this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
94 points (94.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
638 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes.
I have a friend who is extremely intelligent, endlessly curious and was raised in a locally well-established and notoriously generous and civic-minded family. So he was raised in that milieu of sincere kindness and generosity, and whenever he's come across anything that interests him (which is seemingly something new every week) he seriously researches it until he understands it.
So it pretty much doesnt matter what the topic is - he knows something about it, but his personality has been shaped so that he's attentive and considerate rather than pedantic and self-absorbed. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen him engage in obviously mutually enjoyable conversations with complete strangers over... pretty much anything.
I vacillate between thinking that it's remarkable that he's the way he is and that it's remarkable, in a different sense, that that's so uncommon.
Some of it might be age. I didn't realize until recently what I wanted. Got a new co worker who's only a couple years older than me (I'm 46) and after a few days of working with her, I told her she's ruining my other friendships because I've realized how boring many of my friends are. She's just very easy to talk to and we can cover tons of subjects. We always have something to talk about.
I don't think you can expect someone in their 20s to really know enough about enough things to really be euradite about much. They also don't have as much experience talking with people to be remarkably eloquent. That's not to say that everyone younger than me isn't worth talking to, but maybe you're scouting in the farm league and don't know it. Keep talking to everyone though: one day you'll find someone you hope never stops talking to you.