31. You usually prefer to be around others rather than on your own
I don’t want to choose one or the other. I love social times, but I can’t be around people always. I recharge by myself by being alone. I do my best thinking alone, it’s where I get to write and process through thoughts, read.
However, I just realized I had originally thought of “be around others” in a group setting. But being around others could also mean one other person. I could probably be around one other person pretty much all the time. I sort of like the instagram account dinosaurcouch. It’s a webtoon. Here’s one:
And another:
Basically I disagree slightly on this one.
32. You become bored or lose interest when the discussion gets highly theoretical
I love theoretical discussions and I tend to work from that level. If I’m looking at data, I’m trying to make sense of it by establishing some larger framework that it can fit into. But if you start with the theory, I’m ok with that.
My wife, on the other hand, gets kind of lost with the theory. She needs specifics to get her head around it. This is often a difference between us when we’re talking about things. She gets lost with my discussions because I’m usually talking in a more general level about things and she sometimes can’t figure out what I’m getting at. She tends to get so much into the weeds about her examples that I lose focus.
I notice that the great writers that I enjoy tend to give both the theory and the specific examples to show how the theory works in real life. I’m sure that’s the balance that I need to find to, but I’m on disagree side of the spectrum with this statement. I love theoretical discussions.
33. You find it easy to empathize with a person whose experiences are very different from yours
I’m actually terrible at this. In fact, just today I was talking with my boss about my difficulty in having empathy with people who are sick a lot. We have a few people in our office that are frequently sick, and they’ve been out most of this week, so the office is feeling kind of barren. I try to give some generic words of comfort to people who are going through illness. But because I’m not sick very much, I sort of don’t understand people who are. I know they are, but after a while I start to feel like, “What’s wrong with you? Pull it together!”
This was an issue between my wife and I. She does suffer from lots of health issues, and I’m not by nature very sympathetic. So years ago I started doing this over the top version of sympathy. She’d play along with it and it became a thing. But oddly enough, in a kind of fake-it-til-you-make-it way, I actually started to feel more sympathy towards her issues.
Of course there are some things that I’ve gone through personally that I can very much feel for other people. A few years ago I was at church, and a woman I knew from the worship team, part of young couple that we’d become friends with, was crying after church. I noted it and asked her what’s up. She had had an affair and her marriage was falling apart. Having known both of them and loved them, I immediately felt a serious sympathy for what she was going through. We prayed for her and I called her husband and took him out a few times too, just to give him an ear to talk to. But of course, this last paragraph doesn’t address the statement, which specifically mentions: experiences very different from yours.
I’ll attempt to understand, but most times I don’t find it easy.