Many people are authoritarian minded (because our society is), and they don't get the idea of emergent order. Austrian Economics is built on it, and in physics we see it naturally occur literally all the time. But many people think order can only be imposed on a system, rather than arise naturally.
Atomization is not a normal situation. It's a situation where an individual is permanently and continually stripped of affiliations and communities he might otherwise naturally form.
Individualism isn't the same as atomization. Individualism allows the individual to make those communities as he desires. There is no reason for him to be an element onto his own if he does not seek it. This is why communities develop. Forming social groups is such a basic-bitch concept of human interaction it would take perpetual social conditioning, institutional pressures, and technological persuasion from extremely powerful actors that profit off of atomitizing people 24/7 through constant maintenance to even have such a society function in such an atomitized way.
...
shit
Now, I will say that I'm a fairly atomitized individual. However, the reason for that is an extremely arrested development stemming from abuse. Part of the reason I'm intellectually focused the way I am is because all of my neurological development and cognitive skill went into trying to think my way into surviving problems. The reason I don't naturally socialize with people is because that is not skill I have sufficiently developed yet.
But that should tell you how abnormal the conditioning has to actually be to make people self-atomitizing. It has to be a form of perpetual psychological conditioning, and applied at an early enough age that you don't have earlier social interactions to fall back on.
Don't let your kids use cellphones or spend all their time on the internet.
I've been thinking of how a children's book aimed towards atomized children might be comical enough to get published (basically teaching basics of living like a beast surrounded by enemies, older ages get lessons on humanity).
This one's very hard, I know from personal experience.
Books are not really enough. You really kind of require psychological counseling. It's like asking, "what kind of children's book would your write for kids who've been sexually abused?" You can, but you should really talk to professionals about how child psychology copes with that level of abuse. Similarly, an atomitized child is probably on the edge of suicide for significant social isolation, learned helplessness, de-individuation, and lacking any clear social value.
The kids who are surviving well in an atomitized environment, have adapted to atomization by self-isolating as methodology of risk mitigation. This means that they are self-atomizing as a way to control potential external risks. This is a purely defensive cognitive behavior. This kid has to learn how to expose himself to risk, and then also have the confidence to withstand the fairly common failure that will come with many early attempts. For someone who has no social value, this is a terribly complex problem without either external assistance from professionals or descending into narcissism. They've never moderated their behavior before, so they don't know when to moderate their confidence nor their self-doubt. This means, emotionally, everything's going to hurt at first until they learn to take it. That's a very tough prospect to try and self-teach. This is why a professional acting as a support system is so vital.
Imagine a kid attempting to learn how to swim in a pond near his house, with no supervision or guidance. This isn't even a controlled environment. It's genuinely dangerous. This kid would have to have an extremely high level of determination to learn and an extreme pain threshold for near constant failure because he doesn't even have the basics down, and can't reference any. That's a ton of physical work, significant pain, even more discipline, and truly high levels of obstinance in a person who likely to quit because it's already familiar.
On the other hand, a child may go the entirely opposite direction. They may determine all of their value from external social responses. This kid isn't going to just be some "social butterfly". They're going to be too outgoing. They're going to either be a class clown always seeking positive attention, they may be attention-whoring, they may obsessed with social signalling, they may even become sexually deviant in order to garner positive attention as they turn into teens. This is actually, probably, as worse result. This person is going to have tons of ingrained self-destructive behaviors that exist because they have no ability to moderate their emotions, and no ability to maintain any self-confidence outside of social conditioning. These kids are going to drown their loneliness in really bad things.
These kids are going to need a completely different approach. They'll need to learn how to have self-confidence as well as stoicism to deal with rejection, failure, and manipulation.
Basically, you have to write a children's book that is addressed to the different children's behavioral pathologies that have emerged from the atomization. One is the """conservative""" pathology, and the other is the """"liberal"""" pathology for a better terms.
Luckily, we've conversed before so I'll replace them with "resistor" mental pathologies, and "inductor" mental pathologies.
Now, I will say that I'm a fairly atomitized individual. However, the reason for that is an extremely arrested development stemming from abuse. Part of the reason I'm intellectually focused the way I am is because all of my neurological development and cognitive skill went into trying to think my way into surviving problems. The reason I don't naturally socialize with people is because that is not skill I have sufficiently developed yet.
Ayy, I found another! I'll limit my divulgence of details because I'm trying to break the habit - sometimes it's hard to stop talking about personal shit. But it's on topic and I sort of have to play my hand for this conversation.
I went through some shit. Missing some chunks of memory, been spending the past several years learning how to feel anger because I rather successfully sealed up the little problems that I had control over. The parts I remember I still have nightmares about. I don't go outside much because I shut down if I encounter one specific personality type (only ever encountered two).
You learn some interesting things as a person when you're forced into extreme situations for long periods of time. You know this, surely. One of my takeaways - once I understood just how my life was different than others I spoke to - was that I don't want anyone to go through what I did. Not much you can do there, but for the sad fuck stuck in that world, I want to reach out with some advice that could've helped me. Like, just something simple like "Some people really do want you to be miserable and will do anything they can to achieve it" would have helped me avoid a lot of anguish if I'd learned it earlier.
I've spent many years seeing psychologists and using psychiatric drugs (stopped the pills, not worth it). Most of that effort was pure curiousity; I needed to understand how I worked. I often advise for others to give it a try, but a good friend you can open up to is WAY better in my experience.
They're going to be too outgoing. They're going to either be a class clown always seeking positive attention,
I hit an interesting roadbump around this matter. This was the path I started on, but then I got misdiagnosed with ADHD and forced onto an overdose of ritalin right around puberty. Boy, that was like flipping a switch, I became crippled by anxiety. "Your grades are better now, so you're staying on this medicine". The anxiety made avoiding some of the worse outcomes easier, at least.
So I think my motive is clear, but I'll spell it out because I can: I want to help other people overcome the hurdles that I could not (and the ones I could, I want others to overcome them with less struggle). I would've been a psych major like the other failures but I hate writing papers. But no, I'm probably not gonna seriously publish such a thing and put it in stores. If anything, I'd just post it online somewhere and probably never reach the intended audience.
Tell me just one thing, I'm really curious since I've never really identified a person with similarly poor youth. What's your friend making process like? Mine is an intense probing to feel out boundaries mixed with some bait to see if they're prone to behaviors that would put me off. I had to develop some awkward strategies to get sufficient data because people are surprisingly reluctant to open up to others. I'd be surprised if you had a similar issue with your process, but I'm betting it's an area you struggle with as well.
Like, just something simple like "Some people really do want you to be miserable and will do anything they can to achieve it" would have helped me avoid a lot of anguish if I'd learned it earlier.
Most people are not used to dealing with proper predators. It's way less common than people like us suspect. But it's also less common than the predators themselves also think. They think everyone in the world is like them, but they really are the abnormal ones.
I've spent many years seeing psychologists and using psychiatric drugs (stopped the pills, not worth it). Most of that effort was pure curiousity; I needed to understand how I worked. I often advise for others to give it a try
I never gave it a try because it was my intellect that got me through it. I literally had to think my way through problems. I'm not patting myself on the back here because I still got most of it wrong, but there's no way I could have used drugs to fix my problems, when my problems were primarily perceptual, and required introspection to fix.
If anything, I'd just post it online somewhere and probably never reach the intended audience.
We could always right it here, and use it as a foundation for teaching as an institution. We should try to attract more gamers, which are bound to be kids in similar positions. Might be worth a try.
What's your friend making process like?
I didn't.
The solution that I came up with scared the shit out of me, but it was the only rational solution that could have possibly existed. As an analogy without detail. I was scared of the dark, and so were my predators. So I embraced the dark, and found it far less dangerous than the light. I realized that my predators burned bridges to control my movement, but they were always the ones burning them. So I burned the bridge we both stood on.
This solution worked, despite toll in all other areas, so I replicated it. I avoided risk, and so I avoided social relationships. At the first sign of trouble, I burned bridges permanently, even to people who never intended for the bridges to be burned in the first place, surprising both of us: them being surprised that I burned the bridge over nothing, and me surprised that they weren't a predator and didn't intend to burn the bridge in the first place.
It turns out that 'becoming the darkness' and 'burning all of the bridges' is not the normal way of solving problems, and forming relationships.
...
oops
my bad
Basically, whatever friends I made, I made very early as a child. One of those is still around, and it's important to sometimes have my cold perspective on family issues because we come from wildly divergent perspectives. He is highly sociable. Such that, he needs my anti-social perspective to analyze problems analytically, and he is personally responsible for the entirety of my social life.
Which is fairly inappropriate on my part. I will need to ask him how he does that. "How do you friend?"
Best as I can tell, it involves repeatedly saying yes to social environments, developing contacts in those social environments to focus on, making an active effort to maintain relationships with those people by creating new/custom environments to share with your "social network", and prioritizing those relationships on interest, benefit, and feedback.
See, this is why they keep me around.
I'm not saying that I can't do these things. I can, it's just not part of my own development to do these things because I've never done them, and they are not part of a disciplined or repetitive regime for social engagement.
See, normal humans respond to emotional stimuli that results from prolonged isolation, loneliness, or even simple boredom by seeking out social gatherings that provide them with affirmation, entertainment, and intellectual stimuli among other things. So it comes naturally for them to reach out and engage in social groupings based on those stimuli. Since that has never been my response, I'm not currently wired to respond in a similar way. I take different ways instead.
What I, and probably you, need to do is use disciplined regimentation to re-condition ourselves into intentionally engaging in beneficial social environments as a response to those stimuli. I'm still working on that. It's much easier to do when you either value yourself enough to demonstrate self-worth as social value, or if you have social value in your social groups. So, it's always a good start to carry yourself (and present yourself) with confidence and affirmation. Hilariously, it works even if you don't mean it, because it's so internal and subjective that making yourself believe it, and it being true, are actually the same thing.
I never gave it a try because it was my intellect that got me through it.
That's pretty good as far as coping mechanisms to develop. I pulled the card for dissociation so all I can do is nope out at will (and by reflex) - I have been trying to not do this recently because it's interfering with other skills developing. I'm almost jealous, but I'd have to take the history with it and I'll stick with the devil I know.
As far as "oops" goes, have you considered what you would have had to do in the absence of that choice? I've thought a lot about what I could have done differently, and the other paths available to me either sound worse or were impossible with the information I had at the time. I try to live my life with no regrets, but sometimes I still wonder if maybe prisontime would have been better for me. I'd probably be a different person, at the least, but I don't hate myself so there's not much potential for regret there.
no way I could have used drugs to fix my problems, when my problems were primarily perceptual, and required introspection to fix
I should elaborate, then. I didn't mean to imply that pyschiatric drugs are actually helpful for real problems. The only person who should even consider long term use is a person with a chemical imbalance, and even then I'd recommend trying to find a different solution. I was largely just playing along with idiot professionals in an attempt to experiment on myself because I wasn't clever enough to think out my answers.
I suppose an exception would be drugs that have recreational value. Alcohol helped me get through high school and helped me walk out of my room. The short term, regulated meds I stockpiled work to help me through unavoidable scenarios I'm forced into that I can't afford to "nope out" from. But these are shitty solutions.
The conclusion I came to in my therapy is that my only path forward is to open a door inside me that was closed for a reason. It's great to know this. But I refuse to ever open that - I will choose death first.
He is highly sociable. Such that, he needs my anti-social perspective to analyze problems analytically, and he is personally responsible for the entirety of my social life.
Hmm, sounds similar to a friend I had during school years. I got involved in a lot of 'normal' activities and with a lot of 'normal' people through him. Only, I never really spoke my mind to him, so I was appreciated as a listener instead of as a friend. I'm grateful, regardless, and consider my debt paid. All of my "friends" betrayed me when I asked them for help and understanding. So I said fuck this shallow friend shit and never bothered again. Now, what I call friend is probably closer to family for other people.
Even if I misinterpreted your words, I'm glad you have at least the one friend. Life gets real bleak with no one to talk to.
Relatedly, your evaluation of how to make a friend sounds..well, correct, but I think all it can produce is shallow friendship. That may be useful for you in a self-mastery sort of way. I won't try to give advice there, as my process for friends and mates are identical and it created many years of trouble for me. The times I tried switching to a more normal method like what you describe would quickly veer off course - my bad there though because I thought it'd be okay to socialize with furries in college (people think fags are bad about promiscuity, holy shit they have no idea about furries).
I have one close friend and one mate right now. Feels bad sometimes, I know I can't fulfill my role in a romantic relationship properly with the state of my emotions, but I'm dang dumb enough to do it anyway.
Since that has never been my response, I'm not currently wired to respond in a similar way. I take different ways instead.
We should try to attract more gamers, which are bound to be kids in similar positions.
Y'know, I never really thought to pry with gaming buddies that vaguely mention abusive pasts. Perhaps I missed some. Though I wasn't in the mindset to look for a long time. I only recently found out that there's a psych label for it (to the best of my knowledge, and borrowing from my sister's expensive therapists): cptsd. Basically when you get ptsd and then instead of being allowed to recuperate you're damaged repeatedly for years. Not recognized by american psych institutes so no tendies for me. Your prior explanation of it was more in depth, but I think a normie might understand "ptsd squared" better. Rambling, sorry.
Perhaps I'm reading in too deeply, but the two quotes put together seems to make a decent case. The only real counter I have is that I'm unsure how to imagine a troubled kid getting mixed up in culture war. Kids should be focusing on cool stuff and learning. The topics we get into here kind of demand an advanced set of mental filters that I wouldn't expect a kid to have, similar to how a kid should never be bothered with political talk (real politics, not the political circus stuff). I can't imagine how I would have even reacted to having casualized internet in my youth, let alone gamergate. Maybe I could have instinctively sided against journos because I became disgusted with the emotional manipulation present in news media fairly young.
carry yourself (and present yourself) with confidence and affirmation.
It activates my grim humor sometimes when doing so. People so easily swayed, I reflexively look down on them. Ironically, one of my most common presentations is slave mentality - by that, I mean, present yourself as a beaten dog. But I spent a lot of time around lowlifes where it helped me blend in. Simple confidence is definitely more comfortable, but sometimes it just serves to increase my cognitive load by adding extra variables into my efforts to read the minds of everyone in the room - easier to go unnoticed on a slow brain day. It did take me quite a while to understand how to get confidence to draw on, though.
As far as faking...I get you there, but it ties into an advanced dissociative technique I learned at my first/last job, where I turn on autopilot and crank out a bunch of mimicry to get through any small social encounter. I'm good at it, but it makes me feel sick in my gut and heart afterwards. Like a tiny betrayal of my values, I dunno, it's been hard to figure out.
What I, and probably you, need to do is use disciplined regimentation to re-condition ourselves into intentionally engaging in beneficial social environments as a response to those stimuli.
I've considered it, but I always come back to "no way". I can always figure out a way to solve a problem caused by isolation, and I'll always justify it even if it's inefficient or ridiculous. I've accepted that. The biggest part of it that kills me is that one of my hobbies is pnp game design and playtesting is a monumental task when there's zero playtesters.
Many people are authoritarian minded (because our society is), and they don't get the idea of emergent order. Austrian Economics is built on it, and in physics we see it naturally occur literally all the time. But many people think order can only be imposed on a system, rather than arise naturally.
Atomization is not a normal situation. It's a situation where an individual is permanently and continually stripped of affiliations and communities he might otherwise naturally form.
Individualism isn't the same as atomization. Individualism allows the individual to make those communities as he desires. There is no reason for him to be an element onto his own if he does not seek it. This is why communities develop. Forming social groups is such a basic-bitch concept of human interaction it would take perpetual social conditioning, institutional pressures, and technological persuasion from extremely powerful actors that profit off of atomitizing people 24/7 through constant maintenance to even have such a society function in such an atomitized way.
...
shit
Now, I will say that I'm a fairly atomitized individual. However, the reason for that is an extremely arrested development stemming from abuse. Part of the reason I'm intellectually focused the way I am is because all of my neurological development and cognitive skill went into trying to think my way into surviving problems. The reason I don't naturally socialize with people is because that is not skill I have sufficiently developed yet.
But that should tell you how abnormal the conditioning has to actually be to make people self-atomitizing. It has to be a form of perpetual psychological conditioning, and applied at an early enough age that you don't have earlier social interactions to fall back on.
Don't let your kids use cellphones or spend all their time on the internet.
This one's very hard, I know from personal experience.
Books are not really enough. You really kind of require psychological counseling. It's like asking, "what kind of children's book would your write for kids who've been sexually abused?" You can, but you should really talk to professionals about how child psychology copes with that level of abuse. Similarly, an atomitized child is probably on the edge of suicide for significant social isolation, learned helplessness, de-individuation, and lacking any clear social value.
The kids who are surviving well in an atomitized environment, have adapted to atomization by self-isolating as methodology of risk mitigation. This means that they are self-atomizing as a way to control potential external risks. This is a purely defensive cognitive behavior. This kid has to learn how to expose himself to risk, and then also have the confidence to withstand the fairly common failure that will come with many early attempts. For someone who has no social value, this is a terribly complex problem without either external assistance from professionals or descending into narcissism. They've never moderated their behavior before, so they don't know when to moderate their confidence nor their self-doubt. This means, emotionally, everything's going to hurt at first until they learn to take it. That's a very tough prospect to try and self-teach. This is why a professional acting as a support system is so vital.
Imagine a kid attempting to learn how to swim in a pond near his house, with no supervision or guidance. This isn't even a controlled environment. It's genuinely dangerous. This kid would have to have an extremely high level of determination to learn and an extreme pain threshold for near constant failure because he doesn't even have the basics down, and can't reference any. That's a ton of physical work, significant pain, even more discipline, and truly high levels of obstinance in a person who likely to quit because it's already familiar.
On the other hand, a child may go the entirely opposite direction. They may determine all of their value from external social responses. This kid isn't going to just be some "social butterfly". They're going to be too outgoing. They're going to either be a class clown always seeking positive attention, they may be attention-whoring, they may obsessed with social signalling, they may even become sexually deviant in order to garner positive attention as they turn into teens. This is actually, probably, as worse result. This person is going to have tons of ingrained self-destructive behaviors that exist because they have no ability to moderate their emotions, and no ability to maintain any self-confidence outside of social conditioning. These kids are going to drown their loneliness in really bad things.
These kids are going to need a completely different approach. They'll need to learn how to have self-confidence as well as stoicism to deal with rejection, failure, and manipulation.
Basically, you have to write a children's book that is addressed to the different children's behavioral pathologies that have emerged from the atomization. One is the """conservative""" pathology, and the other is the """"liberal"""" pathology for a better terms.
Luckily, we've conversed before so I'll replace them with "resistor" mental pathologies, and "inductor" mental pathologies.
Ayy, I found another! I'll limit my divulgence of details because I'm trying to break the habit - sometimes it's hard to stop talking about personal shit. But it's on topic and I sort of have to play my hand for this conversation.
I went through some shit. Missing some chunks of memory, been spending the past several years learning how to feel anger because I rather successfully sealed up the little problems that I had control over. The parts I remember I still have nightmares about. I don't go outside much because I shut down if I encounter one specific personality type (only ever encountered two).
You learn some interesting things as a person when you're forced into extreme situations for long periods of time. You know this, surely. One of my takeaways - once I understood just how my life was different than others I spoke to - was that I don't want anyone to go through what I did. Not much you can do there, but for the sad fuck stuck in that world, I want to reach out with some advice that could've helped me. Like, just something simple like "Some people really do want you to be miserable and will do anything they can to achieve it" would have helped me avoid a lot of anguish if I'd learned it earlier.
I've spent many years seeing psychologists and using psychiatric drugs (stopped the pills, not worth it). Most of that effort was pure curiousity; I needed to understand how I worked. I often advise for others to give it a try, but a good friend you can open up to is WAY better in my experience.
I hit an interesting roadbump around this matter. This was the path I started on, but then I got misdiagnosed with ADHD and forced onto an overdose of ritalin right around puberty. Boy, that was like flipping a switch, I became crippled by anxiety. "Your grades are better now, so you're staying on this medicine". The anxiety made avoiding some of the worse outcomes easier, at least.
So I think my motive is clear, but I'll spell it out because I can: I want to help other people overcome the hurdles that I could not (and the ones I could, I want others to overcome them with less struggle). I would've been a psych major like the other failures but I hate writing papers. But no, I'm probably not gonna seriously publish such a thing and put it in stores. If anything, I'd just post it online somewhere and probably never reach the intended audience.
Tell me just one thing, I'm really curious since I've never really identified a person with similarly poor youth. What's your friend making process like? Mine is an intense probing to feel out boundaries mixed with some bait to see if they're prone to behaviors that would put me off. I had to develop some awkward strategies to get sufficient data because people are surprisingly reluctant to open up to others. I'd be surprised if you had a similar issue with your process, but I'm betting it's an area you struggle with as well.
Most people are not used to dealing with proper predators. It's way less common than people like us suspect. But it's also less common than the predators themselves also think. They think everyone in the world is like them, but they really are the abnormal ones.
I never gave it a try because it was my intellect that got me through it. I literally had to think my way through problems. I'm not patting myself on the back here because I still got most of it wrong, but there's no way I could have used drugs to fix my problems, when my problems were primarily perceptual, and required introspection to fix.
We could always right it here, and use it as a foundation for teaching as an institution. We should try to attract more gamers, which are bound to be kids in similar positions. Might be worth a try.
I didn't.
The solution that I came up with scared the shit out of me, but it was the only rational solution that could have possibly existed. As an analogy without detail. I was scared of the dark, and so were my predators. So I embraced the dark, and found it far less dangerous than the light. I realized that my predators burned bridges to control my movement, but they were always the ones burning them. So I burned the bridge we both stood on.
This solution worked, despite toll in all other areas, so I replicated it. I avoided risk, and so I avoided social relationships. At the first sign of trouble, I burned bridges permanently, even to people who never intended for the bridges to be burned in the first place, surprising both of us: them being surprised that I burned the bridge over nothing, and me surprised that they weren't a predator and didn't intend to burn the bridge in the first place.
It turns out that 'becoming the darkness' and 'burning all of the bridges' is not the normal way of solving problems, and forming relationships.
...
oops
my bad
Basically, whatever friends I made, I made very early as a child. One of those is still around, and it's important to sometimes have my cold perspective on family issues because we come from wildly divergent perspectives. He is highly sociable. Such that, he needs my anti-social perspective to analyze problems analytically, and he is personally responsible for the entirety of my social life.
Which is fairly inappropriate on my part. I will need to ask him how he does that. "How do you friend?"
Best as I can tell, it involves repeatedly saying yes to social environments, developing contacts in those social environments to focus on, making an active effort to maintain relationships with those people by creating new/custom environments to share with your "social network", and prioritizing those relationships on interest, benefit, and feedback.
See, this is why they keep me around.
I'm not saying that I can't do these things. I can, it's just not part of my own development to do these things because I've never done them, and they are not part of a disciplined or repetitive regime for social engagement.
See, normal humans respond to emotional stimuli that results from prolonged isolation, loneliness, or even simple boredom by seeking out social gatherings that provide them with affirmation, entertainment, and intellectual stimuli among other things. So it comes naturally for them to reach out and engage in social groupings based on those stimuli. Since that has never been my response, I'm not currently wired to respond in a similar way. I take different ways instead.
What I, and probably you, need to do is use disciplined regimentation to re-condition ourselves into intentionally engaging in beneficial social environments as a response to those stimuli. I'm still working on that. It's much easier to do when you either value yourself enough to demonstrate self-worth as social value, or if you have social value in your social groups. So, it's always a good start to carry yourself (and present yourself) with confidence and affirmation. Hilariously, it works even if you don't mean it, because it's so internal and subjective that making yourself believe it, and it being true, are actually the same thing.
That's pretty good as far as coping mechanisms to develop. I pulled the card for dissociation so all I can do is nope out at will (and by reflex) - I have been trying to not do this recently because it's interfering with other skills developing. I'm almost jealous, but I'd have to take the history with it and I'll stick with the devil I know.
As far as "oops" goes, have you considered what you would have had to do in the absence of that choice? I've thought a lot about what I could have done differently, and the other paths available to me either sound worse or were impossible with the information I had at the time. I try to live my life with no regrets, but sometimes I still wonder if maybe prisontime would have been better for me. I'd probably be a different person, at the least, but I don't hate myself so there's not much potential for regret there.
I should elaborate, then. I didn't mean to imply that pyschiatric drugs are actually helpful for real problems. The only person who should even consider long term use is a person with a chemical imbalance, and even then I'd recommend trying to find a different solution. I was largely just playing along with idiot professionals in an attempt to experiment on myself because I wasn't clever enough to think out my answers.
I suppose an exception would be drugs that have recreational value. Alcohol helped me get through high school and helped me walk out of my room. The short term, regulated meds I stockpiled work to help me through unavoidable scenarios I'm forced into that I can't afford to "nope out" from. But these are shitty solutions.
The conclusion I came to in my therapy is that my only path forward is to open a door inside me that was closed for a reason. It's great to know this. But I refuse to ever open that - I will choose death first.
Hmm, sounds similar to a friend I had during school years. I got involved in a lot of 'normal' activities and with a lot of 'normal' people through him. Only, I never really spoke my mind to him, so I was appreciated as a listener instead of as a friend. I'm grateful, regardless, and consider my debt paid. All of my "friends" betrayed me when I asked them for help and understanding. So I said fuck this shallow friend shit and never bothered again. Now, what I call friend is probably closer to family for other people.
Even if I misinterpreted your words, I'm glad you have at least the one friend. Life gets real bleak with no one to talk to.
Relatedly, your evaluation of how to make a friend sounds..well, correct, but I think all it can produce is shallow friendship. That may be useful for you in a self-mastery sort of way. I won't try to give advice there, as my process for friends and mates are identical and it created many years of trouble for me. The times I tried switching to a more normal method like what you describe would quickly veer off course - my bad there though because I thought it'd be okay to socialize with furries in college (people think fags are bad about promiscuity, holy shit they have no idea about furries).
I have one close friend and one mate right now. Feels bad sometimes, I know I can't fulfill my role in a romantic relationship properly with the state of my emotions, but I'm dang dumb enough to do it anyway.
Y'know, I never really thought to pry with gaming buddies that vaguely mention abusive pasts. Perhaps I missed some. Though I wasn't in the mindset to look for a long time. I only recently found out that there's a psych label for it (to the best of my knowledge, and borrowing from my sister's expensive therapists): cptsd. Basically when you get ptsd and then instead of being allowed to recuperate you're damaged repeatedly for years. Not recognized by american psych institutes so no tendies for me. Your prior explanation of it was more in depth, but I think a normie might understand "ptsd squared" better. Rambling, sorry.
Perhaps I'm reading in too deeply, but the two quotes put together seems to make a decent case. The only real counter I have is that I'm unsure how to imagine a troubled kid getting mixed up in culture war. Kids should be focusing on cool stuff and learning. The topics we get into here kind of demand an advanced set of mental filters that I wouldn't expect a kid to have, similar to how a kid should never be bothered with political talk (real politics, not the political circus stuff). I can't imagine how I would have even reacted to having casualized internet in my youth, let alone gamergate. Maybe I could have instinctively sided against journos because I became disgusted with the emotional manipulation present in news media fairly young.
It activates my grim humor sometimes when doing so. People so easily swayed, I reflexively look down on them. Ironically, one of my most common presentations is slave mentality - by that, I mean, present yourself as a beaten dog. But I spent a lot of time around lowlifes where it helped me blend in. Simple confidence is definitely more comfortable, but sometimes it just serves to increase my cognitive load by adding extra variables into my efforts to read the minds of everyone in the room - easier to go unnoticed on a slow brain day. It did take me quite a while to understand how to get confidence to draw on, though.
As far as faking...I get you there, but it ties into an advanced dissociative technique I learned at my first/last job, where I turn on autopilot and crank out a bunch of mimicry to get through any small social encounter. I'm good at it, but it makes me feel sick in my gut and heart afterwards. Like a tiny betrayal of my values, I dunno, it's been hard to figure out.
I've considered it, but I always come back to "no way". I can always figure out a way to solve a problem caused by isolation, and I'll always justify it even if it's inefficient or ridiculous. I've accepted that. The biggest part of it that kills me is that one of my hobbies is pnp game design and playtesting is a monumental task when there's zero playtesters.