It might be the table at the family gathering. It might be a small group or even just you and one other person at a bar. It might be an angry and outspoken person that talks too loudly at the restaurant with someone else at their table and doesn’t care that you think the only thing possibly worse is a crying baby or fussy toddler. It might be someone wearing apparel at a vacation spot that is screaming out that they would love nothing more than to start a fight with even random strangers because…reasons.
Some people enjoy monopolizing the conversation. And although not directly seeking to grift you, there’s an uneasy feeling you are going to be thinking, “Oh God, here we go again.” These are the people that are the attention whores who simply refuse to admit they might be wrong about anything. They are the ones that try to antagonize someone they’ve pegged as the smartest person in the room. And they feel it’s time to play the outsmart the smart person. Take them down a notch. And lots of smart people know the game and deliberately make a habit of not engaging because it’s a no win proposition. Their arguments will be loaded with logical fallacies and dirty DEBATE ME, BRO!! tactics.
But during that nurturing phase while they are building up to the point where they have become the Joe Rogan of their social circles, what do these people talk about? What are the confidence builders in their echo chambers that made them become the kind of person you want to avoid for the next four years?
Weird shit
Like gematria. Or 9/11 conspiracies or JFK assassination. Anything that gives you a chance to make up evidence or recite fake evidence someone else made up, like Haitian immigrants are eating cats or elementary schools have litter boxes. The average other person in the conversation will not know the immediate debunk.
Their job
Normal social interaction requires the politeness to tolerate an update on what someone else is going through at their place of employment. You may even get a brief query about your job, but it’s a fake out to give them an excuse to go full bore attention whore weirdo mode and talk about their job. If their job is completely different it’s a golden opportunity to keep it focused. You as a bank teller don’t know about computer coding with Java and Python. Every chance they get to talk about a topic the other person isn’t comfortable with - they aren’t objectively wrong. What’s wrong is the expectation that you have to live with the one sided nature. You are the punching bag that has to put up with the condescending insinuation of not actually knowing everything. The smarter the target audience is, the more satisfaction gained in outsmarting the smart person.
Politics/Economics/Religion
These are the familiar ruiners of group gatherings. You, as the annoying weirdo, get to introduce completely subjective material with a mix of a far too small amount of actual facts and spin it into a yarn that’s difficult to entangle. Well practiced and the chance to be perceived as an expert in something you don’t really have any clue about. A lot of the fallacies relate to short term versus long term thinking. Why not take up Pascal’s Wager and think about your eternal soul today? Oh my, look at the price of eggs and gas!! Better put a dictator in office now!! (As the target, try to go easy on the religious ones, a lot of them are really well intentioned. But if they get to the Westboro kill the **** stage, yeah duck out of those conversations.)
Shitty Heroes
A subset of the previous. It’s what you get when you admire a Musk or Rogan because you don’t understand that you admire the superficial “winning” over quality of arguments. You enjoy winning your little debates, and these influencers appear to be intelligent despite an overwhelming amount of actual evidence they aren’t. The easiest debunk of the wealthy = intelligent myth is how often the shitty hero contradicts themselves. The shitty hero is all over the place. When you play both sides and your gullible target audience doesn’t call you out on it, you’re golden shit.
You Repeat Yourself
A lot. And you don’t realize that you repeat yourself a lot. You have a stockpile of jokes, memes, and personal anecdotes that got you a gotcha moment in the past. Overall, you are so annoying people don’t want to hang around you unless they are part of your weirdo clique. And you’ve got that stockpile that got a genuine positive response that you fall back on in trying times. And it doesn’t matter which group from above the conversation revolves around. As soon as you hear a reference you recognize, even outside the basic conversation, you choke in with, “A duck walks into a bar…”. Uggh. I hate having a good memory. Hearing the old Kobe Bryant gematria again didn’t change my mind the first time, nothing has altered that now.
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