You generally don't WANT to do it, but you feel better after you have, and it's absolutely necessary for maintaining your (mental) health.
So whenever I am dreading some social situation I just remember it as a form of exercise, something that I don't want to do but must do.
I am similar to you (I am also the person you're responding to). Case in point - the hardest "subject" in business school for me was the Happy Hour. But I am glad that through that experience, and other experiences like moving away from development towards management and even sales, as well as having a family, has forced me to develop these muscles.
The one thing I want to point out is that our experience of this is not universal. For example, my wife is naturally oriented towards people: her default is to be with her family, friends, helping patients at work, etc. So for her, socializing doesn't feel like exercising - but something like quiet solitude and introspection would. Perhaps this is obvious but your comment could be read that you think our view of socializing is universal and it's not.
I was also terrible at confrontation when I was younger because I have affirmation as a love language and confrontation doesn't fit too well with that.
In the same way, I had to discover to deal with my baggage so that confrontation was not awkward if handled objectively. It is possible to critique without criticism and most of all, it is entirely possible that other people might be able to teach me something ;-)
I still find my self looking-down on people who are often less "technical" and who therefore struggle to understand logical things but then I struggle to enjoy myself, to throw caution to the wind sometimes and to do things that I can look back on and say "I'm glad I took that risk".
Something I always tell my mentees is that your strength and weakness are the two faces of the same coin. Your logic and rationality very likely enable you to have a great career and a stable life that is devoid of stupid risk that other people ruin their lives with. Logic is a gift. But at the same time, the use of this "tool" is limiting in some other ways, as you have outlined.
On the flip side, someone may be very emotional/impulsive and enjoy the things you are currently "pining" for but at the same time have other parts of their life be a total mess because of it.
The answer is to recognize that what we have, even if it works very well for us, as a tool. Logic is a tool that generally serves you well. But at times, there are places to recognize to put that tool down because it's not appropriate or necessary for the situation at hand.
The analogy is something like this - let's say you're a sharp shooter in the army. You have your career and you make an impact because of your knowledge of how to shoot a gun well. But you don't want to limit your life experiences to situations where using a gun is a solution, nor do you want to use the gun inappropriately. The answer is to say: I love my sharp-shooting skills but here is a situation where I need to put the gun down and just have a coffee with my friend, or whatever.
> Individuation does not isolate, it connects.
> Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
If you have a bit, could you point me to something that discusses individuation from this angle (versus more general things I quickly found?)
That is one way of trying to know your own shadow self. Knowing and integrating shadow is first step to individuation.
Man and his symbols is good introduction to Carl Jung's theories if you would like to know more.
Well, maybe not other people in general, but certainly colleagus at work...
“Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are...well...human beings.”
You often hear the weirdest ideas about people from people who don’t socialize much.
Slide side-track but the older I get the more I realize that (at least for me) having to deal with other people is a path to "salvation", not "hell."
When I was younger, I found certain types of people and interactions difficult and painful. I was very quick to judge people who caused me this "pain" as bad people, and so I always interpreted the quote that "hell is other people" as a reference to that.
But lately I've come to realize that these negative reactions have much more to do with me than with the people. I react(ed) strongly to certain people and things because of my own emotional baggage, etc. and I've come to value these interactions as pointers to where I need to work on myself.
So I find that having to deal with people actually forces you (or at least, forces me) to confront your own issues, it's a form of therapy although obviously painful in the moment. The alternative is to avoid all these triggers. For example, someone in my family chose to spend much more time with plants than with people in order to avoid all these painful triggers, but as a consequence I see her "spiraling" more and more into her own emotional dark places rather than being forced to stay above water by social interactions - by being forced to confront and work through the issues.
Maybe this is not universal, maybe it only applies to me, but I see that the more work I do on myself, the less I agree with "hell is other people" - which means there was never really a big problem with them, only with me.