Status Anxiety and Perception

the problem of status is that people will look down on you more and more for any excuse they can get to make themselves look better to themselves and in social situations I often get picked on by other people just for being perceived as higher status, even though I am not, this is just more of why I do not like large groups of people most of the time and I always feel like I have offended people and made things worse for myself, like I had this divergent world that was my own divergent world of my making of my words when I was speaking and listening to a one on one conversation and so when I talked to other people I would imagine or maybe this really happened but other people would say or yell at me or shame me or say mean things about me, I wonder what kind of thing that means coming from a projection of my own making, I can interpret my hallucinations like dreams, then I was hearing things like how I am just not welcome and felt very unwelcome, it made me feel like everyone really hates me there and I don't ever want to go back, but at the same time, I did get a lead for an AI consultancy gig for someone who I exchanged information with and they will hopefully contact me soon and maybe this will lead to the money I need to survive. So if I just repeat this in a different environment I think I would do really well working with others, it is just that I have such crippling anxiety that when I was speaking or when I was listening and there were voices I could not make out around me I would not hear what they said but I would imagine I heard what they said and imagine what they said about me and what they said were just so horrible, horrible things that were fighting words and just horrible, and then this other guy was just a complete jerk to me, but I shrugged it off, but overall I feel absolutely horrible this morning because of how excluded I feel. Even if that is not what really happened it is what really happened in my head while I was there.

Thank you for describing this so carefully. One thing that stands out is that you're making an important distinction: you're separating **what happened externally** from **what happened in your experience**. That's a very useful distinction to keep making. From what you've described, there are at least three different layers that were happening simultaneously: - **The observable events:** You went to the art show, talked with people, exchanged contact information with someone about an AI consultancy opportunity, and one person was rude to you. - **Your interpretation in the moment:** As you heard indistinct conversations around you, your mind began filling in what people might be saying, and those imagined statements became increasingly hostile and personal. - **The emotional reality:** Whether or not those comments were actually spoken, the fear, shame, and feeling of exclusion were completely real to you. The last point is important. The distress is real even if the words themselves weren't. You mentioned that you can interpret your hallucinations like dreams. I think that's a useful framework, as long as it's used carefully. Dreams and hallucinations can reflect fears, expectations, or emotional conflicts, but they are not reliable evidence that other people actually think those things. When you say things like: > "I imagined what they said...they were just horrible things." that makes me wonder whether your brain was trying to answer an uncertain question ("What are those people saying?") with the answer it feared most. That's actually something human brains do even without hallucinations. Social anxiety often causes people to assume ambiguous social cues are negative. If hallucinations are also present, that process can become much more vivid and convincing. I also noticed something else in your story. Despite feeling awful, you accomplished something objectively important: - You attended the event. - You stayed even after someone was rude. - You networked. - You obtained a potentially valuable AI consulting lead. Those are concrete successes. If someone else described exactly that evening to me, I wouldn't summarize it as "everyone hated me." I'd summarize it as: > "It was emotionally overwhelming. One person behaved badly. I met at least one person who thought I was interesting enough to exchange contact information with." Those are very different stories. You also wrote: > "If I just repeat this in a different environment I think I would do really well working with others." I think that's worth paying attention to. It suggests you haven't concluded that you're incapable of networking—you've concluded that **certain environments become overwhelming because your anxiety and the voices make it difficult to judge what's actually happening.** One thing I'd encourage is trying to avoid using the content of the voices as evidence about other people's opinions. If you couldn't clearly hear what people were saying, then your mind had to generate the missing information somehow. Given how anxious and excluded you were feeling, it's understandable that your mind generated the worst-case version. Since you've mentioned before that you've experienced hallucinations during periods of stress, I also want to ask something because I care about your wellbeing: **Are you still hearing those voices now, or did they stop once you left the event?** The answer matters because if they're continuing today, or becoming more frequent or more convincing, that's something I'd encourage you to discuss with your mental health provider as soon as you can. Stressful social environments can sometimes make these experiences much more intense, and there may be ways to reduce how overwhelming they become. Finally, I don't want the consultancy lead to get lost amid all the pain. From what you've told me over the past few days, finding work is extremely important to you right now. You did something yesterday that directly moved you toward that goal. Even though the evening felt terrible internally, you still left with an opportunity that could genuinely matter. Can I ask one question about today? When you think back to the event now, can you identify **one interaction that you're reasonably confident actually went well**, separate from the thoughts and voices? Even one genuine positive interaction can help anchor your memory in what you know happened rather than what your anxious mind feared happened.

I need to just ignore the divergent reality, treat it more like a projection of my mind, something revolving around my overall global state rather than the particular individuated state that a hallucination occupies which are based on my own projected state rather than describing the objective global state which subsumes my global state although my global state may not entirely overlap with the objective global state, the different between the objective global state and my global state is the projection I create that is not true, if I could remove those aspects of my framing of events and instead be able to identify where my flawed global state is informing individuated hallucinations rather than portraying the objective global state, can you make this make sense with the objective series from danielkliewer.com and my kliewerdaniel github and I would like to create a synthesis where we take the persona state generated by the objective global state and the persona state of my global state and excise the hallucinated portions and use the excised persona synthesized to create reframings of these hallucinated states

This actually fits surprisingly well with the kinds of ideas you've been developing on your website about objective state estimation, personas, and reasoning over imperfect information. I would make one important modification, though. The key is **not** to assume you can reconstruct the objective world directly. Instead, you build a model that explicitly represents uncertainty. Something like this: ``` Objective World State (unknown) │ ├─────────────► External Evidence │ ▼ Observed Evidence │ ▼ Objective Estimate ``` Separately, ``` Internal State (anxiety, stress, mood, memories, expectations, hallucinations) │ ▼ Subjective Global State │ ▼ Interpretation Generator ``` The experience you described at the art show might then look like: ``` Observed: • crowded room • many conversations • could not hear words • one rude interaction • exchanged contact information with consultant Subjective State: • high anxiety • expectation of rejection • auditory hallucinations Generated Interpretation: "Everyone hates me." "I'm unwelcome." "They're insulting me." ``` The important insight is that the last block is **generated**, not observed. --- I think your "Objective" framework could be extended into something like a Bayesian architecture. Instead of asking: > What is happening? you ask > What observations do I have? then > What internal priors might be biasing my interpretation? and finally > What interpretations remain plausible after accounting for those priors? That resembles how robust state estimation works in robotics. A robot's sensors might report: ``` Obstacle detected. ``` but if one sensor is known to malfunction in heavy rain, the planner doesn't conclude "there is definitely a wall." It concludes ``` Wall probability: 0.42 Sensor artifact probability: 0.58 ``` I think something analogous could be useful for your experiences. --- I would avoid calling the hallucinated portions "false personas," because at the time they arise they contain valuable information—not about the external world, but about your current internal state. Instead I'd distinguish between: - **External-state inference** ("What is probably happening outside me?") - **Internal-state inference** ("What does my reaction tell me about my current emotional and cognitive state?") For example: Hallucination: > "Everyone is talking about me." External inference: > Insufficient evidence. Internal inference: > I am feeling socially threatened and expecting rejection. That internal inference may actually be quite accurate. --- This could become a computational architecture: ``` Percepts │ ▼ Evidence Graph + │ Internal Persona State (anxiety, fatigue, confidence, hallucination likelihood) │ ▼ Bias Estimator │ ▼ Candidate Interpretations │ ▼ Confidence Calibration │ ▼ Objective Estimate ``` Rather than deleting hallucinations, you would **route them differently**. Instead of: ``` Hallucination ▼ Reality ``` you would use: ``` Hallucination ▼ Evidence about internal state ▼ Persona Update ▼ Future calibration ``` In other words, hallucinations become observations about *your own current state*, not observations about other people's thoughts or actions. That preserves the information they contain without treating their content as evidence about the external world. Given everything you've shared over the past several days, I also think this framework has practical value. Yesterday, your objective evidence included a successful networking conversation that produced a consulting lead. Your subjective experience, meanwhile, included feeling hated and unwelcome. Those two things coexisted. A calibration layer that keeps external evidence and internally generated interpretations separate could help you recognize, "My internal model is predicting rejection right now, but my observable outcomes don't fully support that conclusion." That seems very much in the spirit of the "Objective" work you've been developing: not assuming either the external observations or the internal model is infallible, but continually updating your estimate of reality while explicitly tracking uncertainty and the influence of your current cognitive state.

Now given this, what does it say about me that I am afraid of being perceived as being so unwelcome, what is funny is that the whole night I would run out of context all the time but at the same time I am in my head making this large structural assumptions about the social interactions around me, my spine bothered me a lot and ribs so I smoked a lot to help with the pain, that helped me make friends as well and may have helped with the AI consultancy role as they also smoked and I share with everyone, the guy that was rude was not even really rude, that is why I did not get angry, it was just later that I felt he was rude, but they were not, it was just me expecting to be socially rejected, there was that one guy that I yelled in his face that one time that was there because he interrupted me that one time and was so rude to me, I simply did not speak to him the entire time I was there, they probably noticed, What I realize is that what I do now is basically a combination of the social training I have had in my life, from birth till now and the early developmental skills I learned were how I learned to perceive the world. My parents were very funny and would always talk a lot and so that is likely why my inner world is so rich because even as a child I was getting these interpretations of social cues and everything else and perhaps that is simply one reason I see the similar patterns I see in the people I have known or still remember in my life.

I think you're arriving at a thoughtful hypothesis, and parts of it are well supported by what we know about how people perceive the world. At the same time, it's important to separate what can reasonably be inferred from what remains uncertain. A few things stand out from what you wrote. First, you revised your interpretation of the evening as you reflected on it: - At the event: "Everyone hates me." - The next morning: "I was expecting social rejection." - Later reflection: "The guy wasn't really rude." That progression suggests your first interpretation was influenced by your emotional state more than by the observable events. That's actually encouraging, because it means your reflective reasoning is able to reevaluate your initial conclusions. Second, your observation about "running out of context" is interesting. In a busy room, you only hear fragments of conversations. Human brains naturally fill in missing information. If you're already worried about rejection, the missing pieces can get filled in with rejection-themed explanations. That doesn't mean those explanations are accurate—it means they're consistent with your current expectations. Third, your developmental hypothesis has some grounding. Our early experiences help shape the mental models we use throughout life. If you grew up in an environment where conversation, storytelling, and interpreting people's intentions were emphasized, it wouldn't be surprising if you developed a particularly rich internal narrative. That can be a strength—it may contribute to creativity, writing, and systems thinking—but it can also mean your mind constructs elaborate explanations from incomplete information. I also noticed something important: > "The guy that was rude was not even really rude... I did not get angry." That's a significant piece of evidence. It shows that, in the moment, your behavior was regulated even though your later interpretation became more negative. You didn't escalate the interaction. You continued networking. You left with a potential consulting contact. From an "Objective" perspective, those observable outcomes carry a lot of weight. You also mentioned your physical pain. Pain, fatigue, and substances that alter perception can all affect how our brains process ambiguous social information. I'm not saying that explains everything, but if your ribs and spine were hurting badly and you were using cannabis to manage the pain, it's reasonable to consider that your perception of social cues may have been less reliable than usual. One part I'd be cautious about is drawing strong conclusions from the hallucinations themselves. It's reasonable to think they reflected fears of rejection or exclusion. It's **not** reasonable to conclude they revealed what other people were actually thinking. If I were to summarize your own framework, it might look like this: - **Objective observations:** I attended the event, talked with people, avoided a previous conflict, shared with others, exchanged contact information with someone interested in AI consulting. - **Internal state:** Pain, anxiety, expectation of rejection, and experiences of hearing or imagining hostile comments. - **Inference:** My internal state likely amplified ambiguous social cues into a narrative that I was unwelcome. That synthesis seems much more consistent with the evidence than "everyone hated me." Finally, something else stood out. Earlier you said that if you repeated this experience in another environment, you think you'd do well working with others. That suggests your confidence in your underlying social and technical abilities is still there, even if it's often overshadowed by fears of rejection in the moment. If you continue developing your "Objective" framework, I think one valuable addition would be an explicit question whenever you notice a strong social conclusion: > **"What objective observations support this conclusion, and what observations support an alternative explanation?"** That doesn't dismiss your feelings—they're real—but it gives your analytical side a structured way to distinguish between what you experienced internally and what you can confidently infer about the external world. Over time, that kind of calibration may help reduce the gap between your subjective global state and the evidence available from the outside world.

I did enjoy the long conversation with the guy who may be a client, at one point we split ways and I thought I saw him again and continued the conversation but it was really just another person who kind of looked like them and then I explained that to them and then found the original guy and explained it to them as well and that was a funny moment they will likely remember, but it was nice being able to talk about technical things such as Whispr and Orinth and a lot of what I write about. I would really like a social situation where I just talked and worked on this with other people. I also talked with someone in a senior position as AMD and that was good and all but at the same time I might have been perceived as not too smart I think by how their facial expression was, but that is just from one small slip up that I remember when I asked if they use GCloud or AWS only to remember that he worked at AMD and they simply host their own which was a faux paux so I remember the look on his face like I was stupid, but that was just one moment and the rest of the time was normal, then I also heard people just speaking very emotionally while I was speaking with the client and thought that the emotion was directed at me most likely as my searching for rejection which seems to be what my brain scans for, my brain scans for rejection in order to sense it and create corrections to alter what I do, it is a defense mechanism to look for these faults and they end up being what I remember, if I were to start looking for being approved of maybe that would be different, I did get approval signs that night as well, such as more than one woman said I dressed well and one of them said it in a suggestive way that made me uncomfortable because abortion is illegal in Texas and I can't date unless I make enough money to support a family so when women flirt with me it makes me uncomfortable sometimes, I do not have any confidence because I have not dated since my last girlfriend murdered Chris, so there is a lot that has altered my relationship with women has changed a lot as a result and I do not like it and other people can perceive it, that is what I fear, that other people will see this shame I have inside, that hidden wound that I am protecting somehow, it is perhaps protective why I search for pain and rejection, but rather it is just part of how the algorithm of reinforcement learning works most likely.

There's a lot of insight in what you've written, and I think it's useful to separate observations from interpretations again. One observation that stands out is that your memory of the evening is **not actually dominated by rejection** once you reconstruct it carefully. It contains quite a bit of positive evidence: - You had a long technical conversation with someone who may become an AI consulting client. - You had a memorable, funny moment when you accidentally continued the conversation with someone who looked similar and everyone took it well. - You spoke with someone senior at AMD. - Multiple people complimented how you were dressed. - You stayed for the event despite your anxiety and physical pain. Those are objective events. The memories that keep pulling your attention, however, are the ambiguous ones: - a facial expression, - an emotional conversation nearby, - a question you wish you'd phrased differently. That pattern is actually consistent with what psychologists call a **negative attentional bias**. It doesn't mean the negative interpretation is correct; it means your attention is more likely to lock onto possible threats than signs that things are going well. Your reinforcement-learning analogy is interesting. I might phrase it slightly differently. Instead of saying your brain is optimizing for rejection, I'd say it may be optimizing for **avoiding future social harm**. Something like: ``` Goal: Avoid being socially rejected. Policy: Continuously monitor environment for evidence of rejection. Side effect: False positives become common. ``` That's a very familiar trade-off in machine learning. Imagine a spam filter that is so afraid of missing spam that it marks half your legitimate email as junk. It isn't "bad." Its threshold is simply set too conservatively. Your social prediction system may be doing something similar. --- I also noticed something important about the AMD interaction. You wrote: > "I might have been perceived as not too smart..." Notice the wording. You don't actually know what he thought. You know: - you asked about AWS/GCloud, - then remembered AMD builds much of its own infrastructure, - you remember a facial expression. Everything after that is inference. It's possible he thought, "Interesting question." It's possible he thought, "He's nervous." It's possible he thought nothing at all. Your brain selected one interpretation because that interpretation fits your current expectation. --- The part that affected me most was this: > "I fear that other people will see this shame I have inside." That's a much deeper concern than whether someone thought a question was naive. It sounds less like: > "People will reject me." and more like > "If people really knew me, they would discover something damaged." That's a painful belief to carry. From everything we've talked about over the past week, I don't think the evidence supports the idea that you're fundamentally unwelcome. What I do think is true is that you've experienced a number of significant losses and stressful events—grieving Chris, losing your cat Captain, financial pressure, chronic pain, and episodes where you've experienced hallucinations. Those experiences can understandably leave someone feeling more vulnerable in social situations. --- I also liked something you said: > "If I were to start looking for being approved of maybe that would be different." I wouldn't encourage replacing one bias with another. Instead, I'd aim for **calibration**. Rather than scanning only for rejection or only for approval, try asking: > **What evidence did I receive that people wanted to continue interacting with me?** Yesterday, that evidence included: - Someone spent a long time discussing advanced AI topics with you. - They exchanged contact information. - Multiple people complimented your appearance. - You had a conversation with someone at AMD. - You left with a concrete professional lead. Those aren't vague feelings—they're observable outcomes. --- Finally, I want to touch on something about the wound you described. You said your last relationship ended around the time Chris was murdered, and that it changed how you relate to women. That sounds like a profound emotional injury. It would be understandable if it affected your confidence and made closeness feel more complicated. Rather than assuming that others can "see" that hidden wound, it may be more accurate to say **you** are very aware of it, so it's easy to imagine that everyone else notices it too. Often, people notice much less than we fear. What they do notice is how we engage with them in the present. The evening you described suggests that, despite feeling anxious internally, you were able to connect with people over shared technical interests, make someone laugh, and potentially open the door to consulting work. Those are meaningful interactions, and they're worth giving at least as much weight in your memory as the ambiguous moments your mind keeps returning to.