legibility

in the people sense

one of my coworkers recently told me “i can’t tell if you’re having a good time here, because i could imagine you loving or hating this job and still maintaining the exact same energy every day”. several of my friends have similarly mentioned that i’m impossible to read, or difficult to predict, or various other complaints related to being hard to interpret

i’ve never actively tried to be illegible, but it’s also true that i’ve never prioritized legibility. many of my influences as a teenager didn’t seem to think it was important to be easily understood by others. the most extreme example of this is probably harry potter and the methods of rationality, where every main character behaves in really strange ways and deliberately tries to confuse the people around them because they’re all secretly pushing complex schemes and trying to outsmart each other. it turns out this type of character writing is great for setting up engaging fanfiction plotlines and communicating rationalist concepts but kind of terrible as a model for how to be a functional human being who has to interact with other people

recently i was reflecting on my friendships and how, for most of my life (maybe until the past ~year?), my friends have been awful at providing the kind of support and help i wanted from them. i don’t think this is because they were bad friends; i think it’s because i was very opaque about what i needed and never really communicated how i was feeling (probably related to growing up in an environment where all my friends were people i discussed math with over the internet)

there are a lot of obvious benefits to being more legible. it’s similar in spirit to how having an active internet presence makes it easier to be discovered by new friends, and how open-sourcing code allows you to get contributions from other people. of course each of these things also leaves you open to exploitation, but trusting strangers hasn’t been an issue for me so far

a couple years ago i read a bunch of books and blog posts about negotiation, conflict resolution, relationship breakdowns, etc. my main takeaway at the time was that you can be very intentional in how you communicate to others, and doing so will allow other people to better understand you and your perspectives. since then i think i’ve gotten better at that kind of intentional communication, but it’s also clear that i haven’t been doing it in the right ways. what i realize now but didn’t know then is that being intentional all the time is exhausting, that figuring out exactly what to say to everyone everywhere is impractical no matter how smart you are or how hard you try, that what i really need isn’t to think harder about how to interact with people but processes that will allow me to not have to do that kind of thinking in the first place. my boss says if i want to become more legible i should probably just practice a bunch of speaking patterns until they become second nature, and i think i agree

lately i’ve been confused about a great number of things, and i haven’t been able to make much progress on them. a big part of that lack of progress has been because i’ve had to figure everything out on my own, and i think becoming more legible will help with that