It amazes me how much feeling can be conveyed in such a short amount of time through eye contact. At times it can feel almost like a kind of telepathy. I guess there's a good reason they say the eyes are the windows of the soul. For me, eye contact is one of those things that can get a bit weird and uncomfortable if I think about it too long in social situations. It's best if I let it flow and be natural. Sadly, I notice a lot of younger people who avoid eye contact all together. Perhaps they've never developed the skill having grown up with such massive amounts of screen time?
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it gets weird if you're telling yourself "I should make eye contact"? it does for me, too. Even if I don't, I'll sometimes hold someone's gaze in conversation and feel an awkwardness - did i do it too long? or wrong? is there "wrong"? But I guess we get better.
Dead on. It gives a terrible crutch to the natural awkwardness that comes with that age, and if you give someone literally any place to hide, they'd rather hide than meet you head-on. I've also noticed a mistrust when you take an interest in them (not in a creepy way duh), but there seems to be an abundance of "who? me?" mentality and it's also traceable back to social media and this culture of unachievable "fame" and influencer-statusness.
Yes, the very moment it becomes a conscious thought it feels "off".
It's interesting what you say about mistrust. I never have given that much thought. I wonder if we've raised a generation of paranoid people because of online scams and such and then they project that concern onto all real world interactions?
I don't honestly know. But to be fair, anyone with an ounce of sense recognizes the many perils of getting duped in some way online, and that might make young people more cautious in general. I don't really know. I'm not generally of the doomsayers' brigade, decrying the youth. Quite the contrary, it seems to me 17-year-olds or so nowadays are tremendously precocious and self-aware (Thank God), but as with all things, there's also some things going less well...
I'm optimistic about the future generations too. So many of them are realizing how detrimental social media is and are either leaving it alone altogether or not using it as much. I think we have a bright future but we're just going through a dark time of transformation right now.