The solution isn’t trying harder to be liked. It’s expanding your comfort with being disliked.
Social anxiety is an optimal response when there is a scarcity of other people to interact with. If you are meeting new 100 people every day, it doesn’t matter if 99 people dislike you, so long as you get another 100 new people tomorrow; because as long as you keep playing you will continue to gather people who like you.
If your total count of people to interact with is very small, then it suddenly becomes incredibly important to be not disliked, because you will quickly exhaust all your social prospects and be disliked by everyone.
Also in that kind of an environment, it’s not just that you run out of people who might like you. It’s also that the effect of individual people’s opinion on what everyone else thinks about you gets pronounced. E.g. if there is a clique of people who you could potentially befriend, any single one of them disliking may cause that person to badmouth you to everyone else in the clique.
So if you only have, say, 20 people you could interact with, it’s not even that you only have 20 chances to get someone to like you. At worst, if catch the ire of someone sufficiently influential, you might only get one chance.
No wonder a lot of people experience the most social anxiety when they’re teenagers. That can very well be the locally optimal strategy for many kids in e.g. your stereotypical high school.
Social anxiety is an optimal response when there is a scarcity of other people to interact with. If you are meeting new 100 people every day, it doesn’t matter if 99 people dislike you, so long as you get another 100 new people tomorrow; because as long as you keep playing you will continue to gather people who like you.
If your total count of people to interact with is very small, then it suddenly becomes incredibly important to be not disliked, because you will quickly exhaust all your social prospects and be disliked by everyone.
Great point!
Also in that kind of an environment, it’s not just that you run out of people who might like you. It’s also that the effect of individual people’s opinion on what everyone else thinks about you gets pronounced. E.g. if there is a clique of people who you could potentially befriend, any single one of them disliking may cause that person to badmouth you to everyone else in the clique.
So if you only have, say, 20 people you could interact with, it’s not even that you only have 20 chances to get someone to like you. At worst, if catch the ire of someone sufficiently influential, you might only get one chance.
No wonder a lot of people experience the most social anxiety when they’re teenagers. That can very well be the locally optimal strategy for many kids in e.g. your stereotypical high school.
This is assuming you need to interact closely with anyone (which isn’t always the case), but sure.
I spent many years of my life not having friends because I didn’t like anyone around me that much, and had no social anxiety