"I didn't know what made people want to be friends. I didn't know what made people attractive to one another. I didn't know what underlay social interactions"

A confession of estrangement sits at the center of these lines: an admission that the basic engines of human connection, friendship, attraction, the hidden rules of interaction, were not intuitively available but opaque. Rather than a felt participation in social life, there is an observer’s stance, as if humanity were a phenomenon to be studied from the outside. The phrasing “what made people” turns relationships into mechanisms, suggesting a gaze that seeks causes, levers, and formulas where most people sense resonance, comfort, and shared meaning.

That stance implies more than simple shyness or social awkwardness. It hints at a divide between knowing how and knowing why. One might learn the choreography of charm, humor, and reciprocity, how to smile at the right moment, echo the right interest, mirror the right emotion, yet still lack the internal compass that gives those gestures sincerity. The result is performance without embodiment, imitation without belonging. In such a position, other people can become puzzles to decode or instruments to use, their inner lives flattened into variables in a private calculus.

There is also a loneliness here. Not understanding why people seek one another can mean never feeling fully invited into the common room of human warmth. Without an intuitive grasp of attraction and friendship, intimacy risks becoming a story told in a language one can recite but not inhabit. The repeated “I didn’t know” underscores a persistent deficit, a self-awareness that the foundations are missing.

At its most troubling, this distance unmoors the ordinary guardrails of empathy. If the meanings under social life are opaque, if other minds are merely patterns to manipulate, then conscience can be reduced to technique. The passage reveals, starkly, how the absence of felt connection can warp both self and other: a life lived adjacent to human community, keenly observant yet fundamentally disconnected from its animating core.