Standards Too High To Live In Society

This is very general, and obviously I may get a lot of details wrong, but the gross picture I want to talk about is this:

The sort of people that have educated themslves mostly through what their teachers and parents told them and what they learnt from manuals and books and fiction... tend to have very high moral standards. Most of their experiences of human interaction will be vicarious (relying on how people portray themselves), if not downright fictional.

• They expect perfect loyalty from friends, like, Harry Potter levels of loyalty, because that's how most of the friendships they experienced are.
• They expect romance to be a matter of showing intrinsic valuable traits as an individual, and that perseverance pays, and that, if there are differences and misunderstandings in the beginning, it will all even out after some hilarious, memorable antics, because they've seen too many rom coms.
• They may even believe that they should seek a romantic partner as a matter of course. They'll also have a very narrow range of people who they find physically attractive, because that's how actors are.

And those are only a few of the misjudgings that lonely people who live society mostly through fiction can make. I think we can chalk it up to Availability Bias.

Some of them may also shun other people because they're not interesting enough. As far as they're concerned, they'll compare talking to you with reading a book*

. If there's more for them to learn or enjoy from reading a book, they may very well choose the book.

So far, so good: if they don't want to be around people they see as beneath them, their funeral. But it doesn't stop here.

See, the worrying part is that this causes the individual to get lonelier and lonelier, more lonely than they actually want to be, as they eliminate the people around them that don't fit those narrow criteria. That is, among those few who give them the time of the day anyway: not only are lonely people systematically perceived as unattractive (if they're lonely it's probably for a reason, contrary to the fictional Boo Radley aesops) so people don't approach them, they themselves are awfully lacking practice at dealing with people, and will be clumsy, awkward and even Innocently Insensitive and unable to properly read the mood.

Oh, and one more thing: those standards they apply to everyone else? They apply to themselves too. And they fail to meet them. Hence, self-hatred. Which can be fine if it drives them to make themselves better*

So, adding extremely high moral, intellectual, ethic and aesthetic standards to choose friends on top of all of that...

Why do I qualify those as "extremely" high? Look at the opposite of the spectrum. The partygoers, the people who need to be around other people. The extroverts. The socialites. (Again, all this is in Broad Strokes). How do they keep in touch with so many people, how can they even stand to be in the same room? They're simply more tolerant.

Sure, they'll only trust you with their friendship and their confidence if they enjoy your company a lot more than other people's and you have proven that, personally, to them, you are loyal and trusty. But they won't care about how you treat the rest of the world. You're their friend if you are good to them, regardless of how much of a bastard you can be to other people they don't care about. The moral standards will rise and fall depending on circumstance and necessity.

They might be nitpicking to the point of obsessiveness with the people they need to take down a peg, and tolerant to those that they need to be on good standing. They have a lot of "friends" (basically, "drinking pals", in spirit), and an exclusive little group of "friends" (more like allies).

Add the great practice they have at dealing with people, and the fact that people seeing someone liked and well surrounded might be drawn to them if only to find out what the fuss is all about... It's an exponential cycle of meeting, befriending, antagonizing sometimes, and socializing. The main limit is the number of hours there is in the day.

The muggles are somewhere in the middle, obviously, and are basically on stable loops (though they stop making friends after a certain age and start losing them as they grow older)...

So, am I on to something, or is this all a big pile of rubbish?

edited 6th Nov '11 8:18:24 AM by PacificState

A case of true love has the same redeeming power as a case of genuine curiosity: they are the same.

Cool story, bro.

You might be onto something, I'm not sure what though.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

I am now known as Flyboy.

Well, supposing I was right, what should be done about it?

edited 6th Nov '11 8:16:55 AM by PacificState

A case of true love has the same redeeming power as a case of genuine curiosity: they are the same.

I... could see this being true of a very small number of individuals, but most people who are lonely aren't lonely because they have too high standards. They're lonely because they just have difficulty interacting with people easily for whatever reason, not because they rule out interacting with too many people.

Though someone who gets burned often enough may start sticking more to only the type of person they actually do know how to interact with, or may start fantasizing about fictional people who seem really easy to get along with and wouldn't judge them, which might in some cases look superficially like high standards from the outside.

edited 6th Nov '11 8:33:08 AM by Jeysie

Apparently I am adorable, but my GF is my #1 Groupie. (Avatar by Dreki-K)

I agree with Jeysie (I think.) The fact that someone is an introvert is what comes first. Then it would perhaps fuel the cycle that you are talking about. If introverts have standards that are too high, due to comparing real life to fiction (I think everyone does this,) the only reason this is true is because they would rather immerse themselves in the fiction than interact with real people in the first place...i.e. They have developed lacking social skills because they are introverts. They are not introverts because they have lacking social skills.

It's probably a chicken and egg thing.

edited 6th Nov '11 8:49:59 AM by sketch162000

I think that it's more a matter of wrong standards. If someone gets most of their knowledge of human relationships from fiction rather than from direct experience, their understanding of how to communicate and interact with people will be poor — just as poor as, for example, the understanding of human anatomy that an alien could get by reading a selection of manga and anime.

In most works, every character has, tops, 5-10 different motivations that are sufficient to explain near-completely their behaviour.*

I have no ideas about what's the average for a real human being, but I will eat both my hats if it is not in the hundreds. At least.

Real people just do not work like fictional people. They are unpredictable, and they have complicated and ever-changing agendas, and they are playing by ear and trying to understand what you are about at the same time in which you are doing that to them.

Real Life makes the most ludicrously complex Thirty Xanatos Pileup ever look like a game of Tri-Tac-Toe. If one approaches it like the latter, they will be so confused.

edited 6th Nov '11 9:10:43 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

You're their friend if you are good to them, regardless of how much of a bastard you can be to other people they don't care about

I take great issue with this part. An extrovert will care about how their friends treat others, because they are 'concerned'' with more people. Just because thye go to parties doesn't mean they like douchebags.

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

Interesting. I sort of experienced this when I was younger. I had this idea that I was supposed to be like on TV, where I had lots of friends, always slept over at their house, and went to parties all the time,where I would meet guys and get a boyfriend. I think that unrealistic expectations could be a part of why some people are loners or lonely. But not necessarily high expectations.

I believe you have the causal relationship backwards. I dont think very many people are lonely because they get their information from fiction and develop standards that are too high. I think usually people become socially isolated first, then because they have no other source of information, they tend to over-rely on fiction (and non-fiction). Let's just say they learn their social skills by reading, not by doing. They may also develop interpersonal standards that are more idealistic than realistic (not too moral, because such people are just as likely to end up relying on PUA techniques, or model themselves on an anti-hero). The point is they try to adhere to principles that are too simplistic and pure, because they dont know any better.

I speak from some personal experience. At one time, I modeled most of my interpersonal perspectives and presentational skills on Sherlock Holmes. That worked about as well as you might guess. If I was lucky, some people thought I was cute. The tough part was I didnt know I was doing it until much later. So yeah, it happens.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

The story of my life. Nothing else to be said about it

If we disagree, that much, at least, we have in common

Oh, come on. I shared, you can too...

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Yeah, I think Sketch and Marquis put it more simply and clearly than I did. Usually it's the social isolation that comes first for whatever reason, which then can possibly lead to the development of wonky standards.

I mean, I'm not that picky, personally, despite being an introvert and sometimes lonely. I tend to be willing to get along with anyone I can... well... get along with without them getting mad at me too often, and who isn't much of a jerk to others, either. (I do vastly prefer to spend time with geeks or people I otherwise share similar interests with, but it's a normal thing to prefer to want to hang out with similarly-minded people, I feel.)

edited 6th Nov '11 11:08:21 AM by Jeysie

Apparently I am adorable, but my GF is my #1 Groupie. (Avatar by Dreki-K)

I don't think one needs to be an introvert in order to internalize dubious values propagated by the mainstream media. I have plenty of very social, not terribly introspective friends who base their notions of romance on Hollywood films and Twilight-esque novels. It's basically a matter of believing in an ideal, and seeking to make your real relationships live up to it.

And better than thy stroke; why swellest thou then?

I think there's an attraction to cheesiness somewhere there. That is, not attraction to a person that would actually give you the world, but to one who would claim they'd want to, but whose history and image gives you every possible reason to doubt that, but they might, and that might bit with the almost-certain danger is the stupid but dramatic and exciting bit that makes the relationship exciting. A vampire that claims to be in love with you would be a good metaphor for this, and so it is literally used in fiction, to great effect.

On an unrelated note: compare today's vaultbasement-dwellers, hikikimori and other shut-ins with hermits. Even today, there are people in, say, India, who give up on life and live ascetically on the streets, doing nothing, eating nearly nothing, and thus able to rely on charity alone to survive. The phenomenon exists throughout the world. And though, on one hand, in Western culture those are regarded as "hobos" and "bums" and assorted types with below-zero prestige, on the other hand, in many places, in India for instance, people have some sort of respect towards them for giving up on "this crazy world" (so to speak) and will randomly sit next to them, in silence, "sharing their wisdom".

edited 6th Nov '11 1:30:41 PM by PacificState

A case of true love has the same redeeming power as a case of genuine curiosity: they are the same.

Might be because a homeless person in the Western world is usually not homeless by choice, although I understand there is a percentage of paranoid schizophrenics who prefer homelessness either to hospitalization or their normal living circumstances.

And better than thy stroke; why swellest thou then?

I have no idea if I'm typical or whatever, but I'm lonely (ish, I'm alone, but not that lonely, if that makes sense) because I just don't care about relationships like that. I have a lot of acquaintances (God, that's a hard word to spell), I mean, I'm well-liked, but I just don't have the motivation to go the extra mile and have friends. I'd rather read or something.

Anyway, that kind of goes against the OP's ideas, but again, I'm not sure if I'm typical.

Still Sheepin'

Well, I've been told I have incredibly high standards, but I also consider myself tolerant. I think everyone has room for improvement, and I try to encourage other people to improve (when I can do so without being rude, of course), but I accept that nobody's going to achieve perfection. (And for what it's worth, I do attempt to practice what I preach.)

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

I have incredibly high standards on who I'll spend my time with outside of work and other places where I have to interact with people.

I have a small group of really good friends that I enjoy talking to, a good girlfriend who I think is interesting and funny(most of the time) and relatively low moral expectations of others(blame the military for that)

It can work. Otherwise these people will have to sink or swim. Either learn and adapt from being stabbed in the back enough times or getting too lonely, or eventually shoot yourself in the face. Their choice.

I honestly blame the internet. I grew up reading quite a few books, and then when we got dial-up in the house I went nuts with the internet, absorbing all sorts of cultures, references, and experiences vicariously from others. This led me to kind of dislike many of my peers because they were all really simple motherfuckers. I still believe most people are simpletons, it's just that it isn't hard to find interesting people in my line of work.

As expected of a cop. You yourself are pretty "simple", in a Captain Carrot way. Look, it's not so much about fearing to be betrayed oneself (that's just part of growing up), but rather repulsion at the idea of associating with people who betray, manipulate, lie and hurt. If one only cares what friends do to oneself, one can make and enjoy quite a few of them.

A case of true love has the same redeeming power as a case of genuine curiosity: they are the same.

In Russian there's this proverb that goes "S kem povedyoshsya, ot togo i naberyoshsya.", which basically means that you'll become the same sort of person as the people you hang out with. Which is definitely true, people that surround you do mold you in a way. That's why it's never good idea to hang out with people who have dodgy morals, you will eventually become just like them. You should always make friends with the sorts of people that you aspire to be. And there are plenty of people like that, no reason to be lonely.

I have friends who can be a little obnoxious, but none of them really do extremely immoral things.

They can be stubborn, lazy, or petty at times, but I've probably committed more "sins" than any of my close friends.