/lit/ - Literature

>>14209043
You sound like me at 18. Slightly aloof, maybe autistic, definitely apathetic and unmotivated.

As I got older and came to understand new things about myself and came into new responsibilities I found myself wanting to ask advice and compare experiences more and more. Your peers are you best source of information. We are all figuring life out as it goes. We are all riding the crest of the present together. Older generations cannot tell us how to cope with the modern world. And it becomes interesting to get to know a person and then try and read them backward through their formative experiences, why they are the way they are as opposed to you, and what this can tell you about different points of view.

I still have pretty bad social skills, but not for a lack of things to say. If I had the power I would spend an hour interrogating every new person I met, but though people love to talk about themselves direct questioning can come off rude or even threatening.

Then of course there's also that I'm gathering material when I talk to people now. I'm writing profiles of the people I meet and saving them in a back pocket for characters down the road.