Tuesday 8 March 2016

Social interactions

My job is a bizarre mix of independent solo working within a very social-interaction based environment. This can be really quite draining sometimes and days by the time I make it home I'm so mentally drained its all I can do to function long enough to make/eat dinner.

I've had to develop a few strategies for coping with my work environment, one of the strongest ones in my armoury being my ability to fake interest in a topic being discussed around me.

I try not to utilise this too often as I don't like presenting a fake front to anyone really, but there are times I genuinely don't care about someone's son's girlfriend or the latest soap plot but I recognise that its not a situation I can politely escape from any time soon!

Over the years I've asked trusted family members and friends to let me know of the 'tells' I display when I'm starting to grow bored or irritated so I can try to keep them under wraps when need be - of course this doesn't always work and there have been many times I've utterly failed at keeping my internal thoughts from shining through my body language, still, I like to think the rates are improving!

The main thing I've found is that I have started to recognise when other 'normal' people are doing this around me as well, I wonder just how much of human interaction is made up of faked interest to conform to what we believe social expectations are?

1 comment:

  1. This is really interesting as I think that most social interactions are basically quite fake on the surface level. However the emotions underpinning these are not fake and so that's why we all continue this charade. Because it's not really a charade. For me at least..

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