Thoughts
I’ve generated the “spaceship hypothetical.” It goes like this: imagine you’ve been placed on a spaceship with 4 strangers. Your journey
is so long that you’ll die before you get there. You have no contact with Earth. Your duties around maintaining the spaceship take a negligible amount of time (although I’m sure they’re very important). (This relies on suspension of disbelief to account for the fact that 5 people in good mental health signed up for what is definitionally a suicide mission.)
This presents a paradox under my normal approach to social interactions. See, it is obvious and self evident that, with very little else do, I should interact with the other people on the spaceship. And yet, since there is no minimum amount of interaction that needs to be sustained and no common goal that requires camaraderie and no risk of running out of time to make my acquaintance with the other members of the ship, and no pre-scheduled organized events, at no single moment is talking to someone else the obvious correct course of action. You have the rest of your life to get to know these people, why should you do it today? But if you never do it at all, something has gone horribly wrong.
I think there’s a level of hope that maybe I’m missing in my life. Maybe you talk to them on day one not because you need to and not because you love them, but because you hope that on day 6,000 you will love talking to them. Maybe you go on the first date not because it’s an obligation and you’re running out of time before you’re ineligible to be married and you’re so bored and lonely, and maybe you don’t go on the first date because you loved the person on at first sight. Maybe you go on the date because you have hope that you’ll grow to love them. That’s hard for me but it might be better than the alternatives.