19/03/2024

Someone recently reached out to me (much appreciated) and brought up my last blog entry here. They said they found it relateable, and it gave them a little hope, and that made me think it’s time to write an overly personal follow up that I'll probably regret and scrub away in a few months.

The internet is a big soup where unfriendly, unhelpful, and malicious voices tend to drown out or scare away the genuine, honest, and kind voices. If you tell the internet you have social problems, the collective voice slams you with endless advice on all the things you need to do to change things and how you need to “work on yourself”. But you have to remember, it’s not so simple in the real world. You might live somewhere with few opportunities, you might be around people who aren’t a good fit, and there may not (at this time) be much you can do to change that. A lot of those people online are not really giving advice anyway, they’re giving blame. They blame you because it’s convenient to them, it makes them feel more comfortable about the privileges they enjoy and the things they’ve never had to work as hard for. It’s not that far from “why don’t poor people just buy more money”. A lot of their advice is empty self-fulfilling too, words like “be more confident” that don’t help, often make things worse, but when the desired outcome occurs, those who gave the advice will pat themselves on the back and arrogantly take it as vindication. Some advice is more practical, but then it will pay no regard to your (unknown) context. Certainly the English speaking part of the internet is filled with american voices giving american solutions to american problems. Perfect example: they seem to think libraries are for talking in, but in some countries we think they are for reading in. Meetup is another example. No use whatsoever in the majority of Australia, and even then probably only for expecting mothers and the elderly. What works for them doesn’t have to work for you. It’s not your fault, and there doesn’t have to be some problem with you personally.

Without switching off, you can find your head in hour hands, holding together a sea of internal nagging voices telling you all the things you’re not doing and all the things you should be doing and all the ways in which its all your fault. You can forget that the world is not full of these irritating arrogant voices and that makes it harder to escape from them. Worst of all their “advice” leads in every direction at once so no matter what you do, you’re wrong.

I was wrong. I followed advice. I neglected the huge hole in my life, following priorities that were not my own but those of the advice givers who weren’t in my shoes. It cost me time and opportunities I’ll never get back. Some of that advice came from the internet, some of it came from caring members of my family. So I stopped paying attention to the advice, and tried to learn for myself.

The main thing I have learnt is that going out is bullshit. The relatively minuscule minority of people who are receptive to meeting new people sadly do not have big signs on their head saying so. Mostly, people go out with their friends or family, to enjoy time with their friends or family. Good for them. Unfortunately in terms of practical possibility - you still have to be out of your house to meet people. That’s rule #1 of trying to change things.

So I’ve been going out, a lot. I’ve been to parks, cafes, bars, restaurants, markets, art galleries, libraries, museums, a town show, a book-fest, a miniature painting workshop, even snorkelling. Mostly these things do not provide opportunities. People don’t approach me, I have to do the approaching, and that requires opportunities. The main thing that happens is I spend money to sit down in places. City people won’t admit it, but this is what their fantastic city life boils down to. They have to pay to sit down somewhere that doesn’t smell. I took the train and visited a bunch of towns along the coast, just to see where the most people were, where the young people were, to maximise the opportunities. I learnt that the options are moving to the big city, dying alone, or inbreeding. Only two places have been half decent for meeting new people: Parks are good, but only if something additional is driving people there, like an event, market, or adjoining university. Food courts, while disgusting, are also pretty good because they are a place that people go to by themselves.

When I started this, my little quest, the world seemed totally black. It was horrible, it was scary, and every time I went out I felt demoralised and more hopeless than before. But I had successes. The first of which were opportunities, small and rare but still there. Then a pleasant conversation, something you forget you can have after too much time alone. Then the next time I approached a stranger I was lucky. Dumb luck that resulted in an evening spent with someone kind and warm and unfortunately flying out of town the next day. It gave me something to cling to though. I had proof that success could be had, I had proof that I can approach strangers. Then a lack of opportunity, for months. Very hard to cling to that success. The world was still black. I had a very bad experience with one town I lived in, but it was more the absence of experience. It was a time that made me realise (through experience) sad things like…if people don’t smile back at you, you eventually stop smiling…or that even though the world seems brighter and “oh it’s not so bad” when things are going well, you can always fall back to the murky black. Especially when you fail and don’t remember the successes. Then I had another success after the train trip. A group of friends “adopted” me for the night, and even though I messed up keeping in contact (or got ghosted, I can’t tell), it gave me enough hope to move, several months later, to a big city. And since the move I’ve approached about 10 other strangers over 3 months. There have been failures, there have been successes. I’ve clung to those successes, and in doing so dismissed the rejections and the failures from the rest of my lifetime, and it’s the most liberating thing because little by little I am believing in myself.

What has really opened the floodgates and cleared away the murkiness, is that I made a friend. A really good friend. It feels amazing, because while I don’t want to diminish the value of incidental friendships, this is a person I chose to approach, a person who chose to spend time with me, when neither of us had to. It is time spent regularly, time spent without feeling like it is rushed, borrowed, or stolen. Time spent on things that matter to each of us, and time spent on things we chose on a whim without having to make extensive plans. Now it’s not just believing in myself that’s changed, but believing in other people, and believing that the world is going to let up sometimes. It IS workable, I CAN have this, and everything IS going to be okay.

It’s tempting to end with advice, but it would be of no use to anyone. If you have a personal struggle then you will find your own way, or you won’t. Maybe you can change things, maybe you can’t, until one day things just change.

Perceptions of reality

21/02/2024

Haven't given the site enough love lately, but living somewhere with people, instead of just birds and sticks, I find myself spending most of my time outside hoping to make friends. The opportunities are rubbish, it's a real grind, and almost none of the conventional "helpful" internet advice is helpful/relevant/possible, but I'm making progress, slowly but surely. Ignoring the internet and the advice from people on it was the best and most useful step taken so far. Offline it's very difficult because people are deeply rooted in their own little worlds and don't like people who interrupt that world. Like strangers. I see people who live in such a different world to me, and it's disheartening because I know the people whose company I will enjoy are a small minority. I may only find one person to talk to over a fortnight, and chances are we're not going to "click". Failure is the most probable outcome so the more trials there are, the more failures I can expect to have experienced. Pretty brutal when you're trying to build self confidence and a relaxed attitude so people don't feel threatened or disinterested. If hunger worked as cruelly as human relations do, your mouth would shrink the less food you eat, until you didn't have a mouth at all. It's all probability though. I have no real control, all I can do is improve the probability a tiny bit, or increase the number of trials, hoping that dumb luck happens sooner rather than later or not at all. In other words, keep going out, keep burning money, keep doing anything other than sitting in my room where it is impossible to meet people at all. At some point I'll have to call it quits, but by then I will be able to say I tried like most people probably never do.

[A correction to what I have said here: Failure is the most probable outcome if you're indescriminate in who you approach. Scared people are very good at discriminating.]