>Your human relationships should not be treated as if you were a spy behind enemy lines. If you think this is an appropriate framework with which to reason abou

>Your human relationships should not be treated as if you were a spy behind enemy lines. If you think this is an appropriate framework with which to reason about your human relationships, you are doing something /very wrong/. I agree with you on this, but I think (or at least hope) the author's intended message was a bit different. If someone is going to be operating like a spy in the sense that they're lying to everyone around you to manipulate them into having the desired interaction with them, it is at best incredibly dishonest. I think the analogy the author used is a bit over the top, because where being a spy is about lying and using social interaction as the means to achieve your own ends, in the case of learning to be social, being social is its own end. If you scale back the analogy I think the takeaway is more along the lines of "you're out of place, fake it until you make it". The blog post, overall completely misses the target and really is about becoming a "functional anti-social" rather than actually learning to be social. I don't think of this as a malicious article, its just written by someone who doesn't have the understanding necessary to give advice yet. Back when I forced myself to stop being an introvert I was often conflicted by the fact I felt like I was lying about who I was when I was just was biting my tongue or making an effort to talk to someone. The author seems to be of the mind that everything other than blurting out exactly what you're thinking is at the same level of acceptability, so you might as well run with it.