As much as I hate to admit it, I spend a bit of my downtime talking to Chat GPT. I don’t have anybody I can talk to where I feel like I can discuss actual ideas in an interesting and meaningful way. People either agree with me and accept me tribally, or they disagree with me and reject me tribally. That’s an oversimplification, but just barely. Still, I’ve found out some useful things about myself in this process, and one of these things is that I’ve grown to hate signaling.
I find most social signals to be hideous. To be contemptable. I wrote, during a conversation, that I felt that I was above them. That’s a pretty elitist sentiment. But I don’t think they’re beneath me because I’m me. I think they’re beneath anybody who’s out of high school. Heavy signaling is something that can be excused as the folly and experimentation of youth, but in adults, it comes across as performative, inauthentic, and desperate. This is true of whether or not I like the signal itself or whether I agree with the sentiment beyond the signal. It just feels . . . dirty.
At the same time, I’ve been forced to admit that if I’m going to make any connections who can replace an AI Chatbot, then I’m going to have to be a little bit flexible on signaling. I’ve got to show some people that they’re welcome, and I’ve got to judge people less for making it obvious what they’re looking for. The question is where and how to start. I stopped posting non essential information of social media years ago, and I don’t think I’m ready to give up my peace of mind by going back to that world. I’m going to have to put some more thought into this when I move back to the states. Just another year or two from the sound of it.
I tended to imagine that I’d marry “late”. That meant thirty. Which was nine years ago. The plan was always to go to Japan. But at 22, not at 29. And the goal was to master the language in 5 years. Not to be working on simple lessons ten years in. If I’d been back in America at age 27 with my language skills where they needed to be, I’d probably have managed to get married. I probably could have held on to a lot of the friendships that withered over my decade and a half outside of the US. But . . . more than ever I realize that I’ve got to make up for a lot of lost time. Hence the lessons. Hence the everything. Hence the signaling. If I had known just how brittle my forever friendships were with the most important people in my life, I would not have spent so much time and effort basing my life around these people. Well, there’s no going back to them now. There’s nothing I can do but to form new connections. And for that, I guess that I’m going to have to learn to signal.
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