It’s hard and maybe impossible to have a rich or full life without understanding other people, and, being at the end of my life, I’m thinking about what I missed. “Understanding other people” is one thing I missed, in part because “understanding other people” is really made up of many different skills. But I came to understand that a big part of understanding other people—one that I was bad at for a long time—is noticing them. “Noticing” sounds simple, right? And yet notice how bad a fair number of people are at it. I’m not the first to notice how important noticing is; Noam Dworman, who owns the Comedy Cellar, said:

People pick up on very slight cues in an instinctual level — kind of analogous to pheromones, I guess — that they can’t account for. They don’t know they’re doing it. It probably affects who seems like a likable person, unlikable, who you trust. There’s a million different ways these things present themselves, but it’s real. It’s very real. I would say some people are oblivious to these clues, and they probably suffer for that during their lives.

That resonates with me because I was very bad, for a very long time, at picking up those slight cues on an instinctual level—probably because I come from a family consisting of people who range from “terrible at picking them up” to “apparently unable to, like prosopagnosia for social life.” I’m not sure there’s a great way to describe briefly how to pick up slight cues on an instinctual level—if there were, it wouldn’t be hard—but I learned later than most how to do it. Recognition of a problem helps resolve it, and it took me until I was in my twenties to even recognize the problem, so I was behind in both seeing the problem and in fixing it.

No one is perfect, but as with anything human, some people are better at recognizing instinctual social cues than others. Standup comedians, if Dworman is to be believed, are or become better than most. Combined with other social defects like an inferiority complex and too little time simply being around other people, not picking up cues led me to a lot of unhappiness, and, when I was younger, I couldn’t even diagnose the source of the unhappiness, let alone fix it.

Now I see the errors clearly, and, where I am, it’s also easier to speak to mistakes; maybe it’s easier to recognize those mistakes, too, or the ego drops some of its daily defenses because there’s no long-term internal or external reputation to protect. The existential slap hits and then how much more is there to conceal? What is the point of concealing mistakes and whatever one’s truest feelings may be at this point? You want the people who mean something to know how much they mean, before the end.

In “How do we evaluate our lives, at the end? What counts, what matters?”, I speak implicitly about mistakes when I say that “What really matters, sustainably, over time? Other people, and your relationships with other people.” A lot of us, including me, forget this or never learn it. Narcissism is one way of never learning the lesson about other people. There are others, some pathological but most likely not. Most are everyday misses, from inattention or ignorance or ego or busy-ness or the thousand other things composing everyday life. I’m also not the only person to have noticed that normal conversations can (and should) be made better.

Being too open to other people is probably another form of mistake: life is about other people, but there’s got to be a balance. It’s poisonous to give away too much value, but it’s also poisonous to be too miserly and closed off. Being closed off was my fault when younger; it was like I wanted to connect but lacked the interface to do so. It took a long time to build that interface, and not having it earlier on was one of my mistakes. One of the things I found most helpful in building that interface was simple experiment and effort: try, see what works, and if something works do more of it, and if something doesn’t try less. Stated that way it seems obvious, but I didn’t have good models for those basics. There’s a recognizable flow to normal conversation that some people don’t get. They monologue or fade. They never quite get the flow. It took me a long time to get the flow and to better empathize with and model other people.

I think the average person is too closed off, or open in the wrong way, and maybe doesn’t realize it: the closed off are frequently protecting themselves at the cost of vulnerability, and all it takes it a few minutes scrolling on social media to see that having full-access to a person’s every thought and feeling also doesn’t translate into real intimacy. Social media is so often anti-social. And a significant minority of people, like some of my family, either don’t realize that social skills can be taught, learned, and practiced, or realize that but don’t do anything with it. Knowing something but doing nothing in response to it isn’t so different from not knowing it.

My family has trouble with eye contact, even though “Eye contact marks the rise and fall of shared attention in conversation.” And “Eye contact may be a key mechanism for enabling the coordination of shared and independent modes of thought, allowing conversation to both cohere and evolve.” The authors find that “eye contact signals when shared attention is high.” If you don’t make consistent eye contact with someone when you’re facing that person, you’re telling them that you’re not paying attention to them, and they shouldn’t pay attention to you. Some people never learn this and thus never think to teach their kids or younger relatives to make eye contact. And then the lack of eye contact reduces coordination and friendship. Miss one key skill and the tower of social skills comes tumbling down, or is never built in the first place. “When we’re not routinely socializing, we feel that something is amiss.” When we don’t even know how to socialize effectively, because we’ve not been taught it and not observed good examples of it, we also feel that something is amiss. And that’s what I felt for a lot of my life, without being able to understand what I was missing.

Reading is the main thing that helped me undo many early problems and pathologies. I find the people who don’t read somewhat astounding. Some of them have good, socially functional families and so maybe need less book-based modeling, but there is so much to know about the world, and reading is the widest funnel—the widest aperture—we have for taking that in. Until Neuralink is ready, we have the word. This is supposed to be an essay about mistakes, but amidst many life errors, I was also inadvertently doing some things right, and inchoately searching for answers without being able to rightly articulate the questions.

I did a lot of learning via reading (and a lot of escapism via reading), but I don’t think most people learn what they’re missing through books; they learn other ways. Dworman, for example, says that standup comedians are “smarter than most people. They’re still less easy to offend. They’re still much better company. They’re still much better conversations, much less boring small talk.” Very little small talk is fine but why not skip to the big talk? Somewhere I figured that out and have tried to adopt it, and to ask the invasive questions that do a good job of repelling the people I want to repel and attracting the people I want to attract. I want to get out of the exurbs of chat and into the dense core of cities, where the action is.

For that reason, I recently proclaimed a moratorium on banality for any visitors. Now is the time—and there won’t be much more— for me and the people I love to say the things we need to say to each other, while we still can. There isn’t time to discuss the weather, or look at that cute dog photo, or wax poetic on the lack of flavorful tomatoes at the grocery store. Bypassing the warm-up of introductory chit-chat can be uncomfortable, particularly for people not used to expressing whatever they really feel, but goodbyes are inherently uncomfortable. I’ve said to friends that this is my first time dying, so I don’t know exactly what to do. Neither do they. Some have no practice saying anything real or true. But it’s better to wade into uncertainty together, and connect meaningfully, even when it’s hard. Big talk is hard. Worthwhile things often are. To avoid it, means choosing separation over discomfort. Some people want to be on their huge lots separate from everyone else, I guess, but loneliness is a common cost to that, and we’re seeing the rise of the lonely. Maybe we should get out into the world, in all senses, more.

Comedians only like to hang out with comedians, and they die a thousand deaths when they have to go to a dinner with people who are not comedians. They really don’t like it, because they cut out all the nonsense.

That’s what dying tells us, too: cut the nonsense and find the sense that matters. It’s not everything. I’m still doing some things that might be trivial in some sense, like reading. But reading is core to who I am, as an infovore and information processor; not being able to read or think after the major May 25th surgery was debilitating and even humiliating to me. I couldn’t be the person who I am, and who I am supposed to be. The voice in my head shut off. I felt like the proverbial vegetable. The eventual return of the voice in my head made me feel more alive again, even when I couldn’t speak and could barely move. There was a way forward. To me, reading is one of the essences of it, if it’s done well. If I have interesting things to say—things comedians might like to hear—I have them to say because I read a lot.

For much of my life, I didn’t get the instinctual social cues that underpin social life, and it took me a long time to recognize that; but I wonder too, what mistakes am I making now, that I won’t recognize for another 10 – 20 years? Which is to say, ever? What am I not noticing? What am I not noticing that I’m not noticing? Alas, I won’t live long enough to know. That’s one of my burdens, for now, until the burden is unfairly and prematurely taken from me.

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