Say Hi To People You Antisocial Bastards
I Have Had It Up To Here With Your Bullshit
You. Yes, you. The lonely Inkhaven curmudgeon who goes downstairs in your pajamas, eyes downcast, shuffling past your comrades dead-eyed as you get your coffee.
SAY HI TO PEOPLE. Ideally with names attached.
Simple Greetings Signal Openness To Conversation
Most people don’t go up to random strangers and strike up chats. You need to be at the “known acquaintances” level first.
There’s a counter in me that’s tracking something like “how many potential-greetings has it been since this specific person has actually greeted me.” If I go many interactions after a chat with someone without us greeting each other, then this generates an understanding that our relationship is now back to zero. We are no longer mutual acquaintances, but rather, strangers who share a building.
The counter exists, I think, because greetings are basically deposits into a relationship account. And the account doesn’t hold steady at whatever amount when you stop depositing: it decays over time, because every ungreeted pass is a very small piece of evidence that the other person doesn’t consider you worth acknowledging.
Adding a name to a hello is a bigger deposit. Forgetting their name decreases the value of the deposit just a little bit; basically fine, but the relationship builds slower than otherwise. If you’re trying to speedrun embedding yourself in a community, frequent hellos with names attached is most of how you do it.
From The Inside
I think it’s hard to notice this dynamic when you’re the curmudgeon.
The pajama-shuffling curmudgeon (me, sometimes) has a self-model that goes something like “I’m not imposing.” Eyes-down is assumed to be the absence of a social move.
Except from the outside it isn’t. From the outside, eyes-down no-greeting past someone you’ve met before is doing real work and the work is, I’m not gonna lie to you, not great. You’re saying, in effect, “I have looked at you and chosen not to engage.” If you listen reeeeal close, you’ll catch the telltale sound of the other person’s counter ticking up: “consecutive times when this person could have greeted me, but didn’t.”
I think most people who do this are running some kind of assumption that “saying hello to someone” has to be earned somehow with some prior number of fun interactions, and that is false. After the first introduction, saying “hello” cannot be further earned. The hello is, itself, the thing that earns the next hello. There can be no further justification, and waiting for one is how the counter runs out.
I think our accidental curmudgeon is reaching for something legitimate: a posture of not-being-pushy. They’ve just overshot it into a form that reads as “I don’t like you.”
Yin Flirting
I’m using the word “yin” in the same way as this essay: as the shaping of conditions which allow others to act directly if they so choose (the acting which is, itself, yang.)
The case where this shows up most legibly is flirting. I’m not a girl and have nothing to say to women about the active side of flirting. But: I have heard a couple women in different circumstances express frustration that nobody approaches them, while behaving toward others in ways that, for me, would short-circuit my own approach instinct long before it got near consideration.
Because when I ask in myself “would this person enjoy me flirting with them” what I’m actually consulting is a huge gestalt of past and current interactions that contains, as a sort of prerequisite element, “does this person occasionally acknowledge me in a friendly way when I enter the room.” If the answer is “no” then the computation ends there.
I think this probably generalizes.
This Is All Just Yin Socializing
If you’d like to be read as warm and approachable but don’t want to initiate conversation yourself, this is how you do it: say hi when someone enters the room. Include nonzero eye contact. Maybe, if you’re feeling extra spicy, include their name. That’s literally the whole thing, and I think this is the calibrated version of not imposing. The curmudgeon’s eyes-down move is the uncalibrated version, which blows past “quietly receptive” into “absolutely not.”
Say hi to people.
The interesting thing here is that, saying hi to someone is a direct action you take, which creates the conditions for the other person to act directly in response.
In other words, it is a yang action, which *transforms* into a yin shaping in relation to a yang response.
Yang containing yin, yin transforming into yang. ☯️
I really think there are probably people there who DON'T want to have a conversation. Personally I want to talk when i'm in social mode. If I'm just venturing out to get coffee or go to the bathroom, it's not social time and even a greeting is too much