Before anything I want to share that these are my personal thoughts on social interactions and media engagement. As such, I may not be correct on the assumptions I make. I strongly encourage you to comment if you think similarly or differently!
I have noticed some micro-patterns lately about how I engage mainstream content and media. These tendencies include:
- Avoiding broadcast/weekly release shows with hype like Game of Thrones.
- Not having an Instagram account (very personal).
- Never really putting an effort in knowing a song or artist by name.
As a result of these small but highly impactful habits I find myself unable to find common ground in a conversation with someone else — small talk.
One could also argue that you can engage with the mainstream by consuming its opposite — niche, obscure interests — since you’re bound to find a community with which to share your different thoughts and ideas.
From my experience, I find extroverts on either extreme of this engagement: strongly follow or strongly disagree. Regardless, I often times find myself outside of any given side, since I don’t consider myself an extrovert.
If you don’t follow the NFL you will have a hard time engaging with football enthusiasts during its season. If you’re not watching Game of Thrones, you’re passively listening to your coworkers by the water cooler talking about the latest episode. You’re out of the loop!
This is pretty bad since social interaction is vital to job offers, promotions, friends, family and overall psychological well-being. The infamous line “Humans are social creatures” comes to play.
In the light of these thoughts I can’t help wondering if this puts my identity in jeopardy. Is my identity defined by this childish indifference?
As a result of this question, I was split between two options:
- Keep the indifference as part a part of me (far from ideal)
- Follow any trend aimlessly to find some topics for idle chat…
After long hours of reflection, I decided for neither. Unfortunately, the conclusion was more complex and difficult. This sparked, like most of my recent thoughts lately, from PyCon Latam.
When I attended my first Python meetups, I felt like an alien. While I thought it was a cool programming language, I wasn’t passionate about it. As a result, I found it really hard to meet people within the group.
Data Science and Machine Learning (ML) have been in the hype train of Computer Science for a while now. After some years, I started working in this area. Additionally, I registered to attend PyCon Latam out of curiousity (of the beaches in Puerto Vallarta).
Python has an excellent set of tools in ML. As a result, I felt motivated to talk to people in the event about data privacy, best practices, etc. I even gave a lightning talk!
I didn’t make a lot of friends, but I was able to meet more people than I imagined. I was able to gather courage to strike a conversation with strangers, since I thought that I had something to talk about with them. Additionally, talking about ML and the lightning talk branched into other interesting conversations, which was lovely to listen to.
Engaging in PyCon Latam through ML wasn’t a 180° life-changing experience for me, but it was a good start! Maybe you don’t need to follow the hype, but the hype is great to find out new things to try out! If you still don’t like them after trying, that’s fine! At least you tried it!
After the fact, I realized that while striking a conversation is fundamental, listening and embracing the social anxiety is as important to keep the conversation going.
Do you think interests are necessary in social activities? What are some techniques you use to find something in common with someone else?
Please let me know if you agree or disagree, I’d love to read it. :)
