Developers and Sartre
Sartre said “hell is other people”. He didn’t say it to cast himself as the depressed, hapless thinker, he was observing the threatening process every person experiences when they encounter another person. The gist of it, is that while you are able to experience yourself as an autonomous individual, to be absorbed in the self and forgetting the body, you are forced by the laws of nature to experience others as objects, external to you, and ultimately, a threat to you and your desire to self-actualize or acquire finite material worth. In addition, seeing others, in their bodies, is a painful reminder to the self that it is also a body, and subject to death.
Using Sartre’s observation like an equation, it seems to me that the more a person has the capacity to become absorbed in the self, the less they enjoy others, because the transition from pure thought to an inconvenient truth (that you are a meatbag) is more jarring. Perhaps this is why developers who are generally more interested or passionate in their work than others are seen as having fewer social skills.
