25Hour

The student said: “Master, I need your help. At parties I don’t know what to do and suspect that everyone hates me.” At this, the master grabbed his birch rod and struck the student twenty times across the shoulders, and twenty times again. The master said: “And?” Epistemic Status: I'm about 90% certain that what I'm saying is true as regards to me, and 10% that attempting to do what I'm doing actually leads any specific person to similar results as mine (the priors are just really rough here). Heavy on anecdotal evidence. Summary Social anxiety is often explained as a state of irrational fear caused by misguided beliefs about what others think of us, which can be corrected by therapy. I have come to believe differently: that social (and some romantic!) anxiety, writ large, comes from doomed and frequently conscious attempts to micromanage someone else's internal state. This dysfunctional goal takes many concrete forms: 1. make them like us 2. make them not dislike us (as discussed in Social Anxiety Isn’t About Being Liked — LessWrong) 3. ensure they are not feeling awkward in any way 4. ensure they are not starting to secretly resent us 5. ensure we are not imposing on them or transgressing any unspoken boundary they may or may not have. 6. ensure they do not think we are awkward or feel awkward themselves 7. ensure they are never put in the position of having to declare a boundary against us ("if I ask to join this group of people going to a concert maybe they'll say no!") 8. ensure they never notice we're trying to micromanage their internal state because then maybe they feel awkward I'm referring to all of these kinds of pseudo-mind-control attempts by the general term of "approval-seeking", because that's almost always what it boils down to. Approval-seeking cannot be done reliably, and "social anxiety" is just the name we give to the moment-to-moment desperation of trying to accomplish any important-feeling but fundamentally impossible