Vice Versa

Your greatest strengths are your greatest weaknesses. And vice versa.

The first part is a cliché, the “vice versa” part should be too.

I try to remind myself of that when I confront my weaknesses. Staring into the darkness of my inadequacy, it’s easy to overlook the strength that may be lurking in there as well.

For instance, one of my most glaring weaknesses is that I am not a social animal. I prefer to live in my head. I avoid social occasions. When compelled to be social, I have a hard time masking my disinterest. I could care less about others’ concerns, except on the rare occasions when they happen to intersect with mine, at which point I overwhelm them with learned discourses they’d prefer not to hear. I am, fundamentally, a deeply selfish person. So it’s no surprise that I don’t form connections.

This is not good. It has resulted in a great deal of unhappiness in my life, and in others’ lives as well.

However, it does have its advantages.

For one, my thinking is probably more independent than it would otherwise be. Avoiding people makes me less susceptible to social proof, that strong urge to follow the herd that so often leads us over a cliff.

My thinking is also more abstract and systemic; I am less prone than most to personalize complex phenomena. Creationism and the Great Man Theory of History are examples of attempts to personalize and simplify complexity. Normal social beings are more prone to take these mental short-cuts, and therefore more prone to their distortions.

Another benefit is I have more time to think, what with my social calendar being clear of obligations, my phone never ringing, my email rarely pinging me with new messages.

But the most surprising benefit, and one that I have only recently begun to truly appreciate, is that being asocial has actually taught me a great deal about people. Social interactions that come naturally to most people do not come naturally to me. What most do unconsciously, I can only do consciously. I have to analyze my social interactions in order to make them work. My analytical approach is artificial and can result in stilted interactions, but over years of trial and error I’ve managed to refine it to such a degree that I can navigate my way through most social situations while looking more natural than I am.

That’s not surprising to me. What is surprising is that I have also become a social resource for others in my family and small circle of friends. What could these naturally social people possibly learn from me? When they find themselves in social quandaries, and their own natural instincts fail to guide them, an artificial but analytical approach like mine can help reveal answers they otherwise couldn’t see. They never needed to develop analytical social skills, so their social strength is now their weakness, while my social weakness has led me to develop this strength that they sometimes need. So they increasingly consult with me, the most asocial person they know, about social matters.

On the whole, I still believe I’d be happier if I were naturally social. The lifetime benefits of being naturally social significantly outweigh the benefits I’ve outlined above, but rather than rail against the injustice of my weakness I will try to dwell more on its attendant strengths.

Comments

[robert61]

I agree that there is benefit to be gained from social infirmity, and on good grounds, since I share it. In the past couple years, I have much enjoyed Robin Hanson's postings at Overcoming Bias, in large part because I have always felt, as he does, that much of human behavior consists of social signalling. In my experience, few agree that signalling is worthy of so much weight. This is a failure of success, in my view; most swim so easily in the social waters that they are oblivious of the waters' properties. Even sophisticated fellow humans assign a metric of moral worth to interactions that are no more than the theatre of status.