a good conversation tip is that when you initiate a conversation or a topic within a conversation, you are implicitly Casting the other person in a role–they’ll have had or observed similar interactions in the past and understand this even if not consciously. like the simplest example of this is that if you say ‘knock knock’, the other person knows they’re meant to say ‘who’s there?’. this is why intense self-deprecation is a shitty social move, because you are casting your conversational partner in one of two roles: Guy Who Argues With You, which is inherently a tiring role to be put in, especially on the regular, or worse, Guy Who Agrees That You Suck Because They’ve Always Secretly Hated You, which nobody wants to be. verbally self-flagellating isn’t bad social form because it’s wrong to express symptoms of mental illness, it’s bad because unless you are careful you end up implicitly offering the people youre talking to a whip they dont want