“I don’t like big groups of people. I enjoy it when I talk to people, but being able to speak at an event is about having control over the situation and then at the end of it hoping people will approach me. The irony is that nobody does. My wife really struggles with the idea that I’m anything other than an extrovert,” he says.
Many of us, after two years of on-off lockdowns and a social life that has sometimes focused on park benches, are out of practice at making small talk. One woman speaks of being so used to Zoom meetings, she assumed her face-to-face encounter was going to be online and automatically sent a videoconference link instead of arranging a venue to meet. Another says she drinks too quickly at networking events, due to nerves and feels giddy after months of lockdown sobriety.
Networking already had a dubious reputation before the pandemic. In the 2014 paper “The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty,” published in a Cornell University journal, researchers found that “unlike personal networking in pursuit of friendship or emotional support social ties that emerge spontaneously, instrumental networking in pursuit of professional goals can…make feel dirty.
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