Demystifying being social

Being social is often portrayed with the idea that one can interact with another in a specific social setting. They often need to share their good stories of life with people they talk to. It becomes a social compulsory. Meanwhile, essentially, the word social alone should, instead, refer to how one can feel recognized, heard, and understood with the lack of judgment and the other away around, one also does the same to their interlocutor(s) regardless of bad or good news he/she/they want to share. Despite that, in reality, how much time do you encounter a situation where you are in a crowded space or being involved in social event yet, you, by any measure, still feel lonely? The answer for me is a lot.

This has to do with the rule of being social. In this matter, the social talk is often steered to certain topics. Mostly, things that make people feel happy and energized — things that make them forget trauma they face on their daily lives —if one drinks beers to cancel out their pain, the social talk should also work the same. Or else, instead of listening and understanding, each of us would need to bring certain stories to gain others’ attentions.So that you feel matters. The thing that remain the same about this is loneliness.

While this social interaction could be a perfect medium for us to pour our heart out, it is often not the case. For this very reason, I often make a social experiment to share my vulnerability, anxiety, and disappointment in life with the group of people as I engage with them. The idea is to know their response. I intentionally aim to shift the mainstream social conversation themes like “the weather is good, the weekend is nice, and all of those small talks” toward much deep, meaningful conversations. I know people may want to wrestle with me arguing that small talks are meaningful, too, dude, my point is not that. Instead, my point is that we should feel as attentive or perhaps, excited to deep, emotional, traumatic talks as that of those small talks and overly waiting happy news. The former is, however, going to be considered “hmm that’s too negative, too taboo, or too personal”. Let’s move on to the very pseudo-happy talk, “the small talk”. This logic or culture if you wish is rather incorrect. First, how do you know to be happy when you deny the feeling of others? The feeling of others, say about depression, might also reflect to your real life experience. The experience of being human, being fragile, being tired, being disappointed and being confused —or, in the worst case, being suicidal. Second, why do we not use to have meaningful talk, learn to listen to people’s deep emotions? Isn’t it the idea of being social is that we should address this issue? Again, common folks would come back to talk “hello, what a great day today, yes with the awkwardly reply”.

In my view, as much as we think we are social by being with others, we are, in actuality, not. Because we only know the surface of others. Yet, we do not know them in a deeper level. We are scared to touch upon or surface those serious topics in our social life because we concur that we should instead only talk about light talks. Chill, dude.

For that reason, this social construct of what we means by being social is misleading. Being social should not be measured by how many people you should or can talk to, but by how deep, open, and safe you feel to share your vulnerability with others. The pain shared in the conversation makes you understand each other that you are not a sole victim of the merciless life but your interlocutor feel the same, too. Nonetheless, you try to put it together and carry on with life. This way together make you feel less lonely and that is the point of, again, being social.