymous false values are typically promulgated by heavy indoctrination, but the striving for true human values is awakened by sheer temptation in the form of autonomy support and the Capability Approach.

Behaviorist social skilling dumbing down and lowered expectation appropriately to such eviscerated social environments and hostile conditions, offer no remedy pertinent to genuine individual needs, but only deepen despair. It has even been suggested that the successful and congenial conduct of modern social life already requires, not just electronic communication facilities, but real computational power and extensive data, an unmet need, the market gap, to be addressed by automated Sociometry.

Indeed all of the preceding also applies politically, as political powerlessness: helplessness to influence  government, political meaninglessness: wherein political decisions seem unclear and unpredictable, political normlessness: the individual perception that norms or rules intended to govern political relations have broken down, and that departures from prescribed behavior are common, political isolation: individual rejection of political norms and goals put forth, that are widely held and shared by others.

For alienation is the process of becoming a stranger, increasingly powerless and foreign to the very world in which one exists, often in a changing world even engendering nostalgia for any mythic past of harmony and contentment.

Alienation is estrangement, division, fragmentation of social bonds and community, or distancing of people from each other, or of people from whatever is important or meaningful to them, even from comprehension and objective reality or of an individual from their own sense of self, dissociation and inner conflict, all inevitable within any superficial and depersonalized society.

And of course, religion typically blames separation from God.

Among the many dimensions of alienation including powerlessness, meaningless Nihilism, normlessness (anomie), social isolation, cultural estrangement and self-estrangement amid an increasingly surreal incomprehensibly hostile environment or situation, the twisted ostensible motivation of Masochistically feigned mercy is no honest excuse for the adaptively sycophantic appeasement of faceless abusers of power, that in no way resembles genuine sympathetic compassion for individuals one can actually relate to, a legitimate and redeeming purpose, nor likewise even sound rationality. In the aftermath of Zen futile Nihilistic value destruction, skills of amoral social intelligence quickly become little more than the foulest mockery and perversion of meaningful and genuine humane sensitivity and wisdom.

Indeed, Beware Skilled Incompetence, the consequent dishonestly heteronymous adaptation by gutless executives marshalling information Inductively, and thereby manipulatively avoiding any relevant productive outcome of conflict on any level from controversy and never changing the course of action, fixed malagenda under predisposition to heteronymous Cohesion-Norms of Groupthink team traps of Stockholm Syndrome (to whatever degree)! Exactly thus, whether directly by overbearing  power and authority or more deviously by consensus manipulation, and often with the aid of negative stereotypes of outsiders, are dissenters and opposing views never properly argued with, but merely ignored under tacit rationalization of group invulnerability, evidence to the contrary minimized and trivialized, that decisions made by the group cannot be "made-wrong."

Alienation, then, is the personal, pervasive and permanent condition in which individuals find themselves at utter cross purposes with, and dominated by, destructive forces and user-hostile institutions of our own creation, driven by their own Monopolistic agendas, confronting the individual as overbearing, loveless, conditional, bullying, entrenched, threatening and manipulative alien powers amid the demoralization of society.

Such high hopes are vested in progress in the field of automated Sociometry in reversing pandemic alienation, precisely because what is actu1ally so sorely needed is the formation of ones own serviceably helpful social circles or peer groups in order to facilitate optimal extended networking and quality compatible introductions, rather than drifting into isolation or falling in with dysfunction and bullying exploitation. But the true pervasively heteronymous anti-intellectual tabooed open secret root cause of the problem remains painfully irrelevant recreational small talk so bereft of all motivation and purpose of autonomy.

making conversation count:

• Happy People Talk More Seriously and make less small talk

               Talk Deeply, Be Happy?

• Optimal Reciprocal Engagement

Especially in social life and most especially as opposed to career pursuit, people tend to react unconsciously: viscerally, habitually and prejudicially, "on autopilot," rather than in thinking considered response. Actual human motivation is often neither from intrinsic arousal in whatever the doing for its own sake, nor even merely extrinsic for whatever hoped for payoff. Hence, people by in large are neither just impulsive nor are they opportunistic and/or cautious rational agents, all to often just conservative in their actions and decisions, often most compellingly motivated as it may turn out, by such as will be found in whatever their perception of vested interest, of which even the ongoing self justification, however deranged and hypocritical, that is called: Existential Validation, is only an aspect. Vested interest is whatever personal stake or special interest in protecting or promoting that whereof derives howsoever perceived personal benefit or advantage. Even what little that passes for moral restrictions at all, may largely reflect the individual vested interest in whatever social order that in turn at all both intimidates and protects said individual by whatever much the same credible threat. People often become motivated only by buying into indoctrination, by internalizing extrinsic motivators, one way or another into whatever particular investment of sacrifice. And people are notoriously reluctant to let loose of past sacrifice invested, no matter how clearly in vein. Otherwise, should indoctrination and sublimation fail, coercion alone accrues alienation and depression. And this is why faith is so prized: Because it promotes the heteronymous illusion of belonging.

Whatever is ever truly invested in the individual may reflect what is vested in said individual by others. Woody Allen opined that “Eighty percent of success is showing up." But it helps, first, to be invited. Indeed, in the words of Arthur H. Vandenberg: “It is less important to redistribute wealth than it is to redistribute opportunity.” In particular, in a truly functional circle of friends, networking by others on behalf of an individual ideally best and most straightforwardly serves the interests, preferences, needs and desires of said individual in true and abiding autonomy support and respect.

• The Capability Approach

• Frontiers of automated Sociometry

Alas more often, within the attachment disorder of exploitative cliques as much as with self help gurus or any other racket, there arises considerable moral hazard, being: circumstances in which one party, with impunity, insulated from risk, is prone to act on another's behalf expending whatever that other's resources, tangible or intangible, in advance of entirely any other agenda than simply the best interests, preference, needs and desires of the individual ostensibly served. And the individual so exploited, in rationalizing cognitive dissonance often simply makes do actually because of their own fearful prior investment of sacrifice and vested interest accrued. Thus are individuals so often manipulatively deceived, brought together or wedged apart for various scheming exploitative advantage of sly amoral self serving sociopathic relational bullies, hypocritical gang stalking predatory cockblockers and worse.

• Veritable informal cults are often the norm 

And aside, for good or ill, from networking within whatever fateful social embedment, there remain whatever readily available alienating and lonely avenues of futile outreach that truly only exist for whatever socially institutionalized ulterior agendas and rackets. These boring senseless routines so impoverished of intrinsic motivation, with nothing truly engaging, so bereft not only of meaning and purpose on the one hand, but also of any spontaneous playful fun in the other, are amongst the most punishing of life's chores and most insidious of indoctrination and lessons of heteronomy. Indeed, according to H.-G. Gadamer’s ”philosophical hermeneutics” 5.Gadamer, H-G.: ”Der Begriff des Spiels” in ”Wahrheit und Metode” vol. I. 1960., play is the key category through which human beings are brought on terms with the world and to mutual understanding. Therefore it can only follow that anhedonic alienation and estrangement with situation become inevitable in any way of life both so purposeless and so utterly stultified of any sense of play.

Indeed, even if one does actually meet new people, it's often a waste of time. Whatever hoped for purpose in meeting them will typically not be accomplished. Consider the utter cross purpose of any standard bureaucratic ambush: Ever been inveigled into attending a meeting by means of complete lies as to whatever agenda or purpose of said meeting? Why, I have even had the unfortunate acquaintance of a manipulative bully both so desperately lonely and so consumed with controlling jealousy, that he would organize disastrous get-togethers by inviting, pleading and wheedling each person on an entirely different bait-and-switch false pretext, and going to great pains in order to thwart networking between them, let alone that we might actually compare notes! Granted that such may be an extreme case, but when was the last time you where wooed rather than bamboozled and extorted, and could really feel that others actually drew collective strength and sought to build personal advantage and value from better connecting and empowering you, first?

Employment is a sore travail wherein the most incompatible people are pressed together against their will. School is an heteronymously cliquish paranoid and standardized behaviorally structured stultified and stimulus impoverished environment populated by perpetually cagey students ever consumed with the scholastic rat race and the perpetually Sophomoric social pecking order, hence ever terrified of association with the unpopular. Volunteerism is for some else's chores. -Drudgery such as typically does not involve the high levels of interaction and cooperation such as to illicit equally high levels of sociability while curtailing antisocial conduct and rejection. Indeed, even grassroots political activism does not facilitate genuine political representation and input into policy. Conditionality is the order of the day: "Join us comrade, or fuck off!" Indeed, take a seat at their table, but never order off menu.

And recreation is no less standardized, behaviorally structured and stultified. Indeed, the sheer restrictive and trivializing irrelevancy of online dating, just for prime example, typically exacerbates human superficiality. And night life presents a similar predatory business model to that of the casino, though likewise flashy bright and noisy, nevertheless also deliberately stimulus impoverished environment situationally contrived to dazzle, ensnare and then thwart the exploited mark. Upon entering a casino, a simple consideration of the vested interests of the casino owner will explain why the patron cannot readily profit from gambling. Upon entering a bar or dance club, likewise a consideration of the various social and economic stake holders and vested interests in play, will explain why the physical environment is similarly overstimulating while at the same time, ebullience of excited crowds notwithstanding, the social environment is so lonely, isolating and understimulating, as well as the difficulty in achieving whatever extrinsic payoff in hoped for connections, in no less of a zero sum game than Poker and far less fair. For men, success rates typical to night life are abysmal low. In the classic prisoner's dilemma that is the battle of the sexes, women tentatively building confidence are seldom more daring than to bask in a little attention from would be suitors often in fierce and even dangerous cutthroat competition.

Few people are ever completely joined in or completely dropped out. Rather, there is a vast range of degree. Opportunity, such as it will be, depends upon tacit agenda actually defined by attachment as cemented by the stakes vested by people in one another. Networking facility and social success like any other opportunity in society or credible threat in protection of ones own standing, remains a factor of the stakes and the trust that others will place in whichever particular individual. And the timidity of heteronomy is a desperation vested only in the social order and to the exclusion of individual attachment and respect, risk taken in friendship and vested in talent, with trust placed in content of character.

 

So, is there any practical alternative approach ? Dare one declare: To Hell with proximity and propinquity, interpersonal networking, and the entire rat race of those utter tools! If social life really has become so like unto recognizance under enemy surveillance, then:

 What about actually going underground?

Clandestine HUMINT asset recruiting so vital in spycraft and espionage reality, with all the vast resource and connection of the intelligence community brought to bear, is also a favorite staple of spy fiction deep intrigues. From the first season of 'The Avengers' before the character was developed into the even somewhat fancifully iconic archetypical English gentleman, paragon of unflappable grace, demeanor, aplomb and dry wit, a more roguish and even at all more believable secret agent John Steed, with even something of the air of a charming and affable con artist, would traverse the English countryside cultivating all manner of his own specialist personal intelligence assets, maintaining existing working relationships and scouting new talent: interpersonal networking and canvassing, preliminary research culminating in the howsoever systematic initiation of direct contact with whatever target group of individuals.

This, of course, is how he would end up in long term Platonic partnerships with leather clad aristocratic lady martial artists. (No sex please, we're British!) Remember, this is 60's television.

But returning to reality, even the most personable of individuals often struggle in sheer exasperation to meet new people, forge relationships and break isolation. And all too often, social exclusion and abusive bullying and backbiting replete with all manner devious covert relational hostility easily rivaling the most labyrinthine intrigues of espionage, real or fictional, often renders all social outreach effort even the more futile and unpleasant.

And so to employ an at all parallel stock dramatic situation, what about a criminal wanted by the law, a fugitive, persecuted untouchable pariah or spy trapped behind enemy lines, daring not to show themselves in public in order to socialize and network for whatever needed connections and resources? How can one effectively research, spot and reach out privately, to desired relationship prospects? Indeed, what can we learn from confidence tricksters and serial killers, so expertly targeting vulnerable victims and so readily connecting with enthusiastic cohorts? Or indeed from all manner furtive sexual deviants seeking one another in the bad old days of darkest intolerance and taboo? Or more prosaically, is there anything applicable for adaptation in order to ferret out the proverbial unmet fried or the place where one is needed, from the methods of corporate headhunters in pursuit of passive candidates, intelligence gathering in order to identify and then woo qualified personnel even such as who are not actively job hunting and seeking attention at that time? Alas, unlike so much else malignant nonsense, heteronomy and snake oil, the subversive notion in very thought towards strategy in attempt at bypassing a racket so obviously unworkably standardized by design, is a realm of question actually deemed indecent, indiscreet, awkward and squeamish taboo; indeed: "unspylike." (No, really!) And what experience could ever be more surreal and alienating then that? 

 

Unhappiness results from suffering, deprivation, frustration and fear or anxiety. Causes of unhappiness and misery include wrong doing, foolishness, unthinking poor judgment, mistreatment, cruelty, abuse of power, misfortune, stress, boredom and loneliness.

And learned helplessness is passive behavior produced by exposure to unavoidable aversive events, unpleasant experiences. When anyone perceives, correctly or incorrectly, that they have no control over their life, understandably often may give up trying, thus entering deep depression.

Passivity, depression, learned helplessness, giving up and refusal to try, may all help assuage mounting anxiety at the prospect of risk, great or small. But such coping strategy is to take refuge in ever deepening depression, even to the point suicidal despair. Simply giving up typically provides some stress relief in the short term, while exacerbating excruciating despair in the long term.

In such an empty Zen futility and meaningless existence, only constant guidance provides any distraction, and any measure of freedom only leads to gnawing boredom.

Naturally, the unhappy are more easily manipulated because, readily, the unhappy individual is well motivated to seek consolation and relief from the pain thereof. -to feel better, to be consoled, to be reaffirmed, to feel whole and complete. As ever, marketing often strives to confuse and inveigle the consumer in to compensation for genuine underserved needs, via the elicitation of positive associations and mystique, seldom actually substantiated in whatever goods or services. For such is the shameless peddling of false hope!

Hence, it becomes fairly simple for actual punishment and reward systems subtext only ever signaling the same dire lack of sufficiently engaging intrinsic value and eliciting overjustification effect, thereby to demoralize and control the ways and means by which the unhappy individual seeks comfort, consolation and respite. Thence, what will become more convenient than, one way or another, to market whatever the most readily available false hope instead of whatever they are really missing, but have been discouraged? All, however, to persistent futility. For what can be the point?

Alas, many people can never even conceive of questioning whatever the prevalent superficial common wisdom, no matter how consistently it ever fails them in practice, emphasizing a mythology detailing some or other prescribed mechanics of prospecting for connections in utter disregard of every purpose, sense or meaning motivating outreach to begin with, the incessant demands of arbitrary social politics inevitably coming into irreconcilable conflict with the six core polemically purposeful and authentic dramatic motivations of dialogue

In practice, often friendship grows from acquaintance in any given context, by extending the boundaries by involving the other person in other interpersonal or social contexts. Nevertheless, obviously there must be far more to it. Otherwise, loneliness would be vastly uncommon.

Whereas indeed solitary futility is actually the single core value embraced and extolled of the Zen, in the alternative, any true solution to loneliness must instead address the inextricable discontent of sheer Existential pointlessness by the exchange of attention as only possible given engagement in the reciprocal stimulation of meaningful content, expression and attention.

Because, even putting aside the most ruthlessly cynical how-to's of exploitative social climbing and frantically networking the cold and vast in actual practice and for all purposes and intents punishment and reward system of acquaintance (likewise subtext only ever signaling the same dire lack of sufficiently engaging intrinsic value and thereby eliciting overjustification effect) amid all of the failed and trivializingly superficial commonsense advice towards overcoming loneliness, suitable enough only for simple and moderate shyness or uncomplicated social anxiety, of where to hang out, flexibility, lowered expectation, making do with whatever company can be had, however empty, quiet patient perseverance in order to come off more cool, staying active however arbitrarily and likewise organizing one's schedule, who to keep in touch, how to strike up conversation, and even screwing up the courage to confide one's woes, only rarely does the sense of sheer futility and the frustrated quest for intrinsically meaningful and engaging value enter as an aspect of loneliness or frustrated motivation, alas unless in the context of the most dauntingly senseless religious proselytizing.

Alas, even where the motivating quest for meaning and value is howsoever attended to, in relation to loneliness or not, and even with the sense of crisis so well deserved, nowhere does the abstract ever seem to connect to any strategic application or action agenda. After all, practical advice is typically divorced from abstract principle as a matter of pervasive taboo

Substantive change demands not only a healthy discontent, even however restless, but conviction that it is in what we do, the context and content thereof and how we interact that we need some point to it, and very much for it's own sake and in the doing thereof as an essential and indispensable pressing human need or core value, rather than strictly optional or auxiliary, some mere ornamental crowning touch, let alone pragmatically superfluous or actually impractical.

No true friend demands your silence and stifles your growth as a human being.

To overcome alienation, the values of intrinsic motivation must first be reclaimed from the clutches of systematic bait and switch of sublimation. Escape from alienated dependency upon social institutions requires nothing less than the wherewithal to organize and fully immersively engage and interact in meaningful pleasurabe interaction, even cooperation and collaboration.

No, it is not interminably hanging out for small talk that needs or deserves to be given any sort of a chance. Indeed, really giving anyone any chance at all, requires honest attention, genuine interest and sympathy, relative true intimacy that may likely to demand relative privacy in opposition to expectations of brainless and conformist hanging out. Individual freedom and security in any broader social contexts in order to ever really give anyone any chance, will never be achieved so long as doing nothing in particular remains so consuming and exacting a pursuit. Not everyone really has the passion for that bizarre sport.

Indeed, people first of all simply need to be. Therefore, greater true civility and vastly relaxed and simplified norms must come to the defense of even however incidental casual expression of identity. Only then will average people ever finally discover personal resources to spare for cultivating real talent and passionate genuine interests.

Indeed, the inadequacy of ordinary sheer social ineptitude can scarcely be any more daunting and baffling than, to the contrary, the despair that is transmitted from highly skilled Incompetence in adept compliance with every expectation. -oppression propagating among the oppressed!

Perhaps we might imagine that in some bygone era, what once was agreeable to one's fellow human beings was simply that one shared their burden, that they might reciprocate. It still is, except that the burden now a days, rather than actually relating to one another, is the miserable compliant embrace of alienation in a milieu wherein veritably by design, no one's needs can ever be met.

Boredom is resolved only by anything interesting enough to sustain attention. While love and happiness are supplied from someone from whom to exchange needed attention and engaging stimuli, that is, anyone who adequately relate to one another. -And loneliness is the absence all thereof, empty of meaning, sheer pointless futility and utter irrelevance. Indeed, the active psychiatrically Nihilistic engagement in loneliness even within social interaction, is boredom perpetuated under the noxious scam of boring people relying upon others likewise confused, helpless and not paying enough attention ever even to notice or care that no one is really paying attention to one another, repressed into sheer indifference beyond any sheer bother to relate.
 
But surely, what we all really need to share is in the fundamental exercise of freedom being nothing less than the perceptive and intelligent quest for any effective struggle to overcome alienation and loneliness, to connect in order to mount any resistance, making every reasonable effort to improve our lives, rather than endemic blithe rationalization, bogus support group ethos marshmallow-throwing and co-validation wallowing in denial and unaware incompetent accommodation thereof. Indeed, given food, shelter, medicine and even entertainment, what else still remains more important to real progress than human connection of stimulus and attention in whatever expression and cultivation of our talents?
 
 
 
 
 
The banality and the bane of all which is called: recreation. In the words of Chema Pφdrφn: "Seeking pleasure is an opportunity to observe what we do in the face of pain." And nowhere is this more salient than in deconstruction and analysis of what is called recreation, that shabbily travesty of honest hedonism which passes for any wholehearted pleasure seeking. Because it cannot be enough that the sore travail of formal education and employment each standardized behaviorally structured and standardized, but therefore so must be the bulk of the leisure consumption and comfort for which they are the Faustian price. Recreation, typically so devoid of all individuality, is therefore so readily standardized for mass market consumption. But that remains actually secondary. Recreation remains the desperate effort and struggle to recover, on ones own time and expense, from the debilitating learned helpless sheer exhaustion, fear and loathing of exactly the ever so vigorously marketed dubious practical and Existential guarantees they all swear by, namely their family lives, schooling and job careers that they lead, has become the Narcissistic superficial mimesis and introverted oblivion of sheer cognitive, emotional and social disassociation, living death, pointless and awkward "hanging out," banal small talk, fake fun, nightlife, leaving little room for true immersive passion, anything or anyone trustworthy, care and involvement in any experience of anything or anyone else or much of any deeply personal value.
 
Instead, only joyless unfulfilling toxic fear-based co-validation and satisfice in the embrace of superficial relations and oppressive conditionality, painfully corseted and closeted even out in the open! with determined satisfice committed to the profound alienation of networking only under whatever terms and purpose defined by unstated and uncritical consensus agenda, as proverbial cogs in the metaphorical machine and entrenchment in lives not much worth the living. -Making do with standardized in terror of being left out entirely and going nowhere at all, and worse still, of rejection, hostility, exposure and real danger to oneself and ones loved ones, of worse exploitation, even harsher abuse and life threatening decline. Lastly, determined inner life satisfice, consisting of whatever lonely individual resources and coping methods, however, weird, freakish, outrι and bizarre outright or however dull, boring, downright ordinary, bland and banal.
And all such culminating in the very dread of hope itself, lest the temptation to risk may somehow ever jeopardize all so hard won in meek complacency and surrender. Even the inability otherwise to relate at all! In brief, all of the crushingly heavy and somber Existential responsibilities of heteronomy.
 
For, to quote George Orwell:

The main motive for ''nonattachment'' is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.

Such phobia of meaningful involvement and engagement also goes a long way in explaining the common and vulgar preference for the distance of empty idle gossip and groupthink over the Epistemologically and Methodologically penetrating discovery of interview and investigation yielding real knowledge.

 

 

 

 

 

“Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.”  — Milan Kundera, 1929-2023, Czech writer

"Work's okay to pass the time of day, but it's a shaky way to make a living.” Bret Maverick

“By faithfully working eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.”  ― Robert Frost
"Most people work just hard enough not to get fired  and get paid just enough money not to quit.”
  ― George Carlin

“The opposite of play is not work, it is depression.”  —  Brian Sutton-Smith 

"Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”  ― Albert Camus

 

 

According to Tom Hodgkinson, founder of the Idler magazine: "With a very few exceptions the world of jobs is characterized by stifling boredom, grinding tedium, poverty, petty jealousies, sexual harassment, loneliness, deranged co-workers, bullying bosses, seething resentment, illness, exploitation, stress, helplessness, hellish commutes, humiliation, depression, appalling ethics, physical fatigue and mental exhaustion."

• The Oppressed Middle

• Slack On the Job

Alas, however, suffering travail does not end at work or school. Unlike the alienated and futile struggle to relax endemic to what is called: recreation and the further aggravation and desperation of prospecting and dating, any joy in leisure and dalliance for either their own sake, need also partake in idle unconcern with outcome to take care of itself. -Otherwise, yet another chore at best, if not at the very worst: an abyss of cynical strife and deep intrigue. There is actually nothing less playful than recreation, the name given to such fake fun in all desperate struggle to recover from every pointless sore travail. Even genuine play enfolds initiative and purpose of its own, indeed profound revelation of psychological visibility, any glimpse into another's inner life.

That precious rarity which is
fulfillment via pleasurable engagement in meaningful interaction can be ever so heady and intensive. Nevertheless, unlike grinding tedium, the relaxed idleness so distained by traditional work ethic, is also no less actually of tremendous value. After all, the principle of diminishing returns frequently applies to labor; hence, all too often, the less work the more productive each hour thereof.

•  How to be Lazy and successful (spoiler: Pareto Principle)

•  The Right To Be Lazy    Paul Lafargue (1883)

"The way of the idler is a chaotic one," writes Hodgkinson. "He attempts to escape from programmes, theories, formal spiritual practice, order, discipline… The idler's desire is to live with no rules, or only rules that have been invented by himself." And exactly that is a tremendous risk; sacrifice, great lonely effort, endurance and endless struggle from which the average person tends to flee. Indeed, just as Oscar Wilde said, doing nothing is hard work! Indeed, in solitary idleness and contemplation is often the larger part of cogitation, pondering and processing culminating in planning towards productive work only at the end. The same is often true of interpersonal free exchange and collaborative brainstorming, likewise to culminate only much later on in any organized cooperation.

 •  The Case For a Universal Basic Income

 

 
Employment frequently squanders and alienates genius and talent. And yet, employment does however sometimes afford a measure of security and stability, but neither always nor for everyone. -There are many variables. And alas, to do what you love, the common dilemma of unsatisfactory alternatives is either striving in career development, however torturously and gradually to steer ever more towards your bliss and away from whatever sore travail of unwanted drudgery, or else simply to work for money in order to fund cultivation of what you love on your own free time.

• Why Finding The Perfect Career Is So Hard 
Ill prepared, narrowing focus prematurely for wont of resources,
                     when instead, your net must be cast wider
 
• Pitfalls of doing what you love
Don't make of it an exhausting freelance job you'll only hate!
                   Instead, if only you can enjoy building a business...
 
"The Myth that if You Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow [is] one of those deceptive half truths that often leads to humiliation. [Only] if you’re dedicated, disciplined, and smart, and willing to make short-term sacrifices for long term gains, AND you fundamentally understand how money is made (i.e. and the ins and outs of successful business models and the business models of your competitors), then there’s a good probability that, if you’re selective about what you do, you can turn your passion into a money making venture. [Moreover] if your business doesn’t run without you, then you don’t own a business. You own a job." So, are you at all passionate about business in its own right, and is there any overlap between your passion and any known viable business model? First, research.

Indeed, one way or another, real world career challenges often place a premium on moral fiber and work ethic. But moralizing, let alone Moralism, remains dangerous. As a matter of Professional Ethics, a doctor such as a Psychotherapist, much as an attorney or an accountant, works only for the client or patient, with no ambiguity on that score. By way of example for purposes of illustration, an inner conflicted patient in Psychotherapy may get to the root of and overcome even actually criminal compulsions. On the other hand, the patient may instead come to a personal realization that in their heart of hearts they simply consider the law intolerably unjust, overcome false guilt, and rededicate themselves more wholeheartedly and effectively to a life of crime.

Indeed, the Professional Ethics of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy often stands accused of even depraved amorality precisely because Psychotherapy must never take sides, except in service to the patient. But when instead conformity or compliance are allowed to enter as desiderata, as indeed such are the sole treatment criteria as they are in Behavior Modification, conflict of interests is intrinsic and manifest.

And the same problem looms large over any conceivable social skills remediation in any treatment, consultancy, mentorship, counseling, educational or even howsoever parenting context whatsoever, ever pressing the tabooed saliently fundamental question:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social ys  socialize social lies
What are social skills, really?
“American society is a society in which individuals have learned to prize social skills that permit them, like actors, to assume whatever role the occasion demands and to "perform" their lives rather than just live them.”   —  Neil Gabler 
 
• What is Social Intelligence?
• Multiple  Intelligence
• Taboo expectations
 
Are social skills rational and strategic? No, they are not. If people where simply rational agents, I'd have many more friends. After all, I am intelligent interesting, fun, a good friend, trustworthy, understanding, supportive and compassionate, a staunch ally, a significant resource in intelligence and creativity, conscientious and morally upright, a good influence. But while many people can be extremely calculating in heteronomy and pursuit of extrinsic motivation of social advantage or material gain, or as worse and more often, perceived vested interest in whatever little they have, they will be more reticent to exhibit strategic motility in quest of whatever values or benefit in interaction and relationship in and of itself. And while they learn to network capably and professionally at work, they never apply that work ethic and ability to building personal life. Relationships seen as a product of behavior and circumstances, especially compulsions to approval seeking and all to often of third party manipulation and coercion, far more often than simply by any sound deliberation. After all, social skills, we are told, come as second nature, indeed as a function of "An unexamined life that only some nerdy Socratic hipster bum would ever come out and condemn as anti-intellectual stupidity by lifestyle preference.
 
Sexual and romantic relationship brings in further complication. Again, leaving aside ulterior motivations and approval seeking compulsions as well as third party bullying, sexual and romantic may be motivated favorable response to perceived opportunity of gratification and fulfillment, impulses driving response and complex behavioral patterns, but seldom into impulse formation into rational self interest. Transparency is frowned upon, and manipulation frequently recommended.

'Motility' or 'impulse formation' are the names given for the process of deferred gratification beginning from desire or aversion, into follow through in planning and preparation towards an outcome of effective response and
success. But the motility or impulse formation of human attachment and bonding is generally not as good as it might be, conceivably, between true rational agents endowed also with empathy. Instead, we have what are called: "social skills" for predicting and responding to the prevailing willfully reciprocal nebbish mental incompetence in outreach and bonding, and all manner of perfectly confusing and insane prevailing expectations.

Forget the popular kids! The skills of
friendship and those of popularity are frequently at odds. My friends tend to be folks who just can't get the telephone out of their ears! The telephone affords safe privacy for one to one communication and interaction. So unless, of course, we have nothing to talk about, nothing of interest or importance to you, even from all that the reader will find here on FoolQuest.com, on my mind, and nothing to offer of myself, then what I need you to do, is to be a big slut, pick up the phone and call me! Well, you'll need to email me first, but is that really any less slutty? Or post to my forums, and help me draw a crowd. I digress, however.
 
What are typical social skills curriculum? To begin with, by social interaction people of all ages in harmony and clash, effectively socialize one another each to their own best working understanding of fulfilling or at least serviceable social interaction. But all known formal curriculum in deliberate and remedial guidance in such endeavor, actually tends towards somewhat conservative conformism, no matter how they struggle to sidestep and obscure the issue. Such is stealth Behaviorism. Conformism merely accepts existing conditions, interweaving them easily into whatever likewise best understanding of existing code of conduct and values. But autonomy and democracy valuing change and progress, must be capable to evaluate whatever surrounding conditions or status quo according to systems of values other than whatever may be prevalent, with mental and intellectual acuity of Cultural Anthropology, beyond the needs of intellectually and emotionally stunted and impoverished conservative conformism, heteronomy and indoctrination.
 
Reason vs. unreason: The will to power can be better satisfied constructively rather than destructively, only given the tools, the real constructive skills, beginning with tangible material constructiveness, but beyond that also intellectually and socially. The educator Bertrand Russell advocated social constructiveness, the application of intellectual constructiveness consisting of critical thinking in open discussion, towards creative invention of “more productive ways of utilizing existing social forces or creating new ones” and to explore even questions of conduct, rationally as a matter of course. As shall be seen, such intelligent Menschlichkeit stands in utterly stark contrast with all of the ultimately repressive and harmful social skills training as well as all snake oil of social success gurus, each likewise striving only for correct behavior and to avoid incorrect behavior, wherein, truth to be told, more often than not, critical thinking is rejected as something socially awkward to be concealed because open discussion is deemed shamefully incorrect behavior, hurtful to others because it exposes error. Thus, of course, are learning and progress stultified, as we only learn from our mistakes, because we only learn from our mistakes.
 
Shaming: What more need be said? Though never admitting it directly in any straightforward statement, rationalizing ideology indoctrinated by implication through leading arguments closed from intellectual scrutiny by shame of incorrect deviation from said precepts, articles of faith, not even into sin, but dire faux pas, slippery brainwashed social skills training and social success gurus are, by and large, conformist, heteronymous, anti-critical, advocating fundamental dishonesty and Behaviorist compliance, not mere incidental tact let alone genuine sympathetic consideration for others. The cutting edge is exposed as only more of the same old same same. The respectable goody two-shoes and bleakest cynical snake oil peddling would-be Machiavells alike, stand revealed as utter tools, complete sycophancy toadies, but not good at it, so uncomfortably transparent that it backfires.
 
Only oppression discourages thinking freely and speaking openly, so essential to the entirely different social skill set of democratic values and cooperation in pursuit of happiness, autonomy, capability, the scientific quest for truth, the moral thirst for justice, creativity for its own joy and problem solving innovation amongst friends and equals.
 
Absurd: Indoctrinary socialization can be expected only to become ever the more disenchanting, alienated and alienating, the less said socialization anymore serves to integrate patterns in which interests, elements of skill, and differentiation of patterns of behavior all combine, and instead, the more Absurdly arbitrary and senseless Conformism and Behaviorist exhortation to heteronomy become, as revealed throughout Positive Disintegration and growth dawning into greater autonomy.
 
Being that engagement is the beginning of the state or condition of attachment which is an ongoing, remembered or anticipated and even yearned for state of engagement, hence according to Self-Determination Theory, secure attachment is characterized by attention and responsiveness to one another's needs when turning toward one another to obtain comfort and care. Indeed, a prime feature of autonomy is the need for meaningful engagement fending off boredom and loneliness. Heteronomy, the enemy of autonomy, is also the active enemy of engagement and attachment, of transparent agenda, of open passion and interest of every kind. Therefore, the social skill sets of heteronomy and autonomy are so entirely different. Heteronymous social skills correlate to the guardedness and control of heteronomy in the first place, and not any unmet needs of the individual. And yet the exhortations to sublimation persist, of the former as the means to the latter. Indeed, that often seems the only game in town!
 
Learning by assimilation is a distinctly liberal process, possibly the paradigm of liberal education that sociologists call: socialization, by and large a process in which children learn from other children regardless of deliberate adult intervention. But propaganda too, may be understood as a social process, with or without a masterminding propagandist, and indoctrination, once insinuated, likewise propagates amongst the indoctrinated, so that 'socialization' becomes Orwellian newspeak for indoctrination, plain and simple. Nevertheless, social dexterity can be so mysterious unless acquired Inductively, by osmosis from the milieu, socialized or to be dead honest: conditioned and indoctrinated, because of all that goes without saying, indeed even shame and taboo from very mention: The prodigious memory and facile adolescent fascination of the social butterfly, with every detail even of the most superficial and distant acquaintance, the terrified heteronymous preoccupation with social standing, taking a hint, a sufficient word to the wise. To quote Sigmund Freud: "That which is not expressed, is actedout." And the more that gifted and assertive self expression is discouraged and repressed, even particularly as an aspect of gender rτles, the more even the most cruel and seemingly arbitrary facility in the worst covert relational hostility is encouraged and valued as actually prudent and tactful. What dangerously skilled Incompetence!
 
So, are social skills no more than adaptive behavior sets? Are they standardized? Should they be? Are social skills predictive extrapolation from observation and background information in context of hierarchical kinship patterns? Or could it be that social skills are howsoever informal protocols of shared creativity in problem solving? Are social skills indeed creative facility in the spontaneous improvisational performance art of play? Or are social skills perhaps even something else entirely? Indeed, is it all just more of the same dreary primate politics? Indeed how, if at all, is Social Intelligence distinct from Executive Function and Emotional Intelligence?
 
“Socialize or Social Lies?”  — Dennis R. Fox
 
Are social skills the product of socialization? And if so, then what can there be in socialization that amounts to anything more or less than more of much the same sheer indoctrination? Socialization is to the complex process of psychological development as an individual adjusts behavior to the environment, the process by which an individual learns social norms and expectations, with supporting beliefs and values, in order to function in society via the adoption and transmission of culture, tradition and lifestyle therefrom. Socialization, to make a fine point of it, is a process of Behavioral Modification by which norms and expectations even by exposure thereto, are not so much informed or explained but, well, to be honest, indoctrinated into the individual, in order that by means of uncomprehending behavioral motivators, extrinsic motivation, attitudes, values and taboo, are all blithely internalized. Acculturation and organizational knowledge include contextual information of a shared culture even as facilitating increased feelings of membership and commitment, including rτle knowledge as in, for example, job description, and conduct all thereof successfully in accordance with whatever cultural norms of social integration, expectations with supporting beliefs and values. -Ever so crucial in order to function in society, so we are all assured. "It's for your own good, dear!"
 
The preceding question may be reframed: What can anyone be exposed to, such that there can be diminishing little prospect, intentional or unintentional, of surreptitious influence into uncritical acceptance thereof, such as that defines effective indoctrination? One answer is, to whatever extent thereof, transparent critical scrutiny in and of itself, without animosity, indeed thence into all aspects and practice of democratic freedom and civility. And what socialization is better and healthier? Calling that Rationalist Doctrine is the tu quoque ("and so are you!") gambit, of the characterization of openness in and of itself intrinsically, although even seductive, as slippery or surreptitious itself no less, and of the critical as uncritical, that may take some Sophistry, of which there is little shortage.
 
In response much of there to, it may be readily conceded that of course it is impossible to rationally scrutinize completely everything beforehand or even as transpiring in real time. But what of it? Due attention to problems as they arise, will be challenging enough. So perhaps the bar of that which stinks of indoctrination might be justly set a little higher: Indoctrination tends to exceed sheer blithe deception in exploitation of naivety: Indoctrination tends to be distinctly anti-critical as a denial mechanism, maligning, invalidating, discounting, suppressing and generally fending off all and any motivations and inclinations of the individual as might howsoever get in the way of sought for compliance, let alone intellectual rational scrutiny. Indoctrination, in short effectively cultivates ambivalence, and in treatment of what else other than dissidence.  
 
Indeed, Behaviorism as the indoctrinary doctrine of that it is today, even under any among the dizzying array of proliferating offshoots and guises, actually anticipates ambivalence and resistance to behavioral conditioning, resistance to their influence that must be overcome, compliance remaining, after all, the sole treatment or educational criteria. So perhaps the practical question might be: What manner of even ever needed or desirable remedial socialization can there be, other than just more stealth Behaviorism? Or: What conceivable manner of even ever needed or desirable remedial socialization can there be, that is actually critical-faliblist, even genuine and surprising learning experience of investigation into social reality? Once again, the word we are looking for is: 'Anthropology.'
 
Social Intelligence is analytic perception, even however practiced and second nature or: intuitive, whereas Social Skill is indeed performance, and therefore behavioral. Hence, Social Intelligence even in application, is no guarantee of Social Skills, and indeed, Social Skills may be acquired or even behaviorally conditioned, even with however great difficulty, indeed, even with precious little Social Intelligence. However, whereas social skills may tend to be social context specific, fundamental social competencies as perceived by Cultural Anthropology might be seen as translatable and adaptable most broadly.
 
After all, Cultural Anthropologists no matter how proficient, are not just another bunch of utter tools, rather, on the contrary, Anthropology cultivates an abiding and even compassionate engagement to relate to the cultural attitudes, sensibilities and sensitivities of other societies and individuals imbued with experience thereof. The high level of Social Skills of Cultural Anthropology are certainly rooted in a high level of Social Intelligence. Cultural Anthropology offers the hope of ever finding a human face upon Social Skills, and thereby upon ourselves, even collectively, and countering the heteronymous alienation propagated via stealth Behaviorism by whatever pretexts infiltrating every field and undertaking in modern society.
 
Aspie Neanderthals? In her memoir ‘The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's’ Temple Grandin writes: “What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.” Not withstanding, and somewhat to the contrary, it has even been theorized that the Neanderthals lacked Social Skills and therefore, undone by their own rugged Individualism, died out for wont of such civic virtues as division of labor, extended networking and social support (and not just from being so big and muscular and therefore starving unlike our own less massive forbears who could survive on fewer calories)! Perhaps among those most notably challenged in life skills of Social and Emotional Intelligence today, being individuals, even high functioning, diagnosed on the Autisms-Asperger's spectrum, are well known often to compare themselves to Anthropologists abroad in a baffling strange new land. Alas, nothing in practice seems to have emerged from that salient insight. 
 

culture shock

• Fucktarded! Autism as sheer truism?
                               Cognitive Behaviorism exposed.
 
Why are prodigious memory and facile adolescent fascination of the social butterfly, with every detail even of the most superficial and distant acquaintance, such a tremendous advantage in life?
Historically and Psychologically all other social organizations are patterned upon the family which is fundamentally authoritarian. The family is still the single most indispensable social unit and institution. But functional families are rare enough, while perfect ones are impossible. It follows that the family is as inherently destructive and dangerous as anything else human and fallible, if not more so given the crucial centrality of family. Alas, that social support and intervention such as it is, for the family remains by in large premised upon the hierarchical recognition of parental authority, rather than nurture from critical thinking in recognition of human fallibility as befitting responsible democracy and scientific rationalism. Much as only homosexuals have developed their own institutions for outreach for support and guidance in sex and socialization, similarly only the retarded are offered even excellent training and support in patenting by the state! If you are normal than you should have no questions! To admit otherwise is taboo tantamount to treason.
 
In truth, in life society no less than within family, competition and conflict, are never truly quelled by non-threatening topics of conversation. Trust is never forged by dependence upon heteronymous structure of patterned behavior, but by active acknowledgment of all members’ contributions, community building and maintenance, and resolution of group issues.
 
Cultural Anthropology unlike whatever typically heteronymous modes of social remediation, does not strive at correctness, but investigates and actively bridges variation in human society. Nevertheless, the perspective or POV of Cultural Anthropology be deemed heteronymous, viewing as it does, human society as familial (thus perhaps by that very token already tending towards miserable dysfunctionality) and hierarchical in origin, with deep historical roots in kinship, from which all social orders thereafter have been patterned and modified under the typical heteronomy of sublimated attachment.  And hence fundamental social competencies or aptitudes in the conduct of Cultural Anthropology.And competent aptitude is neither passive interpretive perception nor collective behavior sets, but interaction, behavior of an individual, guided by interpretive perception spontaneously in real time, intelligently, and directed by individual objectives and sensibilities even in the social risk of improvisation, well beyond mere behavioral conditioning inevitable within traditional societies. Regardless of whatever mode of social interaction under observation in the field, Anthropologists themselves strive to relate, engage and form attachments. They don't just struggle to blend in. Anthropology studies not merely adaptation of groups of people, but the cultural quest for meaning so rejected along with Psychodynamics, by the entrenched and ubiquitous mainstream of what can only be called: stealth Behaviorism, the insidious cultural infiltration of Behaviorism into every social context and walk of life. 

Cultural Anthropology studies human relationships consistent with rτles of relative social standing, degrees of kinship and rank, all predicated upon competencies and aptitudes of hierarchically predictive social cognition by which to anticipate the responses of others, merely via the recognition of members of one's own social group in order to form direct relationships consistent with rτles of relative social standing, degrees of kinship and rank, recognition of third-party social relationships and prediction of future behavior and in order to know what one is expected to do and how to behave, consensus and superficial harmony in acquiescence to conditionality under tacit threat of bullying. After all, from prehistory and up to the present day, every hierarchical structure has evolved from that of the clan or extended family.

 
“The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the greater the number of people he is connected with, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.”   ―  Leo Tolstoy, “War and Peace”   
The competencies and aptitudes that are subject of Cultural Anthropology, all that is necessary and adequate in order to know what to expect, and what is expected, include hierarchically predictive social cognition by which to anticipate the responses of others, merely via the recognition of members of one's own social group in order to form direct relationships consistent with rτles of relative social standing, degrees of kinship and rank, recognition of third-party social relationships and prediction of future behavior, all distinctly and uncomfortably non-egalitarian.
 
But the fundamental social competencies as perceived by Cultural Anthropology also include, even seemingly as something of a grand afterthought, such executive functioning as cooperation in creative problem-solving, even at its most happily serious, evoking as does play, not merely private and individual but sociable and shared emotional transport of playfulness universal to all mammals. And similarly, cooperation in creative problem-solving (or better still, solution finding), as a priority of its own, being problem-driven rather than ego-driven, may even level the playing field to such conditions of near equality called: low power-distance communication style, and pleasurably engage autonomy, creativity, Positive Disintegration and growth, challenging the entirely different aptitudes of democratic values in action, as amongst gifted peers, dissident in significant paradigm shift. 
 
Alas, the extensive literature on cultural and cultural anthropology dealing for the mostly part, with conservative preliterate societies with no concept of progress, tends to neglect modern industrial society, left for sociology to study, or else to social history and the classics. Therefore the vast anthropological literature has virtually nothing to report upon any institutions, culture or practice of critical controversy in order to spur individual innovation and creative problem-solving, much less cooperation and collaboration therein, to flourish.

Can there ever be any hope that an experience of real freedom under true acceptance rather than only restrictive and invalidating conditionality, is even possible? For how cynical, alienated and lonely if impossible! Can there even exist or occur any kind of membership and belonging that does not inevitably demand and inflict heteronomy and compromise autonomy? And how can that be? The need for organization and even recourse to any minimum of authority, is manifest. So sheer anarchy is no answer. However, if some is good, it hardly follows that more is better. Indeed, as for the imposition of authority, a sharp curve of diminishing and negative returns applies! A better general answer is that collective membership or social participation reinforces shared values, and as corroborated by repeated observation, said values can be democratic and of autonomy rather than of conformism and heteronomy. Better still, such values as relative equality are sometimes even ever  put into practice. But this may all be easier said than done. The key, in turn, can be play, most loosely defined as creativity for its own joy, and common to all mammals. But play alone is not enough, for many obvious motivations both intrinsic and practical. It can't always be playtime because serious considerations must be tended to, and besides, there is all manner of contemplation, expression and relationship that is deep and solemn. Indeed, happy people talk more seriously. But the key can also be creative problem solving, to reiterate: the one uniquely human interaction as observed by Cultural Anthropology to transcend the behavioral predictability of hierarchical dominance.

This uniquely human phenomena of creative collaboration in problem-solving is the very lynchpin of Creativity Should be Social, the central proposal of FoolQuest.com. Creative collaboration in problem-solving is  subject of investigation qualitatively under the soft sciences and humanities in challenge to any traditional heteronymous collective POV, forward looking to human progress that is always so fraught with unsettling controversy then undermined and suppressed by taboo and readily dismissed as pipedream for wont of foundation or justification.  

 
Therefore, in ugly truth, even in our modern age, it still becomes blithely normal for members of social orders to extort deference thereto and thence for Behaviorists to exhort happiness in compliance and to pathologize and dispense treatment for dissidence, under one pretext or another. -That is, unless those social orders are evolved, healthy, functional, Chivalrous, rational and scientific, democratic, sensate to the individual and to other social networks, in which case Behaviorism and what passes for education stand blind and mute.
 
For what if there is discovered howsoever deeper personal issues even of Psychodynamics, of worse: any more Axiologically meaningful dissident conflict beyond mere ignorant non compliance, behind any friction of even the most awkward nonconformity? What, change the entire society? Accommodate the individual? Who has time for that?! Certainly not any slippery institutionalized guardians of status quo and orthodoxy.
 
Little wonder than how so few social groups ever evolve to that most productive stage of high functioning autonomy wherein their capacity, range, and depth of personal relations expand to true interdependence for action independently, in subgroups, or in the larger group, each one's rτles and authorities dynamically adjusting to the changing needs of the group and each other, interdependent in personal relations and problem solving in the realm of task functions as ever may arise, with an overall objective of productivity through problem solving with sustained time and effort. Self assured, the need for group approval is past. Group members are highly engaged, both task oriented and highly people oriented. Morale is high. The task function becomes genuine problem solving, leading toward optimal solutions and optimum group development with support for experimentation in solving problems and an emphasis upon desired achievement.
 
The social science of Cultural Anthropology, an unapologetic qualitative soft science eschewing the poverty characteristic of Behaviorist mimesis of hard science, quests, rather, for meaning in the cultivation of sympathetic and attentive investigation into the sensibilities and values of people and cultures, which is Psychodynamic. But the Anthropologist scarcely ever look so close to home, as in modern industrial democracy. And there are no qualifications and no professional association for social skills training, somewhat covert and ever controlling  Behavior Modification often carried out by Linguists and school teachers. Hence it may come as little surprise that outside of Cultural Anthropology, which is to say: nowhere as concerning any practice of social skills training, much less for modern democracy, is the question at hand as to the atomic nature, so to speak, of social skills, not just whatever their function or purpose, but their fundamental constituent or: monad, anywhere explicitly stated. And yet there seem to be implicit answers as premise to whatever ostensibly pertinent treatment or education. Indeed, seemingly every flavor of Philistine blithe know-it-all charlatan expert from antiquity up to the modern bleeding edge, are all invested in the enterprise of social skills training of one kind or another, except for the one specialty uninvited despite clear actually overwhelming qualification and singular temperament of actual field observation and skepticism in study of social myth ever to challenge prevailing wisdom, namely Cultural Anthropology, and despite the noted greater relevance and actual success at all, of social skills training when actually conducted within intended setting or milieu of application. -Which is to say: by any other name, veritable applied Cultural Anthropology fieldwork blithely carried out as last resort because, as studies have revealed, learning adult-pleasing behaviors and good manners, cultural transmission from the wrong culture, is of little help to Autistic Spectrum children back out on the playground at recess. Lamentably social shills trainings as on offer, so un-empathically mindless, arbitrary, rigid and inflexible Behavior Modification, adapts poorly to new settings of milieu and situations. Indeed, beyond specific acculturation, any broader general talent of social aptitude adaptable into particular milieu or social setting, that is to say, whatever desirable cultivated aptitude for such endeavors as field work in cultural anthropology, diplomacy, or just capably negotiating new environs and situations at all, is quite simply behaviorally irreducible.
 
Whereas, by contrast, the science, the investigatory discipline that is Cultural Anthropology, though alas so uninterested in its own roots in modern science and democracy, seeks for any general principles in the cultivation of abiding respect and skills of observation, flexible and adaptable to the study of and function within various new situations, setting or milieu. -exactly the areas of deficiency characterizing no only the emotional atrophy characteristic of psychosis and the autism spectrum but actually no less of the patronizing heteronomy so fervently embraced and shared by Behaviorism with what passes for education. It would seem that those who can't do, actually don't teach very well either as it turns out. Truly, it's all a case of the mind-blind leading the mind-blind! And that won't do at all.
 
Francois de La Rochefoucauld observed how “A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.” Indeed, in the words of Samuel Johnson: “If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone. A man should keep his friendships in constant repair.”
 
Can social intelligence ever truly parallel the empathy, sympathy and kindness, of intrinsic Emotional Intelligence, that instead often seems so heteronymously constrictive and even hostile to individual autonomy? Behaviorism, even as all such proto-Behaviorism anciently as the Zen, has Narcissistically reduced the essence of social intelligence to its most alienated, shallow and "operant". Whereas the practice and tradition of the investigation that is social intelligence Cultural anthropology depends upon a greater sensitivity and affinity, in a nutshell: love for a people, a functional attachment. Alas that there is as yet no psychological Cultural Anthropology of the tribe of the great Cultural Anthropologists themselves, in order to glean precisely these profound secrets. Cultural Anthropology, most obviously better qualified in every way, remains mute and silent in the misguided, idiotic and damaging discourse of all the frighteningly least well motivated and equipped thereto.
 
Alas therefore, that the skill sets of the ongoing cultivation and maintenance of acquaintanceship even into friendship, is perhaps the most underserved, for anyone who hasn't somehow learned it all without being told. Alas, often for those who are able, it all seems so easy and straightforward, so they dare not even perceive let alone admit any problem to discuss with the rest of us. Indeed those more conscious to better understand, are often all too rightly ashamed of the neglect of their fellow human beings, and are also loath to speak openly. Indeed, many who are the most diligent life long, are actually motivated by entirely understandable social anxiety, and therefore, alas, lack empathy and therefore openly despise and bully incompliant social failures. 
 
To begin with, how, for those who do embrace the distinction, are social skills and social intelligence for whatever range of function or purpose, distinct from Emotional Intelligence, sensitivity and skills by which individuals perceive and relate to one another? Even robots can now be programmed to tell when a human being is paying attention to them. Emotional Intelligence makes inference from observation and background information, to extrapolate the emotions, perspective or: POV and motivations of others, even sympathetically. But again, what by distinction, is Social Intelligence? Indeed, in usage, the very term: "Emotional Quotient" seemingly blithely embraces both intelligences entirely without distinction. Yet not only are they clearly distinct, but as we shall see, so often come into conflict.
 
There is, of course, much buzz about the sheer rat race which is interpersonal networking. But most obvious and basic are good habits of keeping appointments, returning phone calls and answering emails. Alas, as the saying goes, it takes two to tango. Simple responsibility on one's own part, unreciprocated, and again, even simply good manners, is the least of social or interpersonal competence. The less regard others show for you, for whatever reasons, then the more remains upon your shoulders alone. In the face of  the most shocking lack of regard, individual responsibility expands open ended and mysterious. The experience can be shameful, baffling and terrifying. And any structure may seem better than none. No wonder then, the pandering wishful mass appeal of simplistic solutions and panacea, when there is simply no one with your interests at heart. And when no one cares, what is the meaning of social aptitude?
 
It may be readily observed how good and bad people alike pursue similar basic needs, howsoever those very needs may be exalted, demonized or simply trivialized. But whereas good people are emotionally accessible and averse to manipulation and abuse, bad people are closed, emotionally inaccessible and routinely manipulative and one way or another abusive. Hence those popular pricks are frequently trusted, and better and more honest people often shunned, perhaps even in scorn of the most natural and benign of motives that others better conceal or rationalize, or even in domineering envy and resentment of their sense of initiative, autonomy and individual gifted raw talent. So, can such blatant cynicism as embodied in the above observations be embraced as fundamental, or should it merely be dismissed as over simplistic?
 
The answer is that this assertion is manifestly true. The only qualifier is at least any hope at all nevertheless, that not all of us are fools at the mercy of knaves or else knaves preying upon fools, and that there really is anything more at all to master in living life. But serious and sophisticated Cultural Anthropological explanatory investigation all thereof are never so ubiquitous as exhortation to Machiavellian manipulation or submissive conformism via behavioral  brainwash or Inductivist "osmosis" under whatever guise and in whatever context, formal or informal. So pervasive is the heteronymous cult of socialization! As ever, in anything truly important, we are each and all abandoned to our  own devices,
 
The most impossibly high standards of self-realized social and emotional aptitude are enfolded even since time immemorial, within the ancient notion of conduct within dharma. But, to keep the entire question down to Earth, such concerns as improved facility in the Facial action Coding System and body language pertains to Emotional Intelligence rather than social intelligence. Emotional Intelligence is really just empathy, the ability to perceive or interpret the feelings and perspective of others, and even to relate to others thereby. Sympathy follows as an altruistic concern thereto. But by distinction, what are social intelligence and social skills, really? Whereas Emotional Intelligence applies in relationship and interaction with other individuals, social intelligence and skills are judgment and aptitude pertaining howsoever to function in groups and in society at large. So, is all of that somehow a different matter, and precisely how so?

Are social skills, indeed, anything more than adaptive behavior sets,
extrinsically motivated  trained seal conditioned responses in pursuit of vested interest under punishment and reward systems? Again, according to meta-study, simple unsophisticated and straightforward social skills training in any one social context, followed somewhat robotically, breaks down completely in transition to the next.
 
What if there is a strong connection between sheer social ineptitude on the one hand, with sensitivity, self knowledge, tolerance, kindness and intelligence, on the other? But why would one expect and look for any blisteringly anti-intellectual such correlation in the first place? It all comes back to our question: What are social skills, really?
 
Are social skills, that after all need to be second nature without lengthy conscious deliberation, then therefore a set of prejudices and bias? Answer: Yes, and tautologically so, by the above understanding of social skills.
 
And it might well therefore follow that social ineptitude, the dearth of social skill and even the social intelligence behind it, frees empathy and curiosity. After all, curiosity is the agent of compassion. Indeed, bullying behaviors are transmitted along with entire demonizing urban mythologies of defamatory malicious gossip, with the memetic subtext, behaviorally, first of all, to kill individual and potentially dissident curiosity and personal investigation of reality, most particularly as to regards the scapegoated targets of bullying. Indeed, no doubt, covert relational hostility displays not only consummate social skill, howsoever destructive and abusive, but also the most extreme hypocrisy and profoundly poor self knowledge.
 
Only by replacing the shallow, superficial, misanthropic and utterly cretin crypto-Behaviorist standard and expectations of social skills, with any deeper, richer and more profound study and investigation into the Social Anthropology and Psychodynamics of Social Aptitude, can the above cynical conclusions, implicit and unstated, so taboo from critical scrutiny, ever become anything other than logically inescapable.
 
In an amorally pragmatic society without Chivalrous values and fair play, the sheer heteronomy of socialization into an utter tool, will always be cherished as the greatest imaginable prize that can ever be shared by any means necessary. Such is the Behaviorist menace.
 
Indeed, even more sophisticatedly, is the sensitivity of social intelligence really anything any more sophisticated than the sheer heteronomy of skilled Incompetence? Perhaps only if and when there is more to the social situation at hand. Even the most adroit heteronomy becomes catastrophically maladaptive to the needs of any more open society. So, what are social intelligence and social skills, after positive disintegration and growth? -Social Aptitudes  as suitably befitting the dignity of free individuals? This leaves spontaneity at all, if no longer merely as an artifact of conditioned automatic action, then as a Psychodynamic issue of disinhibition and authenticity.
 
In truth, is there really anything by half so simplistic, clumsy and socially inept as the standardized indoctrination and coercion that nowadays passes for social skills training? Indeed, why does social skills training ever in any part consists in simply teaching or conditioning acceptable behavior? How is that skill? Wouldn't the skill as such manifest, rather, in the tolerant dexterity in recognition of expectations, even such as must vary between circumstances of culture and situation? Why isn't a truer social skills training the province of any howsoever better qualified applied Cultural Anthropology? After all, given indeed that Emotional Intelligence is empathy, and that sympathy follows as an altruistic concern thereto thereafter, then what is there that exists relative to Social Intelligence, at all as sympathy to empathy?
 
 
   In other words, Axiologically in our heart of hearts:                              
             Why should thinking caring individuals
                                                                       value and admire toadying sycophantic Social Intelligence?              
 
The answer and best most fervent recommendation in life, from Psychodynamics as to why anyone cares, remains nothing more or less than attachment (yes, the very bane of existence, according to the Zen!), an aspect of relationship and reciprocity, not only of individuals to one another or anything else, but of the individual to society, social environment and situation, even sublimation. But much as with relationships and attachment between individuals, relationship between the individual and society, social environment or situation, is variably defined by the entire gamut of applicable motivation and character from formative experience, the entire gamut from nurture and autonomy support and respect, to fear based heteronomy or alienation if not outrage and maladaptation, violent crime or else sheer frigid indifference indeed exactly as extolled of the Zen. Therefore, mere skill alone and as such, is hardly considered, Psychodynamically.
 
Although the interpersonal Psychodynamics of Transactional Analysis does, indeed, cultivate skill in the Antithesis: a somewhat subversive dexterity for breaking out of a dysfunctional rut in relationship and interaction. Again, democracy in principle is only a definition for a healthy relationship between the individual and any society that values, fosters and respects autonomy.
 
Aptitude with nuanced nonverbal communication, is sometimes named: covert social skill. But isn't such, rather, a function of Emotional Intelligence? Perhaps that depend upon application thereof, to what extent whatever subtext transacted be genuine, individual and autonomous, or social and disingenuously heteronymous. Other functional subtleties are the proverbial grain of salt, context, moderation, proportion and even the saving grace of social hypocrisy mitigating otherwise barbaric custom, all typically lacking in comically over parented heteronomy.
 
Indeed, another answer or reason to care, is suggested by Cultural Anthropology and the social sciences, that in the process of Empirical field research into the acquisition of social sills among other aspects of character, study all the myriad factors of variable social or societal expectations and process, in the appeal even to meaningful values as of whatever trustworthy Chivalry or Menschlichkeit in and of any culture, and also how they inform individual affect, motivation and Point of View, all that ever may inspire empathy and sympathy theretowards, highlighting for any culture it's collective face, whereas ideology only reveals unsympathetic collective neurosis.
 
What then is all this talk of social skills, except sheer Sophistry depicting by inference and implication all manner of unreasonable, vague and open ended oppressive demands and expectations as seemingly somehow reasonable and hence capitulation by any means and at whatever cost merely realistic rather than desperately cynical? Exactly what sort of social skills?
 
Isn't the rampantly crypto-totalitarian systems encroachment that is the inculcation of social skills actually just Moralistic and oppressively burdensome upon membership in society? With every mounting probortunity that faces our species in our times, frankly haven't we got far more urgent and important considerations to impose upon one another than such endlessly debilitating and silly collective validation? Should we not better value the skills by which the society can better include and serve each individual, and foster best personal contribution? Isn't that what we both publically and privately most admire? What more is actually required or desirable (rather than just being so arbitrarily and dubiously expected and imposed) for social cohesion merely than civility, Chivalrous social grace and democratic sensibility with due process as ever necessary?
 
Unfortunately, no thanks to Behaviorism "providing structure" in order to obtain compliance via Behavioral Modification, such intangibles unrecognized by Behaviorism much as they are scorned of the Zen, including empathy at all, let alone towards cultural values, make for precious little part of how socialization is generally conceived of. Worse, far from making ready to meaningfully redeem social skills training co-opted and trivialized by the Behaviorists, on the contrary, whatever social skills, though deemed requisite for organization and fieldwork, are not formerly addressed as such in the curriculum of Cultural Anthropology and the Social Sciences. -An omission which has drawn criticism.
 
Rather, socialization is generally appealed to, mealy mouthed, as a convenient situational osmosis of indoctrination from the social environment in our educational systems, as for example, the point of social skills such as quiet self control, being presented as in how we then can learn what we are being taught, indeed not to put too fine a point: to compliantly endure coercion into boredom, rather than, perish the very thought! of howsoever facilitation in learning whatever interests the individual, intrinsically motivating requisite focus thereby. Alas, power, as from authority of sheer numerical advantage, confers impunity for whatever levels of sheer collective bullying, peer pressure and the dropping hints instead of accountability to transparency, explanation and open controversy.

Under those circumstances, the greatest impairment to vaunted social skills, is simply
dissidence and autonomy. Hence all the greater appeal of Transactional Analysis striving towards some subversive conduct within dharma. Alas, any of the same old same old, is readily marketed to subversive mystique, nowadays.
 
After all, whosever nevertheless as the ardent disciple heteronymously embraces whatever conventional wisdom of social success, tried and true, with every enthusiasm of learning, will therefore tend only to stop and dismiss the complaints of misfits and malcontents, or the fulfillment of varying social needs of entirely different personalities, all as entirely quite superfluous, insufferable, boring and needlessly complicated. No doubt, how much simpler things would be if we a ll thought  alike!
 
On the other hand, however, for example, given as how it has been clearly and consistently observed even in early development, how gifted children mysteriously no longer require any guidance of socialization, whenever simply afforded opportunity of interaction amongst their true peers, other gifted children, that rather does beg the question of exactly who is truly inflicted with needless complication by whom!
 
For in the immortal words of George Bernard Shaw: “Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”
 
And yet any accommodation  in circumstance can can only be of limited and clumsy adaptation to inner conflict, unless facilitating resolution thereof. In truth, being oneself is neither panacea nor obstacle arbitrarily, but sublime Existential challenge.
 
And so we must accord the devil his due before any hope of rising to that challenge: People need not only to reach out successfully and be nicer to one another but also far more effective both individually and acting in concert. And to such ends, if playing the game such as it is won't do, then exactly what viable alternatives are there? What social resources can be discovered and made available, beyond all the conventional schoolboy huckster simplistic?
 
Indeed, people and social systems alike are more efficiently accessible only given better transparency. And ever rising above the protracted caginess and needless stress of hanging out endlessly and making interminable banal small talk is part of the challenge of ever allowing a more genuine and emotionally secure society to arise in which life and authentic true friendship can be more fun for everyone.
 
Indeed, especially given that impression is subjective and hence communication can only be approximate at best, perhaps what may be happier and care free will be art for art's sake, purest creativity, humor, playful intellectual provocation with nothing at stake, the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic information, the experiences thereof that may be shared with others, the smart person's social grooming instead of banal small talk, to express creativity so as to engage and to draw others towards consideration of whatever ideas pursued and deeper human motives incited, and all wherever they may lead, even discovery, spontaneous expression, creative problem solving, planning and action. -Perhaps, as another byproduct, even social integration that is truly integrative and appreciative rather than mindlessly normative! Indeed, all are cordially invited.

 

 

 

 
 

 

...

Not so odd: The angst of psychological asymmetry obtains in the immediacy of lonely and vivid reflection upon inner life and individual consciousness, in such stark contrast to how the minds of others, far less ccessable, ever remain so mysterious and unknown. Psychological asymmetry then simply means that we are not so odd, but after all, only strangers. And so we wallow each in our own pervasive and inexhaustible reservoirs of secret anxiety and vulnerability, even honest and unjustly much maligned mortal terror, never suspecting much the same of others beneath ever crumbling facade of exterior presentation. And yet, life affirming but alas vastly underserved arousal and stimulus appetites of uniquely human social and intellectual stimulus struggle, include most poignantly, those of important close human relationship with full complicity in psychological visibility in order to penetrate psychological asymmetry, Eros which is not so much co-validation in whatever even superficial similarity, as just the opposite, collusion and transport of liberating union with alien difference. And thus forging true friendship in autonomy. All whereof arising entirely as a byproduct of meaningfully purposeful interaction and/or substantive communication and as shall be seen, believe it or not, never otherwise. And no one else, no third party, ever need approve!

Psychological visibility: Relationships in public interaction are generally such as behaviorally structured and situationally defined and to one another by social rτles and values, heteronymously and impersonally, with latitude constrained therein. But autonomous private close personal relationships and communication, are defined even entirely by their participants even regardless of external circumstances or: situation, and informed by their own values. Friendship begins with any glimpse into another's inner life, indeed true Eros, the reciprocal understanding and recognition called: psychological visibility, wherein good conversation the more uplifting, energizes and deepens acquaintance by free flowing investigative personal information exchange, the spark of lively controversy ostensibly on topics of mutual interest and concern, and given equal opportunity to hold forth unreservedly with full and pointed answers and then, likewise, to make inquiry in any depth and attend with undivided concentration.

Beyond the interminable shallow Machiavellian popularity contest or marshmallow throwing bogus support, the highly evolved human social intelligence is an appetite returned and fulfilled by the care and personal investment in others of authentic intellectual, emotional, purposeful and imaginative participation in the ongoing and unexpected discovery and progress of human character and relations over time in cultures of participation offering challenge and support for risk taking, deprivation resulting in frustration, emptiness, inadequacy, sadness, malaise, discontent, boredom, anxiety, alienation and anomie. Without psychological visibility, one can only suffer lonely, misunderstood, unappreciated, obscure and unknown. That is why the pretence that typically buttresses popularity, so antithetical to friendship, remains ever miserable and no less alien than unpopularity and more overt isolation.

Often, people reaching out to make friends, even doing everything to be sociable, amiable and accommodating, nevertheless find others inaccessible or indifferent and uninterested. People that one readily talks with propinquitiesly, still progress no further. And nothing seems to help. Often, even fairly lonely people just don't click. And even connection once established, might remain one way or another at all unsatisfactory. Why so? And what is to be done? Nothing shall avail, unilaterally. But even reciprocally, what can be done? Friendship is a relationship proceeding from an attitude, that of love, indeed mutual caring. In addition, romantic or sexual love, Eros, remains  characterized by yearning for the other. With or without Eros, friendship is a distinctively personal relationship grounded in Platonic love, agape and altruism, specifically by concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other’s sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy of one kind or another. Perhaps therefore friendship begins with any act of friendship beneficial to another, as motivated by a certain insight, specifically by perception and recognition of the value of said other being. To be directed by one's friend means to allow their interests and values at all to shape one's own.

Willingness to reach out and talk to others seems so obviously essential to making new friends. Conversation skills are therefore well admired and deemed of great importance. Indeed, in conducting conversation, it may rightly be considered an artful accomplishment of empathy, good will and self-discipline to accommodate the changing moods of others, subtext of tone and spirit taking priority over substance of ideas expressed. Moreover, conversation also impacts others bearing witness in the same proximate social environment. But surely conversation first of all, imparts and exchanges information, even rational persuasion. A purely social emphasis upon conversation, taken to logical extreme, may even become anti-intellectual and anti-intraceptive. Hence the most interminable and insipid and oppressively mindless small talk, But Eudemonia, capable relationship, Eros which is liberating union with alien difference, and especially true friendship, will accrue only for serious people, arising as byproduct of full engagement in purposeful interaction and/or substantive communication and never otherwise. Friendship and tact are indeed supreme human values, both intrinsically and instrumentally, both selfish and altruistic. And yet, friendship must be freely given. Otherwise, it is not friendship. When friendship is made compulsory, true friendship becomes impossible. Similarly, tact must be freely exercised. Because tact is no longer tact simply in conformity to expectation, but merely submission and sycophancy.

Moral dimensions of Psychological visibility:

“Because psychological visibility consists of valuing another person for their internal aspects, psychological visibility is a moral attitude. And because it places value on those things that others value in themselves, psychological visibility is a morally good attitude.”  

—  Shailushi Baxi, Psychological Visibility as a Source of Value in Friendship, Psychology 1997
 
 
“"Only among people of good can friendship exist, since the perverse people only have accomplices, the interested people have partners, the political people have supporters, the people of royalty have courtiers, only good people have friends."”
 
—  Voltaire
 

 

 
 
Friendship Aphorisms
“We are all authors of each other.”  - Doc Searls

 

 

 

 
 
Making friends
 
Even if you really could just put in a quick purchase order to BUILD-A-FRIEND, who would actually go through with it? Might it not all just end in bitter disillusion and blow up in your face?
 
            Just ask Buddy Blank,
if you can find him...        

 

....
 
 
 
 
“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”

― Albert Camus
 
 
“When you're too busy for friends...you're TOO busy!”
 
 
“Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.”
― Epicurus, A Guide To Happiness
 
 

 

 

 

 

Some assembly required!

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 
Three compelling questions of relatable drama, as in life, ever endure: 
        Who am I?, what do I feel? and what do I want? 
When all else fails, what has actually been desired all along?
What other than friendship? However: :

What Is Friendship? 
By nature, of what benefit, purpose or value, can friendship ever be or become?
 According to Cicero
THECOMPANY YOU KEEP  
 Happy people tend to be popular, centered amid large social network clusters.
After all, likewise, misery loves company.

 

“There’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met.”  — Jim Henson
Every good friend once was a stranger
 
 

Attachment theory was the foundation for an influential psychological theory of loneliness developed by the sociologist Robert S. Weiss. Weiss identified six social needs that, if unmet, contribute to feelings of loneliness. Those needs are attachment, social integration, nurturance, reassurance of worth, sense of reliable alliance, and guidance in stressful  situations. As would be predicted by attachment theory, Weiss maintained that friendships complement but do not substitute for a close, intimate relationship with a partner in staving off loneliness.

 
Rawlin's six stages of friendship
 
 
 
 
“Intimate friends share each other’s experiences and in some ways, they inhabit each other’s lives. They often have similar viewpoints and values,and they may share similar backgrounds and traditions. They witness the milestones and unexpected changes of life, the highs and lows, celebrations and sadness.”
 
Saul Levine M.D., The Importance of Friendship, Psychology Today, Feb 01, 2016

 

    • Lonely despair
    • companionable hope

 

 

 

Instrumentality, expedience and service
Instrumentality refers to utilitarian expedience, practical consideration of means to an end, be such objectives selfish, altruistic or both at once.
 
 
“My first experiences of academic friendship made me smile in after years when I looked back on them. But my circle of acquaintances had gradually grown so large that it was only natural new friendships should grow out of it.”

 — Georg Brandes

 

“Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.” — Samuel Butler

 

“The best time to make friends is before you need them.” – Ethel Barrymore

 

“If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone. A man should keep his friendships in constant repair.”  

 — Samuel Johnson

 

“A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.”   — Francois de La Rochefoucauld

 

“Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.”  — Arthur Schopenhauer

 

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival” 

— C.S. Lewis

 

“It's not what you know, but who you know.”  — Anon.

Meaning, of course: how connected you are, even for the most rank incompetents and scoundrels, that will be all too often so much more key to success even than the very greatest ability, all too often unrecognized and unrewarded.

And hence, who you can get to know or: make acquaintance. Networking. 

Indeed, or, var: “It’s not what you know or who you know, but who you sorta-know.”

In other words: six degrees of separation and all that. -Facility in extended networking, even however superficial, has been found to bring to light the competitive plumb opportunities first.

Or, var: “It's not who you know, but who knows you!” For in the words of Nicolas de Chamfort: “Celebrity is the advantage of being known to people who we don't know, and who don't know us.”  Ever shall it be the propagation of glowing reputation, recognition and standing that draws opportunity to open so many doors. And as Elvis said: “If people stop talking about you, your dead.”

“A true friend is someone who says nice things behind your back.”  — Anthony Hall
 
Beware, however: “People don't always tell you what they are thinking. They just see to it that you don't advance in life.”  — Hannibal Lecter
 
Indeed: “It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper.”  — Errol Flynn  
 
But just perhaps, exactly as the abuse of power wielded by bullies and self appointed social gatekeepers who are essentially monopolistic, closing ranks in order to obstruct and extort all others via artificial scarcity, and thus promoting mass fear and stifling intimidation, likewise friendship and generosity in helping bring success and popularity to others, the doors one is reputed to open freely for others, especially by making introductions, networking connections and building functional webs of support, is all what actually creates value to generate demand, thus in turn leveraging one's own social capital, reputation, popularity and success. Others will naturally be drawn into the orbit and cultivate the good graces of one who continually demonstrates the propensity to confer, by association, enhanced popularity upon even the hither too most unpopular.
 
“If you have much, give of your wealth; If you have little, give of your heart.”  — Arabic Proverb
 
 
“Friendless. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.”

 — Ambrose Bierce

Purport: By definition, a social pariah is impoverished and unattractive hence offering no such tacit bribe of tangible advantage in acquaintance as any asset of social capital or leverage, therefore aggravated and with nothing to loose, indeed, lonely and desperately motivated to the honest expression consisting of sound reasoning and accurate information.
 

“You have to give to the world the thing that you want the most, in order to fix the broken parts inside you.”
 
 — Eve Ensler
 
 
“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”  — Winston Churchill
 
 
“Create value and become known!”  — Brian Macias 
 
 
“If you have nothing else to do, look about you and see if there isn't something close at hand that you can improve! It may make you wealthy, thought it is more likely that it will make you happy.”

 — Matthew Adams

 

“If you want happiness for an hour…take a nap.
 If you want happiness for a day…go fishing.
 If you want happiness for a month…get married.
 If you want happiness for a year…inherit great wealth.
 If you want happiness for a lifetime…help others.”

 — Chinese Proverb.

 

“You will get everything in life that you want if you just help enough other people get what they want.”  — Zig Ziglar
 
 
“It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.”  — Napoleon Hill

 

 

 

Friends you can depend upon

 
 
“Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.”  — Henry David Thoreau
 
 
“No man can be happy without a friend, nor be sure of his friend until he is unhappy.”  — Thomas Fuller
 
 
“A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.”  — Walter Winchell
 
 
                      “All friendship is desirable in itself, though it starts from the need of help”
&
“It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.”         
 — Epicurus
 
 
“He that has done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”  — Benjamin Franklin
 
 
“Anyone can give advice, but a real friend will lend a helping hand.” 
 
 
“Kindness eases everything almost as much as money does.”  — Mason Cooley
 
 
“Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.”
 
 
"In life we never lose friends, we only learn who our true friends are!”
 
 
“In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends.” — John Churton Collins
 
 
“Be more prompt to go to a friend in adversity than in prosperity.”  — Chilon of Sparta
 
 
“I think if I've learned anything about friendship, it's to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don't walk away, don't be distracted, don't be too busy or tired, don't take them for granted. Friends are part of the glue that holds life and faith together. Powerful stuff.”
 
 — Jon Katz
 
 
“When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.”
 
 — Edgar Watson Howe
 
 
“It's not doing something for someone else because they can't, but because you can.”  — Andrew Iskander
 
 
“I get by with a little help from my friends.”   — John Lennon
 
 
 
“The only way to have a friend is to be one.” 
 
&
 
“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late."
 
 — Ralph Waldo Emerson
 

 

 

 

 

Precious friendship
 
 
 
“Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.”
 
 — Sir Peter Ustinov
 
 
“Some people have a large circle of friends while others have only friends that they like.”
 
“It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.”  — Marlene Dietrich
 
 
“There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.”
 — G.K. Chesterton
 
 
“There are plenty of acquaintances in this world... but very few real friends.”  — Chinese Proverb.
 
 
“A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter. Who finds a faithful friend, finds a treasure.” Sirach 6:14
 
 
“I would rather walk with a friend in the dark than walk alone in the light.”  — Helen Keller
 
 
“A faithful friend is the medicine of life.”  Ecclesiastes 6. 16
 
 
“My friends are my estate.”  — Emily Dickinson
 
 
“Once someone's hurt you, it's harder to relax around them, harder to think of them as safe to love. But it doesn't stop you from wanting them.”
 — Holly Black, White Cat
 
 
“The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.”
 
 — Barbara Kingsolver
 
“An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind."
 
— Buddha
 
Proverbs 27:6 A friend means well, even when he hurts you. But when an enemy puts his hand round your shoulder - watch out!   

Commentary: Indeed, Sun Tzu said that if the enemy seeks peace or opens negotiations unexpectedly, they are actually scheming, and that apology and humility likely just a delaying ploy playing for time and respite to regroup. Moreover: "To fail to take the battle to the enemy when your back is to the wall is to perish." For to quote Richard Mitchell: “You can shoot the tiger, or stay out of his way, but you cannot pronounce him a vegetarian.”

 
“He who has a thousand friend has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.”
 
 — Ali ibn Abi Talib, 4th caliph (602-661)
 
 
“If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.” — Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Negativity Friendships: It is only human nature that hate garners the most attention, and we enjoy meeting others who dislike the same things about others as we ourselves do. But all things in moderation. For in bullying that natural impulse runs amok in the most malicious gossip, proselytizing and acting out.

 
“Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.”  — Thomas Jones
 

“A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.”  — Adlai Ewing Stevenson

 
“Do not protect yourself by a fence, but rather by your friends.”  — Czech Proverb
 
 
 
 
Hypocrisy, compassion and sycophantic cynical tact
 
 
“Someday we'll look back on this, laugh nervously, and change the subject.”
 
 
“A good friend can tell you what is the matter with you in a minute. He may not seem such a good friend after telling.” 
 
— Arthur Brisbane
 
 
“When a stranger identifies you from a friend's description, it's just as well you didn't hear the description.”
 
 
“You may live a long while with some people and be on friendly terms with them and never speak openly with them from your soul.”
 
 — Ivan Turgenev 
 
 
“Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.”  — Friedrich Nietzsche
 
 
“Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.” 
 
 — Charles Lamb
 
 
“The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right.”
 
 — Mark Twain
 
 
“You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.”
 
 — Laurence J. Peter
 
 
“It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not.”
 
 — Mignon McLaughlin
 
 
“Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.” 
 
 — Albert Camus
 
 

 

 

 

Honest moral friendship and honor
See also: psychological visibility
 
 
“I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.”   — Plutarch
 
 
“Flattery looks like friendship, just like a wolf looks like a dog.”
 
 
“In giving advice seek to help, not to please, your friend.”   — Solon 
 
 
Machiavelli: ‘That Flatterers Must Be Shunned’
 
 
“Only your real friends tell you when your face is dirty.” (Or, var: spinach in your teeth...)  — Sicilian Proverb
 
 
“A true friend stabs you in the front.”  — Oscar Wild
 
 
“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”  —  Friedrich Nietzsche
 
 
Oil and perfume rejoice the heart; so does the sweetness of a friend's counsel that comes from the heart. Proverbs 27: 9
 
 
“My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.”  — Henry Ford
 
 
“Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.”  — Khalil Gibran
 
 
As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend. Proverbs 27: 17
 
 
“Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.”  — Sir Francis Bacon
 
    “I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.”
                           &
  “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”
 
 — Abraham Lincoln
 
 
“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”  — George Eliot
 
 
“It is more shameful to distrust one's friends than to be deceived by them.”  — Duc de la Rochefoucauld
 
 
“If it’s very painful for you to criticize your friends — you’re safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that’s the time to hold your tongue.”
 
– Alice Duer Miller
 
 
“When words are both true and kind, they can change the world.”  — Buddha

 

 

 

 

Lonely despair

 
 
“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”  — Friedrich Nietzsche
 
 
“It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire, and many things to fear.”  — Sir Francis Bacon
 
 
“People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges” – J.F. Newton.
 
 
“To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.”   — Simone Weil
 
 
“No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.”  — Aristotle
 
 
“What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.”  — Dag Hammarskjold

 

“We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.”

 — Joseph Roux

 

“A man dies as often as he loses his friends.”  — Francis Bacon
 
“The death of a friend is equivalent to the loss of a limb.”  — German Proverb
 
 
“Life dies inside a person when there are no others willing to befriend him.”

 — Mark R. J. Lavoie
 
 
“Loneliness breaks the spirit.” — Jewish Proverb
 
 
“I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.”
 
— Robin Williams
 
 
“A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”  — Gian Vincenzo Gravina
 
 
“When you are unhappy, is there anything more maddening than to be told that you should be contented with your lot?”
 
— Kathleen Norris
 
 
“No man is an island.”   — John Donne

 

4:7 Then I returned, and I saw vanity under the sun.

4:8 There is one alone, and there is not a second; yea, he hath neither child nor brother: yet is there no end of all his labour; neither is his eye satisfied with riches; neither saith he, For whom do I labour, and bereave my soul of good? This is also vanity, yea, it is a sore travail.

— Ecclesiastes, King James version

 

Or indeed, as so excellently and eloquently expressed in that Postmodern driving staccato refrain of The Godfathers: “Birth, School, Work, Death”

 

 

 

 

companionable hope

 

4:9 Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour.

4:10 For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.

4:11 Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone?

4:12 And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

 — Ecclesiastes, King James version

 

“No man is useless while he has a friend.”  —  Robert Louis Stevenson

“I think a man only needs one thing in life. He just needs someone to love. If you can't give him that, then give him something to hope for. And if you can't give him that, just give him something to do.”

 — James Liddle, Memorable Quotes from ‘Flight of the Phoenix’ (remake, 2004)

 

“The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”  — Allan K. Chalmers

 

“One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.”  — Hermann Hesse

 

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.”  — Benjamin Disraeli

 

“The philosophy called individualism, is a philosophy of social cooperation and the progressive intensification of the social nexus.”

 — Ludwig von Mises

 

 

 

 
expression or else isolation
Social isolation, steadily winding its emotional toll, undermines and erodes cognitive and executive function.
 
 
 
 
“Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.”   — Proverbs 27:17 (KJV)
 
 
“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow  — Alice Walker
 
 
“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate to others the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible . . . If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely.”

  — Carl Gustav Jung, 1989, p. 356.

 

“Isolation is the true dream killer, not your attitude” — Barbara Sher

 

“Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings.” — Miles Franklin

 

“People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.” — Anton Chekhov

 

“There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.”

  — Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

 

“The greatest compliment that was ever paid to me was when someone asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.”

  — Henry David Thoreau

 

“Philosophers, writers, artists, even scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking. If Defoe had really lived on a desert island, he could not have written Robinson Crusoe, nor would he have wanted to. Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.”

  — 'Conversation with a Pacifist' by George Orwell

 

It is frequently observed how intelligent people are often more lonely. Autonomy, honestly thinking for oneself and walking one's own path means traveling through life alone, even in a crowd, and struggling to find any common ground because no one can relate. All to often, even the most rational of skeptical criticism is taken as hostile and therefore received with hostility. But controversy which is the free exchange of criticism is inherently friendly, an expression of esteem. Mammals, forming attachment, can become dearest friends, even most profoundly, but among all known life forms, only for human intelligence can abstract ideas factor into psychological visibility, and only human beings can be intellectual partners, much as intellectualization is so Cretin maligned as superficial and utilitarian at best. Here on FoolQuest.com in the Dialectical social engineering of Eudemonia in more optimal social stimulus struggle and in Creativity Should be Social project proposal, the uniquely human intellectual needs of such highly evolved engorged cerebrality, expression or else isolation, are looked to in all hope as the fulcrum of optimal reciprocal engagement and better networking all for leveraging all other values of friendship thereby, and thus achieving the resolution of boredom and loneliness.

 

 

 

 
Friendship and understanding
Growth remaining true to oneself, is best nourished by psychological visibility.

 

“A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the lyrics.”  — unknown

 

“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”

 — Anais Nin

 

“Tell me what company thou keepst, and I'll tell thee what thou art.”  — Miguel de Cervantes

 

“Anyone can tell you it won't hurt tomorrow. I'm here to listen while it hurts today.”

 

"The malheureux need nothing else in this world but men capable of paying attention to them. The capability to pay attention to the malheureux is something very rare, very difficult; it's almost a miracle. Almost all those who think they have this capacity, don't. Warmth, the heart's reaching out, pity, all these are not sufficient. [...] Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

  — Simone Weil

 

“An understanding friend is better than a therapist; and cheaper too!”

 

“The best mirror is an old friend.” — George Herbert

 

“Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.”

  — Richard Bach

 

“One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”  — George Santayana

 

“For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.”

  — Simone Weil
 
 
“Friendship requires compromise without feeling compromised.”
 
“True love does not come by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”  — Jason Jordan

Purport : The intimacy and involvement of love, which we all yearn to receive and also to experience and to share, may be said to consist of altruistically attentive concern focused via the process of ever increasingly knowledgeable comprehension and familiarity with the beloved, authentic respect. -Even, romantically, immersion, to lose oneself in the other.

 
“Being loved deeply by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you corsage.”  — Lao Tzu
 
 
“We will always be friends...because you know too much!”
 
 
“A friend is one who knows us, but loves us anyway.”  — Fr. Jerome Cummings
 
 
“A friend is a person who listens attentively while you say nothing.”
 
 
“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts...”  — Kahlil Gibran
 
 
“To picture a truly alienated man, picture a Kafka to whom it had never occurred to write a word.”  

  — Percy, Walker, 'The Man in the Train', in The Message in the Bottle, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, N.Y., 1975, p. 83

 
“True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable.”  — Dave Tyson Gentry


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OnOFoolQuest.com

The star first follower or ally shall be the true leader

teaching by example, showing others how to follow, demonstrating how to relate

“A good friend knows all your stories. A best friend helped you create them.”

FoolQuest.com in combating loneliness and boredom, remains dedicated, first and foremost, to the advancement of social engineering of more optimal social stimulus struggle: the systematic and concerted cultivation of more optimally pleasurable, engaging and meaningful interaction so essential to human flourishing.

And what could be better?

 

 

 

 
 Friendship Probortunity
     
To reiterate: FoolQuest.com extends unique open invitation, distinct vision of forging close creative community. Does any of that sound like fun? Any questions? Any objections? Any takers? Dare we together take action? Let's talk! Hey, don't all crowd up at once! Seriously though, why such hesitation? Perhaps because it remains, even quite rightly, ever so difficult not to become guarded when strangers online, would be recruiters and proselytizers, strangers out of the blue, announce great doings and appear declaring, in however so many words: "Let's be friends!" Indeed gentle reader, have we such glowing common cause? And am I therein your unmet friend? Let us then evaluate the tantalizing probortunity of friendship.
    
Alas, setting aside any Pollyanna rose colored glasses, honestly there remain objectively real grounds for caution and distrust. Indeed, as Tennessee Williams observed: “We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.” Alas then the result, in the words of George Eliot: “What loneliness is more lonely than distrust Hence, in the words of George MacDonald: “To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.” Because, what possibly do others actually want of anyone else? Just what can they they after? For that matter, even accepting any such at least ostensible friendly approach at whatever conceivable face value, exactly what then is friendship to begin with? The very word being so often bandied about and far too readily. Indeed nothing so cavalier. For friendship remains ever so mysterious! Indeed, how does friendship arise? By what hubris dare we imagine the matter so obvious, and that everybody actually already knows? Why then can't the experts likewise so easily agree? Those ivory tower nerds and geeks! Those stupid experts! Can they possibly be so ignorant? Well, just maybe, upon due reflection, there is nothing so stupid or ignorant about deeper study instead of so eagerly embracing whatever common wisdom, popular assumptions and rightthink, all so blithely and uncritically. Indeed, to quote Mark Twain, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).” Hence all desperate need revealed, of proactive new ideas for taking things more seriously, responsibly and less cavalier dismissively. Because just as Socrates so famously declares: “An unexamined life is not worth the living for a human being.”
     
Alas then how so many quite ordinary folk, every short attention miserably lonely nebbish ever lead about by the nose, all who so desperately want everything to be certain, simple and easy, stubbornly cling to whatever accustomed conventional procedures, no matter how inane, fruitless and dull. And they may even so ardently bless exactly such vacuously co-validated and intractably rigid aimlessness as: spontaneity! Far from it. The relationship pabulum that stands in for emotional nourishment, did not begin with (Anti)Social Media. Indeed, in the words of George Orwell: “The main motive for 'nonattachment' is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual is hard work Alas, in common wisdom, in so anciently enduring preference for inaction, planning to find better personal connection simply is not done: “It just happens! Just let it happen!” So they insist. But what little, if anything, ever actually happens for ever bleating Sheeple, by just putting on a drone-like happy face and talking about nothing at all? Let alone as in this Brave New World online, endlessly trawling for 'likes.' Alas that as shall be seen, even long before the scourge of modern electronic efficiency, so much that we are constantly told is just another classic big lie of blithely relentless approval seeking, alienation and futility. Indeed, in slavish knee-jerk acquiescence and heteronomy to prevailing anti-intellectualism and anti-intraception, the unexamined life, not worth the living for a human being.
    
And yet, and so, and yes, more than ever, gentle readers: Let's be friends! And indeed, intentionally and strategically. Because, as it turns out, trustworthy, capable and happy people, whom we may all do best to emulate, to rτle model, if only we might ever fathom precisely how, are sociable, extroverted and known to reach out, Talk More Seriously and thrive in autonomy, prosper and succeed. And all with less small talk! Indeed, beware all willfully positive and upbeat, interminably irksome, obstructive  and pointlessly belabored empty vacant superficial boring small talk, a happiness killer, so often forced and awkward, only leaving one actually the more depleted, empty and discontent, all urgent need of truly important expression still mute and frustrated. That is why people secretly hate small talk. And rightly so!  Because ever guarded and interminably vapid small talk undermines any impulse of discovery and honest friendship.
   
The challenge as ever for seekers of any better path, in deliberation analytic yet strategic, remains in bridging from precisely such lofty abstract principle, into anything more concrete, specific, practical and actionable. In the words of Henry Ford: “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” Embarkation thus upon the all too uncertain real life Hero's Journey, attempting  anything really cool together, entrepreneurship for the rest of us. If You Desire Anything You've Never Had, Try Something You've Never Done. All beginning in whatever baby first steps upon Laozi's fabled Journey of a Thousand Miles.
    
The angst of psychological asymmetry obtains in the immediacy of lonely and vivid reflection upon inner life and individual consciousness, in contrast to how the minds of others ever remain so mysterious and unknown. After all, psychological asymmetry simply means that we are not so odd, but only strangers. And so we wallow each in our own pervasive and inexhaustible reservoirs of secret anxiety and vulnerability, never suspecting much the same of others beneath ever crumbling facade of exterior presentation. And therefore, so very far from interminably vapid small talk, instead capable human relationship, especially true friendship, indeed meaning in the very deepest sense, full complicity in psychological visibility in order to penetrate psychological asymmetry, Eros remaining not so much co-validation in whatever even superficial similarity as instead, quite the opposite, Eudemonia of liberating union with alien difference. Indeed, most especially as into attachments of true friendship. And even, perhaps most frightening of all, nothing so heartless, forcedly cheerful and upbeat, but instead compassion for the appropriateness of grief. All these and so much more, arising only as byproduct of authentically attentive optimal reciprocal engagement in often tabooed and sometimes emotionally risky purposeful interaction and/or substantive communication. And categorically, never otherwise.

 

 

 

 

Copyright 2004 - 2024 Aaron Agassi UNMET FRIEND

 

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