Okay, so I probably missed the entire point of the thread with my first post.
Re: misunderstood quietness:
I think its that while people are often good at what Adam Smith called "sympathy" or "fellow feeling," very few people are good at "empathy" or "feeling the same thing". So we notice what you are doing, and we put it into our pre-existing categories of fellow feeling: "Zero joking = normal; Zero not joking=something not normal, maybe wrong." If we were better at empathy, we'd be thinking instead, "Zero joking, Zero in joking mode; Zero quiet, Zero in thinking mode."
Empathy is a lot tougher because it requires deeper identification with the other person, "knowing" the other person. Sympathy only requires paying attention to what the other person might value.
For example, if I trade with someone else I have to pay some attention to what the person might value: I can't just charge whatever I want; I can only charge what the market will bear, and that means I need to try to think about (be sympathetic with) others might be willing to bear. And I can do that level of "fellow feeling" even with the strangers I encounter in the marketplace.
But getting that empathy thing done ... well, I can't do that with strangers. Only with intimates. I can't be content with thinking about what others
might value.
I have to be able to value [/u]as they value[u].
And that most of us, how do I say it, suck at.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)