While this is a valid point, it doesn't have anything to do with my close friends or the situations I'm referring to. What I'm trying to say is that I'm not attempting to make people laugh, I only want to engage in a conversation for the sake of analyzing it, not to prove some sort of point. I do this by contemptuously expressing the view.
My last point about comedians was meant to argue against being a "downer."
It boils down to this: people take me too seriously. I've known this for a long time. This is why I'm very witty around people I don't know because if I dig down too deeply into a serious matter with no regard to seriousness (something I'm doing in my head constantly), I get a negative response.
I expected I could open up my head's uncensored logical analysis to my closest of friends, but I suppose I was wrong because they still take what I'm saying seriously. Maybe I'm asking too much of them to drop their feelings for a second and take a step back, but I have to say I've thrown logic to the side for them in order to make them feel better.
Okay, I see what you're saying. I ran across this same theme with an ENTP I was getting to know recently, but it was hard for me to get exactly where he was coming from. He'd say the same things you are saying--that sometimes people take him too seriously, and sometimes he just wants to put things out there, that he doesn't necessarily believe or subscribe to himself.
From my perspective in trying to meet him halfway, I was never offended at anything he said. So it wasn't a values or feelings-type reaction. It was just that sometimes he would say some pretty outlandish things, but they didn't read as though
he thought they were outlandish. The presentation was often the same as the stuff that he'd given a lot of thought to. So it was very hard for me to tell the difference between him saying stuff just to get a reaction or see what I had to say about it, and him sharing a perspective that was pretty concrete in his values system. So naturally, one wants to err on the side of taking someone's ideas seriously as a sign of respect.
Occasionally he would say stuff like "I don't know if I believe any of that or not," and then I'd realize that was a not-serious time. But even at those times, I was unsure what he wanted my reaction to be. Especially because as an INTP, I usually run my wild Ne ideas through Ti before I release them into the environment. And ENFP type unrestrained Ne is pretty easily recognizable as being silly. This wasn't, so much. If I'd gotten a clear idea of the kind of discussion he wanted, maybe I could have played in that world, but I never got a picture of that. The serious stuff looked a lot like the not-serious stuff. But he did restate pretty often the idea that people misunderstand him, and only a few people "get" him naturally, and that people shouldn't take him seriously. I
wanted to understand him, but didn't know how.
Can you maybe tell what an optimal reaction would look like, or maybe give an example of when the conversation went wrong and what you had hoped for?