Creating Tension for the Mischievous

Conflict in life is inevitable. Most people interested in the subject spend their energy on resolution. The mischievous spend theirs somewhere else: the controlled creation of conflict. It's a skill every rascal has mastered — Ferris Bueller, Oscar Wilde, the class clown who is happy to fuck around and find out.

Tension into relief

There may be no better example of that alchemy — turning a moment of conflict into a moment of relief — than Tommy (Joe Pesci) and Henry (Ray Liotta) in Goodfellas:

"You're really funny…really funny." — Henry
"What do you mean, I'm funny?" — Tommy
"You know that story — it's funny. You're a funny guy." — Henry
"Funny how? What's funny about it?... Funny like I'm a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? How am I funny? How the fuck am I funny? Tell me what's funny." — Tommy

One question from Pesci, loaded with implication, and the whole dynamic between them snaps into focus. It knocks Henry out of being a passive observer and puts him dead center in the ring.

As strange as it sounds, we all want that feeling — not the tension itself, but the release that follows it. Pleasure and pain share overlapping brain regions; as Nature Magazine puts it, there's "a common neurobiology for pain and pleasure." You can't get the thrill without a little danger, and you never laugh harder than when laughing was the last thing you anticipated.

Pulling this off takes real study. You need to read the social situation and the environment it's taking place in, understand the general archetype of the person you're dealing with while leaving room for exceptions. Then there's you — your tone, your gaze and your read on how the other person is perceiving you in real time. Get all of it right, and you've handed someone a moment unlike the one before and they'll thank you for it.

What to talk about when you don’t know what to talk about

“Most conversations are monologues in the presence of witnesses” ”

— Mark Twain

Set up: Something to say

If the purpose of any social gathering is to be social, then one of the almost inevitable hurdles we come across is what to be social about? As in, I may not know these people, I don’t know what they are interested in and I have no reason to think that divulging my interests isn’t going to land flat.

That is a rational thought. For some people, the problem isn’t listening to others, it’s feeling comfortable when its their turn to share.  Once the baton is passed to you, if you are shy or believe that your life isn’t interesting, you may find it more appealing to disappear into the bushes like Peter Griffin.

This feeling is likely misguided and it just takes a few conversations with yourself to understand what aspects of your genuine interests would resonate with others.

This process should not turn into a masquerading of interests for the sake of someone else. The purpose of this is to create a mutually enjoyable conversation, which by definition means that you deserve to enjoy it as well. This exercise is simply your attempt to give someone some scaffolding so that they can see your point of view.

A Dissection of Your Interests

If I were to tell someone that my favorite anime was Dr. Stone, if they didn’t know of the show and weren’t anime fans, the initial image they may have in their head is of a man child watching cartoons. Is that wrong of them? Not necessarily, we all have our blindspots and may try to fill them in with the most commonly heard association we have. In these scenarios, instead of the conversation whittling down, we have the opportunity to share something unexpected that can bridge the gap.

Now imagine that I adjust my answer and say that there’s an anime I’m enjoying, its an exploration of how vital the understanding of chemistry and physics is to our survival as a species. Or I could say, I’m watching an anime that explores what would happen if we experienced our own burning of the library of Alexandria, would we be able to rebuild society before the rivaling factions destroyed each other? Both of these are true of the show and each of them gives someones something different to engage with you on.

The mistake in the original response was to share an interest purely on the bases of the default category that comes to mind. Saying you enjoy anime would be the equivalent of someone saying they like books. Both may be true statements but identifying with books in general is too wide a gamut, it doesn’t tell me that you like romance novels or science fiction or historical books, even then, you’d still just be at the tip of the iceberg.

The Exercise

To get comfortable sharing your interests, a question you can ask yourself is, what’s the story of how this interest began? The first answer might be, I’m not sure, because it’s hard to identify the start of something that you didn’t have any reason to catalogue. But a way to find something close to the truth is to think of moments of curiosity you felt with the interest. If we stick with the anime example, the genesis may have been what makes anime such a compelling medium for certain stories? Typically, my friends who like anime are fanatical about it, I don’t know if I can think of someone who actively watches it and is luke warm about it  and that sparked my curiosity.

Ten thousand things

To know one thing is to know ten thousand things - Miyamoto Musashi

The samurai Miyamoto Musashi believed in the concept that deep knowledge in one area will lead you to know many more things.

Your passions have a similar tendency. In a way, they have the ability to move our center of mass in the ven diagram of possible interests, so when you think about your interests and how you can share them with someone, think of what other doors it opened for you. Anime, can turn into an interest in the art of Takashi Murakami, which turns into an interest in ceramics (like Murakami himself has). With that, now you are actually contemplating pottery classes and since that’s a hobby you do with your hands, you are now also considering getting into woodworking.

Interests enter our lives in unexpected ways and they open doors we didn’t expect to ever walk through. Sharing both sides is great for an engaging conversation.