#0011 - Another Meditation On (Not) Making Friends With Losers

I'm pushing to try to 'initiate hang outs'.

As persona Farnoosh from the book A Healthy State of Panic would call it.

I mean being friendly towards people, and I am talking about doing professional networking activities.

And this is an iteration of me trying to do this.

Past ones somehow went down in flames or just fizzled out or what not.

In 10 years of blog posts it turns out I think I used the words 'friend(s)' dozens and dozens of times. Without even trying to.

It turns out I think i may have been obsessed with the topic of relationships and making friends and having and breaking friendships, without necessarily even realizing the extent of it.

And so in this current push, i'm also sometimes bombing, failing, stinking, and essentially i think i'm being seen as a loser by some of the folks who i'm inviting to hang out.

However this time in 2024 i do have a tiny bit of an edge.

I feel like I'm really starting to notice failure patterns more. and feel them more, and pay attention to the social cues more than in past years and in past decades.

so i am starting to respect these patterns as more facts and reuseable and human laws, and lean on the social cues and social pattenrs more as solid and as actionable. 

About two years ago i had a meh hangout with someone in my social circle. It was ok, cordial, i learned about them.

Then some months later i invited the same person to another hangout, and they accepted again, except this second time i noticed they were more hurried, less engaged, more preoccupied. More like they were doing me a favor, less like they really expected to learn or gain or benefit from the hang out. And so from this i felt the first meeting and the interacitons in between affected the second meeting. I doubt if this same person would accept a third meeting now about a year or two later. However they are still cordial. So interesting. HOwever this person is still cordial. It's as if I had 1.5 chances to impress them, and I pretty much failed mostly, and now they moved on and that's that. Specifically from this meeting, in hindsight I now see this was another case of people not liking to hang out with losers.

I wrote a blog draft about how people in general don't like to associate with losers.

And it is coming into my mind again.

On a Rule Breaker Investing podcast episode, a guest told a story about a rough patch where in hindsight the guest had been what the guest now calls a 'screw up' and how the guest's relative, as well as the guest's self, had to help get the guest through that rough patch.
Talking About Death: Not Comfortable but Necessary
I link this story here because, related to the idea of being a loser is the idea of being a screw up. And what that means for one's life and also related is how to get out of being a screw up like that. This story from this podcast is extremely inspiring to me because it sharew some ideas possibly how to work through a loser situation or a screw up situation.

And then it comes to mind, an interviw on a podcast in the past year in 2023-2024. The guest (a persona Tate brother i think) said something like, a vast majority of women want to date a vast minority of studly men as their boyfriends. And if a man is kind of a studly alpha successful guy then a man can choose pretty much any woman the man wants.
I think it was the persona of a Tate brother who in an interview in the past year with either persona Patrick Bet-David or persona Tucker Carlson, said this. However I would need to go check my sources to be sure.
And at the time, i thought, nah, that's a wild exaggeration, there are plenty of men and women and they mostly naturally self-select and pair up and there are more than enough women for men and men for women, and women and men neither are ultimately that picky nor vain nor discerning nor greedy nor ambitious when finding a mate.
However since I heard that thought, i honestly have seen more examples of that than i thought in our society at large. Of course in hollywood it's the norm. However in society I also see this more than i did before.
People, mainly americans i mean, seem to so often dismiss all but the top 10% or even the top 5% or 1%.
I think this is amazing. and if nothing else, it is good to be aware of this. Because it's a real phenomenon.

Morgan's note on this is that, what they are talking about is how we americans and we humans, seem to love successfull people, and how we seem to don't love losers.

in about 2016, so about 8 years ago, i had just gotten a new job and i made a big push to try and do some networking and call up a bunch of people from the past decade of my life and past years of my life. And i recall I did have phone calls with a handful of them. A past colleague, a past schoolmate, another past colleague, a third past colleague. And but i noticed all of those pretty much fizzled out. One phone call but nothing really happened from them. I didn't re-kindle any past friendships and become kindred best buddies with any of these four people as a result of these networking calls. And at the time i had kind of expected to. So it was a lesson at the time, like a silent failure. Life was in 2016 trying to tell me that people don't want to hang out with losers, they only want to hang out with people who realy spark interest and where there's mutual benefit.

Fast forward to today.

I'm thinking once again, how americans, and even humans, do so often gravitate towards the best and brightest, for example when choosing friends and mates and colleagues and in most any situation where you have to interact closely with someone.

And so, Life, you got my attention. I'm now tuning in to patterns that involve social cues and social hierarchy and social judgy-ness. Because I don't want to be washed over without knowing it anymore.
If someone dismisses me silently for some reason or other that involves them thinking that I'm a loser or screw-up in some way or another, then I want to discern that. And then in this knowledge I can decide wheter it's worth it to just move on myself (meaning i too go ahead and dismiss the situation silently, including dismissing the person in the context of that situation), or whether it is worth it to step up my game and redouble and prove to that person that I am not a loser in that situation.

Where I came from, on some levels, it felt llike we just made friends with whoever would be friends with us, and our friends did the same. However in this new paradigm, people try to be friends with specific people, convince certain people to be friends with them. Is the old paradigm stuck in 1st-grade-and earlier paradigm? Is the new paradigm that we should strive to compete with the top 10% of performers?

In other words, has a big part of me just been stuck in 5th grade, for decades, not growing very much? Seems like the case.

Or, and or, maybe what to strive for is the simplicity on the far side of complexity. 
In other words we want to be friends with whoever is near us. 
However if they are losers, then we do find other friends who aren't losers.
However at the same time we still do also befriend those nearby losers and be friendly to them and maybe even coach them up too, if they want to. 



In conclusion, these were more meditations on (not) making friends with losers.










stay tuned for possible more upcoming lemonmama.com blog posts on similar topics with names like these:
...slow vs loser is moot.txt
...review school of rock.txt
...2024 reuse social patterns.txt



Also see related:
#0007 - 2024 Is A Great Year To Reuse Patterns Especially In Areas Of Social Emotional Professional Personal Relationships 2024年要重新使用人與人之間關系的式樣










2024-07-24 0736 By author Morgan Jassen on lemonmama.com/lemonmama