Faisal's Notebook

Recent Notes

Keeping it Professional

4 min read

Note: Despite the irony of this post revolving around my decision to be impersonal while also being personal at the same time, I get the feeling that I’ll be asked about the oddities of my social decisions and being unable respond and articulate it as well as this post will.

Too Long Didn't Read

  • I feel that I am the most productive when I am impersonal, professional, and task-focused.
  • Social efforts and friendliness have increased my insecurity and paranoia, especially through social media.
  • Improving social skills and making friends made me realize that I may just be not designed for friendships and people.
  • Overthinking social situations leads to stress, compulsive habits, and decreased productivity.
  • Separating personal life from work and minimizing social engagement supports my mental health and performance.

After reflecting for a while now, I think I am at my best when I am very impersonal and work-oriented. I think being somewhat friendly has made me overly worried and insecure about my self-worth and image, despite convincing myself that there are countermeasures and practices I could apply to minimize it. Social media in general is just not good for someone like me who is overly self-conscious and paranoid about people hating me.1 Initially, I thought that I needed to learn to be more empathetic, casual, funny, etc. But now I realize that I am better at being provided instructions and just working on tasks alone (except when asking for feedback). I think that confidence, emotional intelligence, and more advanced social skills are just not suited for everyone, and forcing it will result in more harm than good.

I started to seriously devote myself to improving my conversational and social skills at the start of senior high and although I have made my first close and best friends in a long time, I think I was happier being alone most of the time. Currently, I have sufficient social skills to at least work properly with others; anything beyond that is excessive and harmful. I’m generally very paranoid about wronging others and them viewing me poorly as a result of that. Whenever I misinterpret a social situation, I become overly fixated about it for a long period of time. This leads to me making poor and compulsive decisions, avoiding and mismanaging my duties, and spending time doing nothing the entire day. I also constantly space out during important moments because I have a difficult time trying to mitigate and control my intrusive thoughts. At worst, I have a very difficult time not binge eating unhealthy foods, procrastinating, repeating mindless actions, and staying awake for no reason. Avoiding sleep also usually worsens how clear I can think, how reasonable I can be, and also lead to me getting a migraine and being unable to do anything productive for a day or two. Oftentimes, I get stuck with thinking if I deserve to be here, if I can still keep this up for 40-50 years, and if I’ll fail and underperform again because I struggle to regulate my emotions.

Even though I think I can reason my way out of this, I can’t. I’ve looked into multiple ways to control it, and after trying a lot of them, I think the best way for me to be productive is to return to mostly being polite, professional, and impersonal. I’m fundamentally very egoistical, insecure, and irrational. So to maximize my strengths, I should strongly separate my personal life from my school/work related stuff. In addition, I think I’m better off being alone most of the time.

Footnotes

  1. Nonetheless, I don’t think this when I am anonymous online because it minimizes the accountability aspect and my identity isn’t really at risk. ↩

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