Ponder
7d ago
In my experience when someone struggles with socializing people often suggests that person should try meetup. So, the bias is that people that go to meetup often struggle with social skills. Generally, I notice it more with groups that are for a specific age demographic, or that mostly do happy hour type events. When the meetup is around some niche hobby that requires commitment and effort the people tend to have better social skills.
To put it more plainly the meetup pattern I noticed is something like this: meetup tends to attract the possibly on the autism spectrum types that need practice at socializing because they didn't fully learn social skills at an earlier stage in life. Then the people with the worst social skills drive away the people with better social skills by doing things like hitting on multiple girls, or saying some really cringe things. There isn't really a polite/viable way to keep the people with underdeveloped social skills out of the Meetups so people with better social skills avoid them in favor of invite only friend groups. If the social skills level of a meetup drops too low then you end up with a bunch of people that are trying to learn social skills, but the other people in the meetup have the same deficit so it is hard for anyone to help each other. It is kind of a tragedy because you've got a bunch of people who recognized their social flaws and are making an effort to fix that, but are in a setting that often reinforces their social anxiety. They need something more structured with a role model/leader to help them develop social skills and give them feedback - but society doesn't really have a free version of that if you don't already have a social network.
Ponder
7d ago
I'd be curious to hear more about your exposure therapy
Sure, but I must add a caveat that my approach is controversial, potentially dangerous, and not medical advice. Also, the medical system has not been open/supportive of my approach.
The cornerstone of my approach is to turn off my anxious thoughts with phenibut (an uncontrolled substance in the United States. Some people call it a nootropic, but it is more accurate to think of it an anti-anxiety drug). Then I do something like improv where I design a role that allows me to be confident, weird, and causes some people to be curious enough about what I'm doing to approach me (something like the wizard/magician archetype). When people approach me I can either respond in character as the role I'm pretending to be, or as my authentic self where I talk about experimenting with exposure therapy to help with my social anxiety.
The exposure therapy teaches me that people will accept me if I do odd/creative things without heavy masking if I'm in the right environment and I take a playful approach instead of a logical one. My exposure therapy role communicates a lot through non-verbal presence that I don't normally practice. It also teaches me that it can be fun/useful to play a different role and that I can play a role I want instead of the one society expects.
The exposure therapy experience runs into an issue with state-dependent memory where it is hard to recall the confident behavior when sober due to the altered mental state. Therefore, I do a lot of sober planning, integration, and journaling to integrate the confident behavior into my sober persona. Tapering helps to transfer the learned skills to the sober state. Also, researching cognitive science and psychology helps me come up with new ideas for my exposure therapy experiment.
I also combine phenibut with real nootropics to reach an optimal state for the exposure therapy role. On the phenibut day I might use things that increase energy/motivation (dopamine precursors)/mood. I do get a bit of rebound anxiety about 48 hours after taking phenibut so I experiment with nootropics to manage this too.
Phenibut is not well understood but my personal experience tends to indicate it has 3 primary effects that have different timeframes. GABA-B receptor agonism peaks around 4-5 hours after taking phenibut. There is a slight impact on dopamine the day you take it that increases the motivation to socialize. Finally, the calcium channel blocking mechanism lasts the longest and creates a next day after glow for me - I feel calm and in a good mood all day but I don't have the same motivation to seek out social connections as the dosing day. Also, I found that I should never use phenibut more than once a week, and that I must take longer breaks occasionally.
I’m not very social, but I’m mostly content with that. I go to a weekly online book club about spirituality, but most other online content I just consume without engaging with (like listening to long-form podcasts).
In-person I go to a weekly men’s group and meet with a close friend or family about once a month. I also do my exposure therapy at a bar 2-3 times a month. My hobbies are mostly solitary: bicycling, working out, reading, and video games.
I used to attempt to be more social by going to things like Meetups, but I felt like the best outcome I could get was to be tolerated and it was very exhausting being around people I didn’t know in loud environments when I was sober. If I'm not in the right environment (quiet with a structure that encourages going beyond small talk) it feels very hard for me to succeed.
Ponder
11d ago
My journey feels like it is mostly unidirectional and I haven’t noticed the cycles. For me it was:
- Get good grades and follow rules to please the adults.
- Play Magic: the Gathering and video games for enjoyment and socialization with peers.
- Get a post-college job.
- Start burning out at work and romantically due to unwritten social rules that I didn't understand.
- Look for social rules/advice on the internet.
- Find SlateStarCodex.
- Realize that my observations and struggles around socialization were due to undiagnosed Aspergers and gain a better understanding of tribal social games.
- Make some posts in SSC adjacent communities about politics and personal struggles to get feedback on things I didn’t feel safe discussing elsewhere.
- Lose interest in most politics/controversial topics on the internet because people are just optimizing for engagement instead of having good faith discussions. (I've seen the pattern enough to learn that keeping any controversial opinions to myself generates the best outcomes).
- Get into weird (but less controversial) topics that seem to attract more open-minded people and keep normies away because they don’t have enough background information to keep up. (Things like Carl Jung, John Vervaeke, and nootropics).
- Do weird self-experimentation with nootropic assisted exposure therapy to reduce the amount I care about social pressure.
I was referring to Meetup.com specifically.
I have attended at least 100 meetups over the course of 10 years and the pattern I observed was that the 'cool' socially adjusted people would usually stop attending after a few meetups due to their frustration with other people being socially awkward (but this doesn't happen as often in groups dedicated to niche hobbies).
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