Hope posting

Change maxing

I swear we could de-radicalize young men if this was talked about more. Just say hi to people

Inevitably there would be some incels who claim that speaking to women like normal human beings is an attempt by the matrix to emasculate men.

Fake: Anon goes out in public
Gay: other 4channers are supportive

\s

Volunteer work is an amazing way to break cycles of isolation and loneliness. You have a shared common goal with other volunteers and you are making a collective effort to improve the lives of those less fortunate than you. Even if you walk away without having met the love of your life or whatever, at least you can feel good knowing that you helped make the world a better place and got to meet some cool, likeminded people.

Wasn't this one of Elliot Rodger's issues, he just didn't talk to women

One of the biggest problems is that, outside of early school, there's no real way to practice social interactions in a safe setting. The only real option is jumping straight in. If you're already slightly socially stunted, it can be very easy to mess it up. It only takes a couple of negative reactions to put someone off for a long time.

I almost fell into the same hole when I was younger. Thankfully I realised what was likely happening and worked on it. I'm still not good at cold approach social interactions, but I can at least now do it without screwing up catastrophically.

How do you convince yourself that 27 vs 30 is a difference that matters in any way

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this could easily work both ways and someone could talk to THEM.

Still better this way than the Trump way

Yeah. And if you get rejected a few times, don't turn that into an entire personality. Laugh at yourself.

Lack of confidence will do some fucked up things to your brain honestly

Volunteer work backfires for a lot of people when they work at like food pantries though. You get a huge amount of entitled rude assholes and it can make you hate the public and/or the destitute

When i read 30 i thought: oh no, he's talking up 17 year olds.

As long as they don't mistake making a new friend with expectations of having a girlfriend. I've had plenty of guy "friendships" which I genuinely thought would last for years, but the moment they noticed I wasn't having sex with them they pulled away to never be heard of. It breaks your heart in a different way.

It's hard reconciling the fact you are being generous (even indirectly) and the fact that poor people with fucked up lives may be a bit too busy with their shitty lives to show gratefulness.

Like animals biting you when you rescue them, it's hard to understand, no doubt.

Yeah that’s crazy to think people in your HS cohort are too far in age to you to relate

This is such a self-destructive act. Being friends with women gives you more chances of a) meeting women, and b) actually knowing how to interact with them when you do.

¯_(ツ)_/¯ I can’t really speak to that. I volunteer with local mutual aid orgs because it more directly and sustainably impacts the local community.

Also the fact that many of us make for great friends

> "greentext"
> look inside
> red text

Fake: anon talks to women.

Gay: text isn’t green.

Yes, I wasn't even mentioning the whole "hanging with your peeps is awesome" bit, just the infuriating low-hanging incel fruit.

30 is the narrative online where you're pretty much 100 years old. They're convinced once you hit 30 you might as well be her grandpa. The manosphere propaganda feeds off ageism insecurity.

there's no real way to practice social interactions in a safe setting

There are small talk opportunities if you know where to look.

Dog parks are my favorite. Bring your dog, make small talk with the other owners, get to know some of them. It's a low stakes environment that doesn't cost any money, allows you to exit at any time, guarantees at least one shared interest or commonality with people who live near you. You don't even have to talk to people the first few times you go, and can build up comfort/familiarity in the specific place before you take the next step of striking up a conversation with another regular you see a lot.

Another option is where unrelated parties might mingle in shared space: communal tables or bar seating at coffee shops or bars or parks or even restaurants. These fleeting interactions might help practice the skills of small talk, enough to where it's easy to have conversations with strangers.

And sometimes you can outsource the actual cold approach to the extrovert strangers you might encounter, by giving them something to talk about. A baseball cap with your university, a T-shirt with your favorite band from a tour you saw live, a tattoo of something fun, other items of clothing or accessories that might attract positive attention. Sometimes people will say something about it, and then you can talk about a shared interest or background at that point.

Lines and waiting rooms are also sometimes good places to pass the time with conversations. It's a little harder now than 20 years ago, with the rise of smartphones, but it's still a place where people might be bored and appreciate a little conversation to mix things up.

Speaking from the guy perspective (and not at all to minimize your pain) sometimes pulling away is necessary for managing feelings of rejection and longing; better to pull away than to have a crash out in a year about how her boyfriend isn't you but also still bad. It just sucks all around.

I got over my fear of talking to pretty girls sometime around my junior year of high school. Having overheard lots of conversations, and from talking to my female* friend across the street, I realized that girls are more like us than not. For example, get 'em talking about sex among themselves and they nasty.

So I decided I would approach girls same as I would a male peer and damn did that work! I could write an essay, but pretty girls are so used to ass kissing that treating them like one of the guys, ya know, normal, grabs their attention. Ass kissers don't present any sort of challenge, they're boring as paste. Don't be afraid to rib and tease a bit! This is where the idiot notion of "negging" comes from, started as normal flirting, went way too fucking far.

Going to stop now before I end up with the aforementioned essay.

* Going to be drug out and shot as an incel, but she was neither a woman nor a girlfriend. "Neighbor girl who was a friend but not my girlfriend" is a mouthful.

because you're stupid and you think things like that are deterministic laws

It's the cultural narrative of where adulthood begins these days.

Childhood has been extended through your 20s.

it used to be 18 in the 1950s.

My nephew is 16. He thinks he can't date a 15 year or its pedophilia. He thinks this because it's what all the other kids his age think and he is terrified of being called a pedo.

So when a girl who was a grade younger than him asked him out he said no, even though he really liked her, because he didn't want to get socially ostracized for breaking the rules. Awhile later a girl who is 16 flirted with him and he asked her out, but that's cool because they are the same age and there is no 'power imbalance'.

There is a lot of 'age paranoia' going on in online spaces that has filtered out into the real world, such that an 18 year old dating a 16 year old (which I did when I was in HS) is considered horrible and awful, not normal and acceptable.

And some folk extend this to various other ages and perceived 'age gaps'. Like 28 year old dating a 24 year old being considered 'predatory' now. It's stupid... but people believe lots of crazy/stupid things and you aren't going to convince them otherwise because they like using age gaps as some sort of measure of moral acceptability for other people's relationships.

It's not necessarily true at all.

Volunteer work can be full of really shitty and awful people who justify their shittiness based of their 'good intentions'.

I have volunteered my entire life and seen many orgs fail/fall apart due to shitty people getting involved and cannibalizing the org for their own selfish ends, or wanting to turn it into a social club first and a volunteer org second/third.

It can be rewarding, but a lot of orgs are full of very catty insular people who don't want you to be part of their group unless you look/talk/walk like they do, and you tow whatever 'party' line they believe in, even if it's shitty.

Someone volunteering doesn't make them automatically a good or a nice person. That's the smokescreen shitty/selfish people use though to justify their crappy behaviour in these orgs.

The other volunteers bite you too.

And it's easy to understand, a lot of them are bored miserable people looking for an outlet and decided volunteering was the best way for them to power trip and pat themselves on the back while doing so. Or to get away form their wife/husband/kids that they hate. Def met quite a few people like that in my volunteering.

you realize that the inverse is also true.

a lot of people are radicalized because they say hi to people and get told off for their basic politeness/decency?

I'm repeatedly shocked at how hostile people are to me the past few years, in a way they never were previously in my entire life. And well, it's because they have been convinced that even when I pick up the wallet they dropped on the ground to give it back to them, I must be 'attacking' them. because they are indoctrinated that all men are evil nonsense.

and i imagine if I was younger I'd find these experiences a lot more damaging to my psyche, because I might not have ever known a time when being kind to a stranger was considered a threat, like I did when I was young.

I pull away because i don't want to deal with other people's endlessly negative expectations of the world and of me/themselves.

it's exhausting and miserable, and I would rather be alone and happy than socially involved and miserable.

It's not dating either, it's just socializing in general. It sucks to try and meet up with old friends or make new ones, and all they want to do is complain about how awful the world is and how unfair their lives are, and if you don't agree... they think you are a terrible person.

I miss the days when you could meet people and the topics were not an endless self-pity party. I can't remember the last time I met a stranger and they didn't immediately launch into a 'woe is me' conversation. The last time I met a person who wasn't like that was 3-4 years ago. and 8 years ago... I would actually meet a lot of folks who weren't like that.

My other thing that drives me away from socialization... people don't ask me questions or talk to more anymore. They just... lecture me about myself and make really arrogant and stupid assumptions about me. And if I correct them about their wrong assumptions, they get angry and tell me that I am wrong. Another social change I just can't understand, and I notice when I ask people questions they get offended by it like it's rude to ask them basic facts about themselves... and that's how I enjoy interacting with people... so yeah what is the point?

That's just humans grasping the slightest bit of authority and going crazy.

Welp, one down, only 4.1 billion more tries left.

So I decided I would approach girls same as I would a male peer and damn did that work!

Turns out the big secret to meeting people of the other gender is to focus on the "people" part.

That's all dependent on where you live. Maybe where you live that's socially acceptable?

Where I live that's not socially acceptable. It's considered rude and offensive to approach strangers in public spaces unless you have a prior social connection. Even the dog park is like that here.

The only place where it would be acceptable is at these socialization events, and those are often highly structured, like those events where you have to ask people questions on index cards in a weird attempt to force intimacy. 'skip the small talk' type of shit.

are you suggesting that socialization is a two-way street? that people might be seeking reciprocity for their efforts?

how dare you sir!

No, he was mentally ill. He just blamed women, and men, not liking him for the root of his illness, rather than realizing it was his illness that was the problem.

the problem with mental illness is people who are mentally ill often have a misconception of causality of their problems. they blame other folks for what is mostly going on inside themselves.

Real: Anon can improve himself by going outside.

Straight: Anon talked to women.

Anon doing volunteer work? Already a vastly different type from the wide sea of other Anons.

I live in the United States. This is true of urban dog parks I've lived near in the East Coast, the West Coast, Texas, and the Midwest. I didn't have a dog when I lived in rural or small town America, so I don't have direct experience with that, but my impression of stranger openness in rural areas wasn't that different.

For communal spaces, striking up conversations with people near you is also pretty natural. Sitting next to someone at a bar or counter, especially in hotels and airports, is an easy way to talk to someone to pass a little bit of time, and then just disappear back into anonymity whenever you feel like it. The training wheels version is talking to your bartender, and then leaving to talking to other people who are talking to the bartender.

At this point I also have kids, so anywhere there are other parents is also an easy way to talk to strangers. Parks and playgrounds. School and extracurriculars and summer camps and stuff like that have plenty of opportunities to run into semi regular faces that become familiar.

I also know several of my neighbors' names (and basically all of their dogs' names). When I lived in apartment buildings I tended to get to know a few other people who lived in the building, who I'd regularly see in the elevators or lobby or mail room or common areas/amenities.

Probably the most important skill is being able to say something as part of a fleeting moment. Even using the description of "approaching strangers" sounds far more intentional than what I'm talking about, rather than just saying something to someone who is already physically close enough to hear.

And no, nowhere I've lived or regularly worked in the US (around 10 cities and 7 states) would it be considered rude to say to a stranger "ooh, I like your shirt." People like to be complimented, especially on their choices. Same with "can I say hi to your dog?" or "hey where did you buy that coffee, is it anywhere near here?" It's easiest when not every interaction is expected to escalate, and fostering a particular openness is how extroverts meet others, and occasionally step up to the next level (turning a one-off question to a stop-and-chat, having a good enough small talk that you exchange contact information, grabbing a meal or drink together, doing another activity together, etc.). I get that it's harder for people who don't already do all these things to start, but I'm asking people to look for small ways to start, if that's what they actually want in life.

Cool. I live in Boston and anytime I try to be polite to people casually they almost always get angry, even when I'm doing them a favor like picking up something they dropped on the street.

You call it skills, I call it culture change, because I never had this issue 10 years ago. Folks were way more open minded and friendly a decade ago than they are today. Now I say hi to the person at the bar other than the bartender they glare and just stare harder into their phone. Only person that will chat you up at a bar is the bartender usually.

Dog park by me is a lot of old folks who just want to talk about how young people are awful. Never met anyone under 60 at the dog parks I've been too. And most dog owners I meet on the street are completely unfriendly unless they are also gray-haired. Though sometimes they will ask me what breed my dog is and I will say 'mixed' and they will scowl... because most folks here have purebred designer dogs.

Typically I only ever see strangers interacting when I'm traveling and that's the only time they positively interact with me. Like I I get out of town for the weekend and go out to Vermont, folks are a lot friendlier and less hostile. And the local subreddit for this city used to have a post every day about 'why are people so mean and unfriendly here'. so I'm not alone in that experience.

And my neighbors never talk to me unless they want to bitch at me for a friend/family for 'parking in THEIR spot' or trying to get me to support whatever NIMBY petition they are trying to pass, and if you said you don't support restricting housing development and lower taxes they get extremely angry and rant about how 'people like you are ruining this city'. I also ride a bike and they all drive cars, which often results in weird passive aggressive comments about 'when are you going to grow up'. So, why would I want to interact with those miserable judgemental folks and their weird entitlement issues?

I used to volunteer a lot and I quit because even in those spaces people were increasing anti-social and downright hostile when you tried to make conversation with them and it's fucking miserable trying to help someone and ask them where they live as a polite small talk and they scowl at you or ask you if you are trying to stalk them rather than being like 'oh i live in x, what you?'

I'm glad you compulsively responded to every positive comment to tell them how wrong they are and how bad volunteering is.

Hopeposting. I was clenching so hard for the plot twist

Wait there’s a specific Color to the outcome of 4chan texts?