Comment by ZpJuUuNaQ5
9 hours ago
>15 close friends, 50 regular contacts, 150 active acquaintances
Seems like a lot. For me, it's 0 close friends, 0 regular contacts, and 0 active acquaintances. I think I simply never developed any useful social skills which would help me make and keep friends or acquaintances. I wish I had (somehow) kept in touch with at least some people I have met throughout my life. It has never been easier to stay in contact than in all of human history, but no, I had to ghost and ignore everyone and everything. After 29 revolutions around the sun, I have only now started to realize that all that vacuous superiority has led me nowhere. There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can’t wash it off.
Well. Start now. Treat it like an algorithm. Schedule reminders to text/email/call/follow up with people. My ADHD was hard. I would just forget about people and not because I don’t care about them. Then I would feel bad and delay even further because of that. Just do the thing. It may never feel natural except with very close and trusted people. That’s okay. Having friends for the sake of it isn’t the point. Being genuinely interested and sharing experiences and common interests and learning from each other are good reasons though.
> Being genuinely interested and sharing experiences and common interests and learning from each other are good reasons though.
(Not OP, but interested to hear more)
In terms of motivation, do you know of a way to begin a sincere and genuine interest in others that doesn't have some ulterior motivations? That may sound kind of mechanical, but what I mean is roughly something like: "I don't know people, so I do not have any 'genuine interest' in them. As a result, any interest that I do have is insincere."
I chose not to have friends for several decades, which has been extremely convenient for the most part, except for tasks that require more than one person, or work-related situations. Not having to worry about offending people, remembering birthdays, messing up my own plans for the needs of others, etc. was very burdensome. However, being able to use people as a job reference, or getting leads on future opportunities from people I used to work with would also be beneficial so I can understand why people would expend the effort. However, retaining a friendship solely for those job-related purposes seems grossly manipulative because there is no sincerity in what I want from them. I do not want them I only want to extract what they can give to me.
Is it simply understood that, if you make friends with someone as an adult, it is inherently with ulterior motivations in mind, whether it be to avoid loneliness, get work-related benefits, or extract knowledge from them? As a child, I think people tended to make friends simply because they were bored and the person seemed neat. Is that why people still try to make friends with people?
Your primary motivation for having a friend is that you enjoy being with them and talking to them. thats it.
You need to go to therapy and speak to a professional about this. Choosing to not have social connections is a deeply anti-human behavior, we were evolved to be social creatures after all.
Maybe you are truly asocial, but you come across as someone severely stunted emotionally if you think companionship means always extracting value out of someone.
You still can. Most people have more and less social periods of their lives. I have plenty of _very_ social friends in their 40s/50s who weren't as social in their 20s. Or the opposite. Life is long, and many of us need decades focused inwards with others focused outwards
How, though, If you never developed social skills?
How to start riding a bicycle in your 40s, if you never developed bike skills? How to snowboard, if you never developed snowboard skills?
… Do it; suck. Do it more; suck less.
“How to Make Friends and Influence People” is a great & classic book about giving people social room, focus, support, and attention with genuineness and humour (“influence” isn’t meant in a manipulative sense). Effort and attention are required, and practice, but that’s the cost of change and improvement.
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Find ways to lower the stakes.
Make new friends with others that have underdeveloped social skills and figure it out together.
Do things in a group in some activity that won't put the spotlight directly on you and where you can observe others.
Explore therapy where odds of rejection are pretty low since you're paying them for coaching.
I think noticing how children play is very instructive, but if you don't have good social awareness that could get you in trouble. Kids haven't internalized all the baggage you and I might have about social rejection and awkwardness yet. They just confidently say "hey I like your bracelets will you tell me what they mean to you?" and if it doesn't pan out this time they play with someone else. It's the social anxiety / awkwardness that usually makes people the most uncomfortable, not the atypical interactions. Kids don't have that at all.
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I like classes for meeting new people for a few reasons. First, there's a structure around the activity which doesn't force you interact all the time. Second, you're not entering an established group as the one new person. And third, you're all going through a shared experience which naturally helps form bonds.
If you're really hard up for social skills, and you like being around silly fun people and are okay acting silly yourself, I recommend taking an improv class. Any introductory improv class is basically kindergarten games to help you realize how low stakes socializing can be.
But I also realize improv isn't for everyone. In that case I recommend finding an activity you might be interested in and taking a class in it. If you aren't sure what you're interested in, good news! That means you get to take all the classes until you find one you like.
Even if there's no classes for your activity, anything that can be done out of the house and with other people probably has a community built around it. Use your interest in the activity as leverage to expose yourself to that community.
https://www.empathiceurope.com/ has free courses/trainings on empathic listening skills.
Spend some time on that website, see what you can dig up on specific skills, and then test using them in real life.
That site skews heavily towards therapists, and has a lot of woo-woo. It is clearly not THE answer.
But it is A answer. Enough to give you a framework to get started.
It's one of those things: the world doesn't care (unless you are really attractive of course), so you'll have to choose: Do I want to put even more effort into this and/or fake it 'til you make it - or do I want to be alone?
Doing it late(r) only adds to the pain of missing out before.
Just because you enjoy a thing at a certain time in your life, doesn't mean necessarily that you would or could have enjoyed a similar thing earlier.
Besides, social interactions are one of those things that don't depend exclusively on you but also on the environment and on luck. I had better and worse periods, I doubt I could have had only "great periods". Going through periods is how you also learn and get to put some effort to change (the environment and yourself).
In the grand scheme, it's very difficult to miss out on anything.
Taking phrases like "when you're ready" as a condescending insult or ego challenge is a stronger guarantee of pain than simply doing nothing. Your own expectations and misguided impressions are most of the pain.
There are plenty of bitter and unhappy people who got that way by being delusional. Misjudging one's own experiences and accomplishments is what it really means to "miss out".
My advice is to go somewhere in person and to keep going there consistently. It could be a club, a meetup, volunteering, etc.
The internet is the fast food of socialising. While it might be quick and easy, the quality is terrible. You’ll make real life long friends just being in the same room as someone regularly and chatting face to face.
I'm the same as the parent. I've done this. I've been in groups for 2+ years and attend regularly and am not able to get any close friends out of it. I just don't form the connections that other people do. There's just something about the way I interact that doesn't cause me to get close to people. It might be something I'm doing subconsciously and I just don't know what it is. It's not like people can't stand me or anything. There's many people I can interact with normally at work or whatnot. I just don't seem to "click" with people. If anyone knows a coach or course that helps to address this, I would be interested.
I'm in a similar situation — 0 friends, 0 regular contacts, 0 significant others in general (though maybe I'm less worried about that than the original poster). So, I have no chats to analyze. What you offer doesn't work for me. I studied onsite at 2 universities and have 0 contacts/friends from there. I've now been studying for 3 years at an onsite school (I'm there every evening after work and on weekends) — 0 contacts/friends. I moderated a support group weekly for 3 years — 0 contacts/friends. I worked at 4 non-remote jobs, at least 2 years each — 0 contacts/friends.
> I studied onsite at 2 universities and have 0 contacts/friends from there.
IIRC, it's harder than high school to make friends at a university. It's bigger and more anonymous, and outside of student housing there's less free time where students are forced together.
My high school class wasn't too much larger than Dunbar's number (300), and you were getting mixed up with the same kids for 6 hours straight for 6 years.
My university wasn't even that large, and I think there were ~>3,000 kids in my year and plenty enough in my major that it wasn't uncommon (without deliberate effort) to have zero overlap from semester to semester.
You're not going to make friends by studying. Hard pill to swallow, but you have to make an effort to talk to people and get to know them. Go out to lunch with them.
If you're eating alone at your desk, you are signaling that you wish to be left alone.
That's a really strong signal you are either being too picky or focused on yourself. This isn't necessarily "bad", just an observation. Sometimes the environments you put yourself in lack the spark.
This largely depends on luck, though it can improve your chances. There are places where you can be a regular your entire life and never meet a meaningful person, while at other times, simply being in the right place at the right time can lead you to someone with whom you develop a lifelong relationship.
Yes, it does have a component of luck. But it also has a component that's not luck, namely the showing up part. Of course there's no "friend solution" and i wouldn't go looking for friends by sitting in the corner of a cafe on my laptop all day. But i bet going to a makerspace, or a hobby meet, is basically guaranteed to make friends within 1 to 3 months of attendance. So don't let the doubt prevent you from going. There's only one way out and it's to start showing up
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The internet offers less means to bond (mostly a subset of what you get in real life), but the quality most definitely does not have to be terrible. The relationships you form over long distance have potential to be as strong as those you form in person, even if building them up is significantly more difficult.
Zero follow ups. The perfect bait.
You said it yourself, you never developed the skills. there's a learning curve, but learnable skills they are. You need the courage to start developing a skill that you're completely incompetent in, and just do one thing each day. I was in the same place as you at 32 but four years later It's another story.
How?
I avoided people because I was treated badly. Once I got muscles people started laughing at my jokes and treating me well. Working out is the only thing that helped me.
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Literally any way.
If you're nearly a professional athlete then "how do I improve?" has very few answers that could help, and many ways that won't, but if you're a couch potato then anything is better than nothing. Any movement or club, from walking to bodyweight exercise, community hall dance group, exercise bike, treadmill, gym club spin class, climbing gym, Starting Strength, Couch to 5K running podcasts, Pilates, Yoga, Martial Arts, frisbee, volunteering to walk dogs - anything at all is an improvement.
Any book, blog, video, article, about developing social skills will have some ideas and approaches. Asking anyone - family member, counsellor, therapist, doctor, coworker, stranger in the street - for ideas could give you some. Take anything other people do and google "how do I learn that?" and try some of the suggestions.
Charisma On Command channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Charismaoncommand/videos
Harvard Business Review on enjoying smalltalk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRG-YubP1rw
Dr Burns on empathic communication: https://feelinggood.com/2016/12/12/014-the-five-secrets-of-e...
Dr Burns on stop trying to "be somebody" and dare to be Average: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz_Iw3JLCb0
Dr Burns on stopping criticising yourself with "I should XYZ" to everything you do or don't do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5Zl12LS3bg
anything on improving your fashion, haircut, body language, giving genuine compliments, making people feel happier around you, helping interactions feel fun and less like a competition you have to win, how to start conversations, how to keep conversations going, how jokes work, some jokes to memorise.
Imagine all the "how do I learn programming?" posts on the internet, if you want to make a 100fps 3D game in C++ there's only a few useful ideas, if you want to "learn programming" it does not matter what language, computer, IDE, editor, book, article, video, tutorial, you start with. Anything is more progress than doing nothing.
Volunteering to help the vulnerable (in person) helped me with the vacuous superiority. I met some amazing people who just had bad luck. Your post shows you're on the right track and might be ready to make the next step.
Dude, you can still recover some of those friendships. I went through a phase during college where I alienated a TON of my friends, and that was on me. For a variety of reasons we don't need to expound upon here. I eventually reached out to them, made my apologies, and would occasionally check in and see how they were doing. A few of those friendships are repaired and growing again. I think that there's a tendency toward second chance for people who've recognized their shortcomings, worked on them, and then taken responsibility for their actions.
Many will tell otherwise, but I think it is fine to not have these friends, contacts and acquaintances etc. In my case I did put in effort to stay in touch, call up people after many years. But in most cases result was like "Okay, we were in same school/office/rpoject/neighborhood / waited for same bus etc...etc.. now what do you want from me?"
It maybe that you most definitely want it. However for me "missing out" hasn't make life any worse.
Sounds good, let's be friends! Feel free to email me anytime, and I look forward to us staying in touch.
Perhaps the name "ZpJuUuNaQ5" makes it harder for people to be able to do casual chit chat and introduce you to their friends?
> Hey, Z, how's it going?
People have had "weird" or out of the norm nicknames forever. Where do you think nicknames come from?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that’s not their real name. But if it is, it would make it easier to strike up conversations. “What an unusual name. How do you pronounce it, again? How’s that spelled? What’s the story behind it?”
Taking a look at your past comments, I agree with you about you curating "vacuous superiority."
That kind of self insight is valuable.
So maybe, ya know, stop pretending on the internet that you have things figured out?
Funny I go out a lot and I have so many random numbers in my phone from dudes who added me, single serving friends for the night
But yeah I only have like 5 real friends and then maybe 10 acquaintances eg. work
For what it's worth, it's never too late to keep in touch. You said you wish you'd kept in touch, if you're able, you should reach out. No one cares that its been awhile (and they're equally culpable), most people are happy and/or flattered you were thinking of them.
> I have only now started to realize that all that vacuous superiority has led me nowhere
It's not too late, but it might need more effort than if earlier.
You're only 29 -- I have good friends in my life that I didn't meet until I was in my 40s.
You might need some hobbies which are more social, like volunteering. It's very easy to fall into work -> hacking at stuff -> sleep cycle, but you can't live inside your own head for the rest of your days.
I'm older and I've lived through the analog era, before people had cell phones or internet. Facebook wasn't around when I graduated from college, so most contacts from before that withered away -- especially if you ended up living in a different state or city.
It is sometimes heart wrenching to hear about people from your past, knowing that you didn't keep in touch. A girl that I went to elementary school with, always kind of an odd girl (but in a good way), developed leukemia in her 30s and passed away in 2019. I didn't know for seven years. Seven! I went through her Facebook page and it was a roller-coaster of emotions, playing her life backward as she chronicled her condition worsening, periods of hope, all the way back to when she was saying that she had some kind of bug and felt awful.
She was a good friend to me in elementary school, but we ended up going to different high schools and different directions after that. I feel bad that we didn't keep in touch, and that I was completely unaware of her suffering.
I can't wallow in this, though, and this is where I'm attempting (maybe poorly) to make a connection to your situation. You can't change the past, but you can start making meaningful attempts to forge new relationships and to rekindle old ones. Those people that you never kept in touch with? Reach out to them, if only to say "Hi". Reach out because you want to do it, and not because you need something.
How many days will you sit there and think "why doesn't anyone reach out to me?" when you, yourself, are not also making the effort to do so?
> There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can’t wash it off.
Sure you can. There are various paths to it, some outlined in sibling comments, and here’s another one: Pick up the phone and call or text some of those people you wish you had kept in contact with. Don’t have their contacts anymore? Ask someone who might or find them on social media. What do you say to them? “Hey, I was recently thinking of <that time you did something together> and felt like reaching out. How have you been doing?”.
Maybe beforehand “collect” some relevant events which have happened to your life since you last met, so you have something at the ready to keep the conversation going if you need. I’m not saying rehearse it, just have them in mind. If you need some small talk tips, see this short video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRG-YubP1rw
You have to find people you value, then it'll feel worth it
29 isn't remotely close to too late, dude.
That is the saddest thing I have read on this website.
I know it seems stupid, but hit the gym. People will want to be around you if you have muscles.
There's some truth to this, and I'm sorry it's been your experience, but I'd like to gently expand on this a bit as I don't think muscles are the only thing that matter - I know plenty of skinny and fat people with friends.
Relationships are inherently transactional. You won't want to spend time with someone if you don't get something out of it, barring certain unconditional loves like your immediate family. When making new friends, proxies like attractiveness and social standing are how people judge if someone is likely to add value to their lives or not.
So yes, unfortunately, if you talk to someone and you're just some small quiet guy with no interesting characteristics, you'll probably be written off before you get a chance to develop a friendship with them. Whereas if they see you have muscles, or know you're successful in your career, or know you have other friends, they'll be more likely to assume you might be worth getting to know.
Things like working out, dressing well, learning to speak well, etc. all help. However, there is an alternative shortcut to building close friendships - forced interaction. When you're stuck sitting next to someone in class for a year, you don't have the privilege of swapping that person out for someone who seems cooler, you just have to get to know them. When you're stationed in the military with a squad you don't get to swap that squad out for people you think you might like more, you just bond with them. But there are few opportunities like that in normal life, you have to seek them out. Go on a 2 week long canoeing expedition, join a start-up incubator with a small team, play an MMO at a competitive level where you have scheduled runs and are in voice chat. Do stuff that forces you to interact with people for a long time and puts you in environments where you can't just leave and seek out people more like you.
You’ve crafted a well-meaning response, so I want to preface this by saying I’m not poo-pooing on your response at all. Rather, I want to share some other complementary views.
> barring certain unconditional loves like your immediate family.
I’d argue your immediately family isn’t deserving of unconditional love. Unfortunately, familial relationships can be much more toxic than other relationships precisely because you feel an obligation to make a bigger effort to not sever them. But if they’re bad and you’ve done a real effort towards reconciliation and failed, you should cut them out for your own sanity.
I have friends for whom I care much more than family.
> Whereas if they see you have muscles, (…) dressing well
Careful, as those are not universal. Placing too much emphasis on physical appearance can have the opposite effect and make other people preemptively judge you negatively.
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People will want to be around you if you’re kind and generally pleasant, which is a much stronger reason to hang out with someone and leads to much longer lasting and healthier bonds than a physical trait. It also costs nothing and once you can get into that mindset, takes no effort.
I've always been nice and pleasant, but from my analysis, people thought that was weakness. Weak + Nice = Uncool, Strong + Nice = Cool.
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