Life becomes much happier when you realize that there's no reason for 2% of people to be your people and, instead of expecting life to be a matter of searching for those few who are special and wonderful enough to be your 2% unicorn, you work consciously to actually connect with other people and not just view them as energy bars you can consume if you want. In other words, the challenge to overcome isn't the 2%, it's the 98%. You're not doomed to be a 98% person. Hell, most of these 2% people for people like OP's article are the 2% for a lot of folks. You are just clicking with charismatic people generally like you.
Remember that Narcissus wasn't falling in love with himself. He fell in love with the appearance of himself, with the extension of himself. McLuhan wrote quite a bit about how we love to see ourselves reflected outside of ourself. Be careful that your condition for a valuable acquaintance isn't just a desire to use others as a pleasing reflection of yourself (this applies to relationships as well as these "2% people")
This is from a few years back, but etched in my memory. I am an introvert in social situations. I can present to a room, sorta, and I can manage public speech with some prep, but I just listen when there is a party going on. No talk, no intervention on jokes, just listen. My brain just works too slow to butt in to people's conversation, and over time you get the tag of introvert or whatever. I can understand conversation well, but I need an extra second to respond and that does not fit into most conversations.
But then a few years back, we had a sendoff for a colleague, a bunch of us got together, and right across from me, or adjacent, was another colleague who was sci fi fan. We had discussed some series before in office, and this was an opportunity to continue. Bit by bit our conversation went deep, and at one point of time I recall a pointed comment from the host (the person who organized the sendoff), hey what happened to kshacker :) because I think we were talking loud and non-stop. And I realized that too, it was an unusual setup.
Since then, I left the team, that dude left the company, so I havent seen him for a few years, this was definitely pre-covid, but this discussion somehow made me think of a 2% moment, if not a 2%er.
kshacker, I am just a stranger on HN, but if you haven't already... hit him up for me would you?
Why for me? I think you two having another conversation would make the world a more wonderful place as I suspect you 2 will be enjoying each other's conversation. The thought of that makes me happy.
> This is from a few years back, but etched in my memory. I am an introvert in social situations. I can present to a room, sorta, and I can manage public speech with some prep, but I just listen when there is a party going on. No talk, no intervention on jokes, just listen. My brain just works too slow to butt in to people's conversation, and over time you get the tag of introvert or whatever. I can understand conversation well, but I need an extra second to respond and that does not fit into most conversations.
I have this too. I've trained myself to lower my filter. The unfortunate thing is that when I'm in conversations, I'm a lot dumber than I normally in. The fortunate thing is: I talk to a lot more people now.
> The unfortunate thing is that when I'm in conversations, I'm a lot dumber than I normally in.
That's OK. Everyone takes time finding their groove. There used to be days where I did not engage in any conversation until the afternoon, and so my speech always felt rusty. Now I'm at a point in my life where I'm having a chat at 6am, and that sort of thing continues throughout the day. But boy oh boy am I not very interesting to talk to for that first hour.
Anyways, I think most extroverts don't really care that someone appears a little jagged in conversation. They simply benefit from having a conversation.
I'm an introvert in that I enjoy my own company a lot, and I get exhausted by social events. I'm also on the spectrum somewhere, as I find it hard to read social queues and such, which often makes me feel really awkward.
My sister has a million friends and used to host parties all the time, and invited me often. One day she said "people always love it when you come", and I was a bit surprised by that. I asked how so, and she said "you're so good at making people feel seen".
I didn't do it consciously I think, but I realized I would find people who were quiet and start talking to them. If I got the vibe they wanted to be left alone then I'd move on, but most of the time that was not the case. I'd ask about what they studied or worked with, or hobbies, as I do like to discover new things.
She since got kids so not so many parties anymore, but I got reminded of this a couple of years ago when I was at a wedding for a family member.
We're in Norway and another family member had gotten a US girlfriend who was there. As the evening wore on I went over and started talking. Her work was interesting and in contrast to what I knew from Norway, she lived in Nevada and I'd been to Las Vegas once so we talked about the contrast of that city vs the rest and so on. A couple of hours flew past and we were the last to go.
As we were about to leave she gave me a big hug and almost teary eyed said "thank you, you have no idea how good it was to just talk".
Again I was surprised, but she told me that she'd been with the groom's family for a week and nobody had really just talked with her besides her boyfriend.
So yeah, introvert, socially awkward me at it again it seemed.
Don’t drain energy from the people you interact with. Gas them up. Be an active listener. Give more than you take. Contribute meaningfully to a strong relationship. Etc…many ways to possibly interpret this
If you’re trying to match other people instead of being yourself, you’re a problem for many people. It’s why a significant portion of the population hates sales people.
I definitely realized this about myself a long time ago, but the struggle really is intentionally finding new 2%ers. It's not the friendliest attitude to enter into new social spaces with the expectation and intent of filtering out 98% of the people in them. Especially upsetting is when there is misalignment: one person exited to find one of their 2% but unreciprocated. I've been on both sides and neither is pleasant. It's not something that can really be forced, has to happen somewhat organically, but you do have to be intentional if you wish to find new friends.
I was taught a similar method of analyzing relationships by observing the direction in which energy flowed. A positive-positive person is someone with whom you invest energy, but you almost always get _more_ energy back from them. A positive-negative person is someone you invest energy in and will often reciprocate to the bare minimum. A negative-negative person is where the person just constantly sucks energy from you and never gives any back.
You'll have all three in your life, but you really gotta make sure you have enough positive-positive people to counter-balance the others.
You haven't mentioned the negative-positive person who puts effort into the relationship with you but you suck them dry.
In truth, it's not quite so straight forward, and in the real world people occupy different roles with different people at different times. Maybe your role with some people is always to build them up, but you need to rely on others to get through things yourself. At any given time, most relationships are pretty one way, but over time things might balance out - maybe your role is always to provide support for someone, but in turn there's someone in your life who does the same for you and overall it balances out in your life.
The cynical position is to cut out the relationships you see as draining in your life, and while you absolutely should do that if you don't have the strength to do that and maintain your own wellbeing, even if you aren't directly benefitting from a seemingly one-way relationship, often other people will see how you treat them and want to spend more time with you, even if that relationship is primarily energy flowing to you.
> You haven't mentioned the negative-positive person who puts effort into the relationship with you but you suck them dry.
The concept only works when you look at it from one side. If you swap the perspective to the other person, you're the negative-negative person in your example.
> In truth, it's not quite so straight forward, and in the real world people occupy different roles with different people at different times. Maybe your role with some people is always to build them up, but you need to rely on others to get through things yourself. At any given time, most relationships are pretty one way, but over time things might balance out - maybe your role is always to provide support for someone, but in turn there's someone in your life who does the same for you and overall it balances out in your life.
Yes, like most conceptual frameworks, it has limits and shouldn't be taken literally. However, the framework isn't intended to be used for identifying negative-negative relationships and terminating all of them. It's more for gaining a holistic understanding of how energy is being spent/gained in your relationships so you can better understand why you may be feeling burnt out.
> The cynical position is to cut out the relationships you see as draining in your life, and while you absolutely should do that if you don't have the strength to do that and maintain your own wellbeing, even if you aren't directly benefitting from a seemingly one-way relationship, often other people will see how you treat them and want to spend more time with you, even if that relationship is primarily energy flowing to you.
I wouldn't classify the negative-negative people as a "bad relationship." In relationships we often choose to spend energy in a way that reflects our own beliefs/worldview. For example, I have several negative-negative relationships in my community work where I know for a fact people are "abusing" my energy. However, I find it a worthy cause to put energy into, and I have enough positive relationships to support it.
1. You decide (or usually you're told) that you're "introverted" like it's some kind of fundamental, inherent characteristic because you weren't keen on a social obligation of some kind;
2. This label doesn't seem to fit because there are certain people you like but at the same time, just going to work drains you such that you need the entire time until the next day just to recover. So you come up with or are introduced to the concept of a "social battery";
3. Even the social battery model eventually becomes insufficient and it's then you land on introversion of being somewhere on the autism spectrum and what you view as a social battery is really just "masking".
So the 2% people here are, more likely than not, just the people you don't need to mask with.
Let me give you an example: you want to eat ice cream but, for whatever reason, you want to use a tiny spoon. Even a teaspoon seems wrong. If you're with someone you'll get one of two reactions: they'll help you find a suitable spoon without question or they'll ask you why you need a tiny spoon, regardless of whether or not they help you.
This problem with the latter is it's exhausting. You don't want to questioned for every little decision you make. You may know the answer or you may not. Either way, you don't want to have to defend that decision.
So instead you suppress your "idiosynchracies" because you've mentally played out how that conversation goes and you've probably ruminated on the conversation and, from experience, you know you won't feel great. You may even feel under attack. You will try and avoid that feeling, regardless of how you feel about the person.
This is masking. And it's exhausting. The person may not realize they're doing that to you. You may not realize that. You might just feel that something is wrong or even that you're just on alert more than you want to be.
There's a concept here called "radical acceptance" where someone will just accept these quirks without question. These are your 2% people.
i really like ur take here on introversion especially radical acceptance—never heard of that before. thinking about it, i think there's some nuance to it. i think radical acceptance makes a ton of sense when someone’s preference or behavior is rooted in insecurity or a fundamental fear of rejection since pressing too much can make them feel exposed or judged where otherwise they should be validated. but i think in cases where it's just a neutral preference (like picking a flavor of ice cream), i would guess most people actually enjoy talking about the "why" behind their choices because honestly people love talking about themselves and to see other people interested in them. the important thing here and probably difficult to get down is understanding when someone wants connection and engagement vs. when they just need to feel accepted without explanation.
at the end of the day, i think what makes someone a 2%er for them is whether that person knows when to accept without judgement and when to engage with curiosity.
> after 5 days in miami, let me tell ya — its 2%er pickings are slim.
If you're only accepting 1 in 50 people into your circle and you're a self-described introvert, how can you possibly judge how dense your "2%ers" are after only 5 days in a city? At that rate you'd have to judge 10 people a day for all 5 days to even expect better than even odds of finding a person you sort into the accepted bucket. Even if you met 100 people—20 per day—your odds are still only 86% of finding one 2%er. And if you're meeting that many new people per day while in Miami, I question whether you actually gave any one of them enough time to decide if they're a fit.
And I think this points to a larger problem with this whole concept: my "2%ers" are, as a rule, people I've already spent a lot of time with, and the causality there seems to go both ways. The more time I spend with someone the better I know them and generally the less energy it costs to be with them. On the flip side, I've never met someone who I feel energized being with after just one meeting.
If you go through life trying to swipe left and right on people with only brief interactions, you're going to find many fewer opportunities to click with people than if you go into each interaction actually wanting to make this one work.
I wonder if people would be more introverted/extroverted depending on the fit with the people they are around.
like if you spent all day with people you had a LOT in common, would an introvert relax and be "more extroverted". Not only subject matter, but maybe social compatibility, like polite conversation style?
I wonder if there could be communities for introverts that would make them more relaxed.
I'm introverted/extroverted purely based on the current social group's dynamic. I've found that I'll quickly take the extroverted role to keep a group doing things together if nobody else is and I like the group. However, when that role is already filled, or I'm not that keen on keeping the group going, I step back.
My understanding, and this holds true for me, is that the introvert/extrovert concept is a “how do you charge your batteries” kind of thing. Extroverts do that around people, introverts do that not-around-people.
I’m not sure sticking a bunch of like-minded introverts in a room would help. In fact, for me, I know it doesn’t.
> for one, your 2%ers will look different from mine.
That’s a kind and equitable thought, but I daresay there’s significant overlap between each person’s 2%ers. Some people are just really pleasant to be around—to almost everyone. Others, not so much.
A variation of this idea. We have an introvert battery that is drained with people. We also have a human connection battery that needs to be charged. A poor match will drain our introvert battery quickly, and does a poor job of charging our human connection battery. A "2%er" can charge our human connection battery and will only drain our introvert battery at a very slow rate.
I fully agree with the author and do my best to live life this way. He wrote it up more eloquently than I did.
When I was studying: a few people loved me, a larger group hated me and an even larger group felt indifferent. Why focus on the indifferent group and the group that hates you?
This whole introvert/extrovert thing as understood here is not grounded in science.
First of all, everyone gets drained from social interaction. That's how our species behaves.
Second, the real definition of introvertism and extravertism relates to one's focus - on internal thoughts or the outside world respectively.
Lastly, most of the population is neither in any significant capacity.
Interestingly, an actual extravert is drained comparatively more from social interactions, as to the introvert it doesn't even occur to care about drama.
The "2%ers" are hard to come by. However, it's not only about finding them, their lifestyles and friends also have to be compatible with you. You find a person you really get along with, you both remain close friends for years, then suddenly that person enters a relationship with someone you don't get along with. Or they start doing drugs or get addicted to stuff you are not interested in.
Now it's time to move on because your lives are incompatible despite being a person you used to enjoy hanging out with.
Remember that Narcissus wasn't falling in love with himself. He fell in love with the appearance of himself, with the extension of himself. McLuhan wrote quite a bit about how we love to see ourselves reflected outside of ourself. Be careful that your condition for a valuable acquaintance isn't just a desire to use others as a pleasing reflection of yourself (this applies to relationships as well as these "2% people")
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