Tell HN: I'm an Imposter
Hey there. I haven&#x27;t read any of your previous HN posts, so, fresh opinion here.<p>Firstly, don&#x27;t be embarrassed. It&#x27;s good that you want to engage and be stimulated. But by the same token, don&#x27;t expect too much in terms of personal love &amp; understanding here. I&#x27;ve been a coder for almost 30 years and I still don&#x27;t understand half of the things people post here, and it&#x27;s tough to find people of similar minds.<p>What I think you&#x27;re looking for is being in a social setting that stimulates you. And it sucks to say that it&#x27;s so damn hard now to do that. When I was a kid in the 90s, I spent all night in art&#x2F;coffeehouses talking with people from cops to drug dealers, writers and artists to Costco employees. <i>That culture is gone</i>. It&#x27;s been replaced by a cheap knockoff version online, but you never see or know the people, so you don&#x27;t really get the same experience of closing out a place at 4am with friends you know you&#x27;ll see again tomorrow or the next night.<p>My GF grew up in Texas and thinks of herself as someone who escaped being a &quot;normie&quot;. Her whole family is super religious. She has &quot;normie&quot; friends who plan an annual trip to Disney World, stuff like that. She gets most of her intellectual stimulation from learning how to code and talking to me and a few of her not-normal friends, weirdos like me who she picked up over time. And what I do alone and we do together is, we just plant ourselves outside a bar and start chatting away. Or reading a book. You&#x27;d be amazed at the people I meet. Now... I live in Portland, OR. When we go out to bars near her place in the deep countryside, the chance of a really interesting conversation gets a lot slimmer, and we spend a lot more time talking about cars and kids than like, philosophy or international relations (or antifascism) the way we can in Portland. So one big thing I&#x27;ve learned is that where you are really matters. The right city or the right group of friends&#x2F;neighbors can help you blossom. The wrong place can just keep you down, make you hide away or give up trying. No matter how friendly you are. I&#x27;m also very friendly, and easily embarrassed when I&#x27;m too friendly. I&#x27;m not white - or not perceived as white, anyway, so it&#x27;s hard to tell sometimes what people are thinking. You know genuine people when you see &#x27;em.<p>Don&#x27;t fetishize HN. It&#x27;s a high level dork conversation, that&#x27;s all. Honestly, it&#x27;s dangerous to think too much of it, because a lot of people here aren&#x27;t worth the salt. Wherever you live, there are definitely cool dorks nearby, you just need to meet them.<p>I think if you sit outside Starbucks or a bar with a book and eavesdrop on other people&#x27;s conversations and just - at an opportune time if you hear something interesting, don&#x27;t be afraid to say &quot;hey, I heard what you were talking about, mind if I ask something?&quot; Well. This takes practice but it&#x27;s how I met most of the best people in my life. Not online.<p>[edit] Just reading your reply to someone else that you work in a university bookstore makes me realize you probably come into contact with more interesting people than I do every day. I have literally <i>no one</i> in my real life who has a clue what my job involves, except for one or two other people who take laptops to the local bars who trade war stories with me once in awhile. The reason <i>I&#x27;m</i> on HN is literally because as a freelancer it&#x27;s the only place I get to talk shop. Everyone needs to talk shop sometimes.