2.17 How to Human. Advice from the outside

It might surprise many of you to learn that I’m not a natural ‘people person.’ Being affable and sweet online is a lot easier than it is in the real world. I’ve always found socialising online comes with small simple rules that make interactions easy and flowing. Avoiding unpleasant people and existing inside a small social bubble is the epitome of our world online. Confrontations are totally avoidable and awkwardness can be ignored. Prospering as an online social butterfly is a very different skillset to prospering as a RL social butterfly.

Because of this, I started making my ‘how to human’ instructions.

How to human: Mornings and conversation starters.

I work in an office and I am client-facing; this means that every week or more often, I meet new people. Important people and clients that I need to make a good impression on, people who decide big things, people who decide small things. My job is to help translate their needs into IT-speak half the time. The other half the time, my job is to make sure what they want gets done. I pester, I bug, I jump out of bushes on technicians and experts. Being affable and nice is essential to not destroying the fragile ecosystem of inter-office life. About three years ago, I made some small discoveries to the sort of unconscious behaviour that I have, that legitimately bothers other people. I’m going to share these discoveries.

A lot of these might seem pretty normal or common sense to some of you. But this blog post is for those who don’t think ‘oh, so normal’ but instead, like me, groan at how forced social interactions are. None of this comes naturally to me. Maybe it’s my star-sign, the overflowing yin energy in my chakra, perhaps it’s how I was raised or my core Myers Briggs definitions in action—or maybe social habits come naturally for some and have to be learned for others.

Greetings

Humans find validation of their existence in your morning greeting and afternoon farewell.

Let that sink in for a moment at how kind of strange this is. I have literally ruined coworkers days by not saying ‘good morning’ to them in the morning.

As bizarre as this might be for some of us, it seems pretty standard for others. You get in to work and go around saying good morning to everyone.

I’m not a morning person. I wake up, about an hour and a hot shower later, I’m capable of moving and maybe grunting out a few vague words such as ‘give it me the coffee’ or ‘I long for the comforting arms of my bed.’ I don’t do morning greetings. They are a strange archaic lie of social nicety that serve no purpose. It is not a good morning if I’m in at work. A good morning is 10am on a beach on Thailand, drinking champagne and sunbathing. Instead I’m in the grey cubicle wastelands of the office, fluorescent lighting searing my sensitive eyeballs, surrounded by people I tolerate because I’m paid to tolerate them, and drinking shitty coffee from the local café. I even like my job; I have a great job and good pay, fun coworkers and an environment in which I flourish. A good morning, however, is insincere and requires a level of social interaction that I can barely manage most mornings.

Why do people need my greeting every single morning? It’s tired and boring. It’s a waste of the tiny effort I have to muster at this ungodly hour.

Without these greetings, however, I walk into the room, sit down and turn on the computer.

People feel snobbed and ignored. As if I don’t care about their mornings or human-shaped lives.

I don’t know why we place such a strong emphasis on this or why the lack of greetings and farewells seems capable of ruining others. It is just a simple archaic custom that we enforce on our society. Unfortunately, as weird as it feels to me; I’m the odd one out. Humans like these things.

So I started greeting people. The change took about 2 days to have an huge difference. People smiled, people talked and chatted, coworkers responded happily. Strangers would interact with me suddenly. The office atmosphere changed dramatically.

I still struggle with this; greetings are not all that natural for me and my poor voice box takes ages to warm up, so I often get asked why I’m so mousy and quiet so early. To which, I have learned not to answer honestly, even if I still struggle with it.

 

Answering ‘how are you’ with ‘I’m good, thanks. How are you?’

This is weird, but I grew up answering ‘how are you?’ honestly. I was taught to be honest and forthright.  When I was in my early twenties, I noticed a really weird thing I did in conversation- I ignored this question altogether. It comes up a lot in retail jobs. People, feeling awkward while you scan items or set about making their order, will try to lessen their positional guilt and discomfort by offering the ‘small-talk-platitudes.’ It slows down my efficiency so I just skipped it in the conversations. I either never answered, or, worse, would answer honestly.

How foolish! How unsettling a strange beast I am.

In my studies of humans and direct advice a few friends have given me, I have since discovered that there are two circumstances in which one may answer honestly to these questions:

If a parent, sibling or close friend asks how you are, honesty and frankness are perfectly acceptable.

If you’re in a psychologist’s office.

All other times, regardless of how much blood is leaking from every orifice, it is only socially acceptable to answer with ‘I’m good, thanks. How are you?’

One of the things I’ve noticed is that this is robotic small talk and sometimes feedback loops can start as neither person acting out this small talk is really paying attention to anything the other is saying. We’ve been socially programmed to respond with this very simple statement, return the sentiment of ‘I also am human and totally empathise with you’ and as a result I once got into a four-time loop with a gentleman but I was able to find a verbal spring-board out of the chasm we’d fallen into.

I typically don’t care how a total stranger is, nor is it their business to ask after my health. But again, the mere act of asking someone ‘how are you’ seems to trigger this social monkey behaviour and make us warm up to people.

Once I stopped answering this question with witty remarks like ‘It’s Monday and I’m in at the office. How are you?’ or ‘well they paid me to wake up and come here this morning, you?’

And started using the simple program response, people relaxed a lot. Being a conversational maverick is cool and fun when you’re in retail or sitting on a cash register all day seeing hundreds of faces. But in the grey cubicle wastelands, it is often jarring and makes forced interactions just a touch harder. As one friend said ‘no one cares how you actually are, it’s just a thing people say to be polite.’

Even though I barely understand these social niceties, I’ve discovered the why of this behaviour is less important than to actioning of it. I may find it inane and troublesome, but use of these basic human interactions has steadily increased and stabilised healthy relationships with colleagues. 

If you, like me, feel like an outsider to such curious customs and manners, let me know what discoveries you’ve made and how they have improved your socialising skills as a result.