Social Anxiety, Attention Seeking, & Awareness
As the title implies, I have social anxiety; fairly severe. I'm in special education at school partially due to that (and numerous other things).
However, naturally, I feel the need to socialize and speak to others. According to centuries of research and personal anecdotes, humans are naturally social creatures (most of the time - various disorders and experience can lead to the opposite).
I like talking to people in real life despite it being difficult and stressful. From analyzing my own behavior, I've noticed I occasionally exhibit unhealthy/manipulative attention seeking behaviors due to my need for socialization and my lack of it.
Oftentimes, when I do talk, I'm ignored, especially in large groups. This also makes it harder to speak up, because a) I dislike repeating myself, and b) I dislike talking loud.
I get told I mumble and whisper a lot, which makes it difficult for others to hear me. Even then, I believe that, nowadays, people's social awareness is declining. It feels like if you're not the loudest person in the room, you're invisible.
Don't get me wrong - I like being invisible at times. It's nice to stay in my own bubble without others paying attention to me. (It's also helpful to avoid schoolwork and responsibility; another unhealthy behavior of mine I've noticed.)
I don't mean to be cocky or overly self-assured, but I do feel like I have things of value to add to conversations and debates. It feels like most people talk about the same things circling around social media or their cliques rather than experiencing anything real. Now, I'm chronically online and I rarely experience anything "real", but I do expose myself to books, art, writing, etc., which all seem to be neglected nowadays. (I might make a post about the United States' literary crisis in the future.)
It's frustrating to hear others be idiots. (In my algebra class, the teacher asked what one plus negative one was. Some answers I heard included one, two, negative one, so on and so forth.) I don't fully blame it on the people, but I do think that they should be more aware. Of course, changing social scenes and the rise of online education and AI can affect development. The long-term effects aren't fully known yet, but I do think that future generations (and, perhaps even mine) will become less aware of the real things around them, and more.
I got very off track with this post, but I think it's still something worth putting out there.