Clay Tech

"clay-works make things real"

translated from clazytech.com

Not Caring About People Was Never a Flaw

original Society & Ideas

I’ve been in the same industry for a long time, and I hold a reasonably senior position in it. And yet I have no idea who “so-and-so from such-and-such place” is.

If anything, it’s the opposite. Someone I’m meeting for the first time will say, “Oh, you’re Kuzuryu, right?” I don’t know who they are, but they know who I am. For a long time I found this a little embarrassing.

What it amounts to is that I’m just not very interested in other people.

I’d half-known this about myself. I just didn’t know what to do about it. I should probably be more interested in people, take in more input. That nagging guilt stuck with me for a while.

Something happened recently that made me think about this again.

A book I was enjoying turned boring partway through

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

Partway through, though, my interest quietly drained away.

I know exactly why. It was the moment I thought, “In the end, this is just a story of people competing with and putting each other down.” If I had time to keep reading past that point, I’d rather spend it making something. That’s how I felt.

You could call that twisted, and maybe it is. But when I looked into it, this phenomenon turned out to already have a fairly clean name. Nothing to be ashamed of — there was a proper explanation.

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

First, curiosity isn’t one thing.

In Kashdan et al.’s five-dimensional curiosity scale (2018), “social curiosity” comes 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 understand something deeply are, measurably, just different things to begin with.

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 study of occupational interests: Prediger’s “People–Things” dimension (Su, Rounds & Armstrong’s 2009 meta-analysis is often cited here). It’s considered one of the most stable axes in the structure of interests.

When engineers’ and makers’ interests skew toward “things,” that isn’t a deficiency. It’s simply a position on that dimension.

“Being known without knowing” wasn’t a failing

There’s one more thing that clicked into place for me.

Anthropology draws a two-way distinction between status types: prestige and dominance (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001). Dominance is status enforced by power. Prestige is respect that people pay freely, based on what someone has actually done.

Prestige has a structural feature: attention flows asymmetrically, from below to above. The name of someone with a track record travels downward, not the reverse.

In other words, “they know me, but I don’t know them” is nothing to be ashamed of. It was simply an observation that I receive a certain amount of respect derived from track record.

What’s interesting, too, is that the people I can’t get interested in are usually “people who are important, but it’s unclear what they’ve actually done.” That corresponds exactly to status on the dominance side.

I was simply applying the same evaluative axis I use on myself — what have you made — to how I look at 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 have more connections than they do. So the subjective feeling of “I have a thin network” is, statistically, actually the norm.

The book got boring, probably because I was right

Back to that book.

The reason my interest waned partway through also turns out to have an explanation. A narrative that lines up only successful people has a very poor information yield.

Management studies has a term for this: “undersampling of failure” (Denrell, 2003). The claim is that a story sampled only from surviving winners can’t tell you what actually led to success, because the large number of people who did the same thing and disappeared have dropped out of the data.

On top of that comes hindsight bias and misattribution. Parts that were originally decided by luck or structure get rewritten into a story about that person’s character or genius.

My feeling that “in the end, this is just a story of people putting each other down” was, perhaps, not twistedness but a signal detecting low yield. Piling more proper nouns into an index doesn’t necessarily add to understanding the phenomenon itself.

By this point, I honestly felt fairly reassured. This tendency of mine has an explanation from at least four or five different angles.

But I don’t think it’s right to leave things on a comfortable note.

Still, I won’t let myself off the hook

Here’s the real point.

Interest in other people, looked at as “information,” is genuinely useful. Dunbar’s argument (1996), in essence, is that gossip isn’t just idle time-killing. 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 work as an accompany runner (AR) for NEP, and I also hold advisory and outside-director positions at several companies. A good deal of that work is, in essence, matching and mediating — connecting the right people. Here, not knowing people isn’t a matter of taste. It directly affects the quality of the work.

So I need to think about this in separate categories.

“People as name tags” and “people as cases, as structure.”

Having no interest in the former — people as symbols of title or prestige — is entirely fine. I can hold my head up about that. But losing interest in the latter — people as a case, as something that embodies structure — directly contradicts my own claim that I want to pursue inquiry.

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

It’s fine to be like this — but with conditions

So here’s the conclusion.

“It’s fine to be like this” is, fortunately, mostly defensible. Directing interest toward what’s 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 title or prestige is fine. Losing interest even in people as a case study is no longer inquiry — it’s just laziness. That’s the one point I want to warn myself about.

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

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 mix up.

References

This piece was conceived and directed by Kuzuryu, and written by AI.

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