There’s a common failure mode for general likeableness I see in people around me (and I’ve surely also spent my fair share in): Talking to them feels, to a surprising amount, monothematic.

And that’s a bit surprising.

I think they know that being monothematic has high being-boring or being-annoying scores when they see it in other people. And they are also totally capable of noticing that in other people (I think? At least they seem to be socially competent enough so they would be, at least most of the time?).

And it’s not that that hasn’t ever happened to me either. I think I’ve pretty regularly noticed that over various stages of my life. Then I did, in fact, become a bit monothematic (at least towards some of the people).

So, how does this happen?

You’re being interested in what others have to say (A), because other people are super interesting. And you want to be interesting yourself at the same time (B), or just have an intrinsic desire to go after things you find interesting. And then they are obviously more interesting if other people can’t tell you about them and you can’t, in a way, just learn about them by talking to other people). ¹1 Actually, that seems highly related to something I would call Balance talking to other people to learning something yourself to doing

So you more or less naturally start out interested, and wanting to be interesting to other people.

For being interesting yourself, you need something you’re interested in and which you can tell other people about, so you search and you find something you’re interested in.

Branch: 1) This new thing is actually very interesting, so you learn more and more about it. 2) It’s not: then repeat.

This makes you learn more about a thing, and tendentially lose interest in conversations with others that are not about the thing.

Knowing a lot about a thing (compared to others, lol) makes you the person for the thing. ²2 Over various points in my school life, this has been Maths, History, general knowledge, politics, rooting my Android phone, programming, ‘being up to date with the news’, and I’m surely forgetting some. This feels generally nice, but it also makes you—if you dare choose the wrong™ subject to be interested in—a magnet of ridicule from others. Especially if you’re pretty excited about a topic, and talk too much about it, to the point at which you kind of stop being interested and the other kids right now would like to be very cool™.

So you definitely talked too much about the topic at some point, and you were annoying for some time. But since you and your conversation partners all have so much shared context³3 You’re in school, remember?, you never get out of practice of noticing that fast⁴4 And if you ever do, you’re subject to enough ridicule that you will. At some point.. So you notice, and a bit after, you revert back to a more normal topic both of you share (so, (A)), or even just to talking about something the other person is interested in (B). (which in the end mostly brings you back to 1, and the cycle repeats itself.)

And that works quite well for most of the time. But it’s not an equlibrium that persists for all people. This is because that equilibrium is fragile, and you can leave it quite easily.

So, it actually doesn’t stop there. At some point, you find not only one person you can talk to about these topics, but a group. And they can’t stop talking about the thing!

So, you overcome the initial feeling of weirded-out-ness that people really enjoy talking about one thing so much—if it ever was there. And then, you obviously start liking them, and you hang out with them more, and you’re all talking about this more, and it feels amazing.

You hang out with them that you take on a tiny bit of their social norms (those might be whatever), but there is one in particular you’re going to take on: What ‘normally’ get’s talked about.

And then, at some point, you talk to someone else from school again, and you just start talking about the thing. And you’re not getting the ‘normal’ reaction to it.

Surely this must mean that the person just hasn’t understood your point?

So you talk about it some more.

At which point you either remember that for having an interesting conversation, both of the parties need to be interested in the conversation, and you revert back to 4., either finding a common topic, or listening to the other person about their topics.o

Or you don’t. You start thinking that the other person is actually not even that interesting, and you (sub-)consciously decide to hang out with them less.

At the point you start studying, something crazy happens: All of a sudden, all of the single people in the class that were interested in Physics decided to merge into one blob, and spontaneously form social cirles only with each other.

And that feels amazing! From one moment to the other, you can finally talk deeply and for hours to others about the topics you care about most.

But also, where previously everyone had a special topic that was their thing, it now became the standard topic of everyone, and everyone lost their distinctive quality.

Except for the ones that were very interesting before!

.. and as soon as the euphoria of the beginning has dried up (often after the first hard take-home paper), people start searching for their distinctive, special interest, but this time inside their new frame of reference.⁶6 Does that also sound a bit like Evaporative Cooling to you?

So the group cools evaporatively, and you with it: The breadth of topics you regularly bring up in conversation shrinks.

And since you’re not in school anymore, from then on, this happens again and again.

You find some lectures more interesting than others, you hang out more with those people from there, boom. You’re now a specialized physics student⁷7 Quantum stuff, what do I know.

You find some nice papers to read, and ask a professor for some more info. Boom. You’ve just joined a group as a research assistant, and start to think of yourself not only as a physicist, but a high-energy physicist.

And you notice that all of you are more of the same person to a larger extent.

…

Well, that’s kinda what might happen, but not quite what happens.

But maybe, specialization by subjects isn’t actually that much of a problem.

Because sure, at some point, most of the people won’t only be interested in learning and thinking and talking to other people about their job.

So there will be outdoor activities and hobbies and bouldering and complex games ⁸8 Yes, this belongs on the same level as the others. Have you never met physics students? and parties, and the people will be able and interested in talking about these things and many more.

And that’s not something that will bother you.

What might bother you is that basically all of the topics talked about will be approached in basically the same way: Analytically, with an Engineering Mindset, with brute force, in the spirit of coming up with a theory on how this could work, and then testing that theory adversarily to death, like a mathematicians would do.