Hard agree. But I’m autistic, and as far back as I can remember, I’ve avoided social interactions. My mom talks about how I happily played by myself as a toddler. I also remember a neighbor kid who seemed to call constantly to ask to play, and I turned her down over and again. (She eventually back-stabbed me, so don’t feel too bad for her.)

Some people legit like to be around others. Some people can’t stand the thought of spending time alone at all. Everyone’s built differently. For me, it takes a special kind of person to make me want to socialize with them (almost always other neuro-divergent folks, where I can “remove the mask” so to speak.)

What would you be risking if you were honest? There’s a reason you believe you shouldn’t be authentic when you’re around others.

When you are dealing with people or institutions which hold power over you, it is an exhausting obligation to put on the performance that they want. No getting around it unless you find a different situation.

When you are with people who don’t hold power over you, masking is only a benefit if you are seeking to run confidence schemes. Unless you are seeking to deliberately defraud your peers, the best thing you can get from masking is that you will have to continue to perform the character they like and keep yourself suppressed to keep knowing them. If you are authentic around your peers, they will like or dislike you based on who you actually are, no acting required.

If you are suddenly authentic around the people who are exhausting you because they need you to play the character, they will not react well. You may be afraid of that. I promise you that losing your ability to connect to others because you believe you must always suppress yourself should scare you much more. It is a good thing to lose people who require you to not be yourself.

I’ve been reading some of these other replies and my input is that to me you sound depressed / burnt out. I do not say that as a psychologist or therapist, if you want that diagnosis you’d have to talk to a certified one; however, the times in my life I have been more depressed the more I agree with this sentiment and the less I’ve been depressed the less I agree.

I’d also like to remind you that you are asking this on Lemmy, which means a lot of responses you’ll get here are from a certain nerdy, shut-in type. I say this because people here are likely to agree already, which is good for sympathies but not for answering your actual question.

When people say they enjoy being social, they are not lying (with caveats). Most healthy people have at least a couple of relationships they deeply value, and if you’re missing that I think it’s worth continuing to meet people even if it’s a lot of effort.

Work-wise though, yeah people are mostly lying there. There’s a much stronger insentive structure to lie.

I want to reiterate you should look into whether you’ve got burnout or depression, especially given the current climate. Those both have a way of draining enjoyment from seemingly unrelated things, relationships usually being one of the first.

Social interaction is enjoyable and a requirement for a social species. The fact that so many people in this thread are depressed, dejected and lonely is really sad. Despair is not a sustainable life strategy. Please if you are unable to find joy in social interaction find a community you do enjoy and start to be a part of that because the alternative is withering and death.

You may want to get tested for autism, speaking from experience, I always found this weird and I thought everyone must be experiencing the same they just won’t say anything about it but nope lol they enjoy that shit

Maybe I am missing something but I do not see the beautiful part everyone talks about.

You gotta find people who “speak your language”. It’s a massive fucking bummer to always be second guessing myself around some neurotypical people but with my partner or friends I just love being with them?

I can actually be myself with my partner, and my friends are way more understanding of the way I communicate than the general public. That’s why we are friends, because we enjoy spending time with each other!

Most of my friends are through shared interests. Those come with the built-in bonus of generally being task oriented and time limited so I can try and avoid over extending myself. It’s also okay to head out when you aren’t feeling it anymore. No one wants to feel like an obligation.

I need a lot of time by myself, especially now that I am turbo burnt out. But I do think it’s important to have some kind of connection just so one doesn’t become too disconnected. If something comes up and you need to do a socializing it’s a lot easier if you’ve been socializing on your own terms.

Plus, it’s nice to take care of each other.

To me it feels like pure obligation.

it is if you don’t enjoy it.

i find it draining & depressing so i don’t do it outside of work and it makes people angry at me for not engaging.

it also makes collectivizing next to impossible for me.

You will feel like this until you do two things:

• Understand what you like, only you. Not your parents, not your siblings, not your friends, just you. It could be things considered unusual where you live, such as “salmon fishing in the Yemen.”
• Find people who enjoy the same things as you.

You do not have to dedicate your time to people you neither like nor have anything in common with.

There’s a saying that goes “A burden shared is a burden halved. A joy shared is a joy doubled.”

Having a few close friends makes bad times suck less and good times even better.

I enjoy many social interactions.

Went to a concert this weekend. Chatted with the person running the merch table. Briefly chatted with a rando at the bar. Was nice.

Went to a party this weekend. Had a nice chat with some people I’d met before. Maybe came on kind of strong to the socialists in one conversation, but it was fun.

Lemmy probably isn’t going to get you a representative sample of people.

Be free and allow yourself to not do things by pure obligation, we have all different preferences, be kind to yourself first.

Probably hard to find real connection with people who can tell you’re talking to them out of what you think is an obligation instead of enjoying their company

Human beings are social animals. They need social interaction to survive. Being isolated is recognized as a form of torture. Interactions being draining is often a consequence of contingent societal factors rather than an essential property of interaction itself.

I think a LOT of people require external validation to feel good about themselves. Its why we see places like Facebook and Reddit fracture into echo chambers, and why humans separate themselves into social groups based on similarities. Groups then can outcast the “others” which creates a social floor. As long as you’re within Group, you know you aren’t as bad as those Others over there. At the same time, the people within Group build each other uo and reinforce their common behaviors. Dissimilar behaviors within the group leads to either note fracturing within the group, or leads to people changing their behaviors and homogenizing.

When I was last in a band, I noticed the pattern. The 3 of us would each write things on our own that sounded unique, like our individual selves. When we brought the pieces together, or wrote songs together, the result was bland and generic stuff. All of our respective rough edges that made us interesting were rubbed smooth to make room for each other. And the songs that seemed to do the best with crowds were the smoothest ones (not that we had a ton of success- we played a handful of gigs before the pandemic hit and they ended up moving away).

I’ve noticed a lot lately that introverts in media are often portrayed as broken. Evangelion is one of my favorite anime, but its guilty of this. Shinji is often used in memes and internet culture to represent an introvert, but pretty much every scene where we see him alone he is miserable and craving some external validation. When I’m alone I usually just feel at peace.

I think a lot of people fear themselves, their own thoughts. They consider “being in your own head” a bad thing, like your own thoughts are scary.

My older sister is autistic and we were recently talking about traveling. She said that she prefers to travel alone so she can just wander around a new city at her own pace without having to consider the needs of her husband or children or friends kr anyone else, and I related to that a lot. I may also be autistic- I’m waiting for my assessment results lol.

Idk. Individuals are all different and if it makes the happy juices flow then I guess it’s enjoyable for them. For me there are a handful of people that’s true for but for most other interactions I feel similar to you.

That said: Humans developed a brain that could invent languages to make it easier to communicate and coordinate with each other. It’s probably up there with tool usage for advantages we had. So I don’t think it should be that surprising that our brains usually reward us for it if everything is going right.