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translated from clazytech.com

Not caring about people is not a character flaw

original Society & Ideas

I have long been in the same industry, and I hold a reasonably established position in it. And yet, I know almost nothing about “so-and-so, from such-and-such place.”

If anything, the opposite happens. Someone I’m meeting for the first time will say, “Oh, you’re Kuzuryu, right?” I don’t know them, but they know me. For a long time, this left me mildly embarrassed.

What this amounts to is that I don’t have much interest in other people.

I vaguely knew this about myself. I just didn’t know what to do with it. I probably should take more interest in people, take in more input. That sense of guilt was always there.

Something happened recently that made me think about this again.

A book I was enjoying became boring partway through

I was reading tech journalist Kara Swisher’s Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. She has covered that industry’s inner workings up close for a long time. I know that world myself, so at first I was enjoying it.

But partway through, my interest just drained away.

The reason is clear to me. It was the moment I thought, “In the end, this is just a story about people competing with and putting down other people.” If I had time to keep reading, I’d rather spend it making something. That’s what I felt.

Call it contrarian if you like. Maybe it is. But when I looked into it a bit, this phenomenon turned out to have a fairly clean name. It’s not something to be ashamed of. It’s something that can actually be explained.

“Interest in people” is not a single, unified thing

First, curiosity isn’t one kind of thing.

In Kashdan et al.’s five-dimensional curiosity scale (2018), “social curiosity” separates out as a factor independent of “joyous exploration” and “deprivation sensitivity.” Roughly speaking, how much you care about what other people are up to, and how much you want to deeply understand something, are simply different things when measured.

Being low on the former and high on the latter isn’t a contradiction. It’s just one perfectly ordinary combination.

There’s another well-known axis in the world of vocational interests: Prediger’s “People–Things” dimension (the 2009 meta-analysis by Su, Rounds & Armstrong is often cited here). It’s considered one of the most stable axes in the structure of interests.

The fact that engineers’ and makers’ interests skew toward “things” isn’t a deficiency. It’s just a position on that dimension.

Being known without knowing was not a personal failing

There’s another point that clicked into place for me.

Anthropology draws a two-part distinction between status types: prestige and dominance (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001). Dominance is status obtained by forcing compliance through power. Prestige is the respect people freely pay based on “what someone has done.”

Prestige has a structural feature: attention flows asymmetrically, from the bottom up. The name of someone with a track record spreads downward, but not the reverse.

In other words, the situation where “they know me, but I don’t know them” isn’t a shameful failing. It was simply an observation that I was receiving some degree of respect derived from a track record.

What’s interesting, too, is that the people I can’t get interested in tend to be “important people whose actual accomplishments are unclear.” That corresponds exactly to the dominance side of status.

I was simply applying the same evaluative axis I care about for myself — what someone has made — to how I see other people. At the very least, that’s consistent.

There’s also something called the friendship paradox (Feld, 1991). Within a network, most people are surrounded by people who are more socially connected than they are. So the subjective feeling that “my own network is thin” is, statistically, actually the norm.

The book got boring, probably because I was right

Back to that book.

The reason my interest drained away partway through actually has an explanation too. A narrative that lines up only successful people has a very poor information yield.

Management studies has a concept called the undersampling of failure (Denrell, 2003). The point is that you can’t properly infer “what led to success” from a sample made up only of survivors who succeeded. That’s because the large number of people who did the same things and disappeared are missing from the data.

On top of that come hindsight bias and attribution error. Even the parts that were actually determined by luck or structure get rewritten into a story about that person’s character or talent.

My impression that “in the end, this is just a story of people putting each other down” may not have been contrarianism so much as a signal detecting low yield. No matter how much you expand an index of proper nouns, that doesn’t necessarily increase your understanding of the phenomenon itself.

Getting this far was, honestly, quite reassuring. This tendency of mine can be explained from at least four or five different angles.

But I don’t think this is a place where the story should be allowed to end on a comfortable note.

Still, I won’t let this be an excuse

Here’s the real point.

First, interest in other people, looked at as “information,” is genuinely useful. The point of Dunbar’s argument (1996) is that gossip isn’t just idle chatter. Tracking who did what with whom, and who betrayed whom, is a legitimate form of information processing for grasping human relationships.

And given my current role, this isn’t someone else’s problem.

I currently serve as an accompany runner (AR) for NEP, and I also hold advisory and outside positions at several companies. No small part of this work is, in essence, matching and mediation: figuring out who should be connected to whom. Here, not knowing people isn’t a matter of preference — it directly affects the quality of the work.

So a distinction needs to be made.

Between “a person as a name tag” and “a person as a case study, as structure.”

Having no interest in the former — a person as a symbol of title or prestige — is entirely fine. I can hold my head up about that. But if I lose interest in the latter — a person as a single case, as an entity carrying structure within them — that directly contradicts my own claim that I want to pursue inquiry.

My own admission that “the bar for me to become interested is high” probably doesn’t mean my interest is low. I think it’s more that my threshold is high, and once crossed, the interest runs deep. If so, the problem isn’t the total amount of interest, but how that threshold gets crossed.

It’s fine to be this way — but with a condition

So here’s where this lands.

“It’s fine to be this way” turns out, fortunately, to be mostly supportable. Directing interest toward what’s been made, rather than toward status itself, is a legitimate preference. There was no need to be ashamed of it.

But it’s not unconditional.

Having no interest in people as titles or prestige is fine. But if that turns into losing interest in people as individual cases, that’s no longer inquiry — it’s just laziness. That’s the one point I want to hold myself to.

There’s plenty I want to do, plenty I want to try. So I’ll prioritize that. That’s fine.

But not being interested in titles, and losing interest in people themselves, are two different things. That’s the one distinction I don’t want to get wrong.

References

This piece was drafted and directed by Kuzuryu, with the writing done by AI.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2026/08/1728/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.