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Wellness Wednesday for March 29, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Not infrequently someone here will ask for advice on improving their social skills, and I guess this week it's my turn.

My question: can anyone offer testimonials of having significantly altered their personality through conscious effort? I've become increasingly skeptical that certain kinds of change are possible.

I am 30, socially retarded, and have tried much of the usual advice, including

  • joining hobby groups (sports, dance, music, improv, rationalists, board games) - never made any lasting friends

  • improving fitness / grooming / appearance - this is in progress and I expect I'll continue to work on this

  • talking to strangers - doesn't go well (nor particularly poorly, just awkwardly)

My concern is that hanging out with people who are not very close friends is 1) difficult, in that I suck at establishing rapport, thinking of things to say, responding with appropriate emotion, 2) extremely tiring, and therefore 3) just unpleasant. This is true even if the people are super nerdy and share the same interests as me. One has to keep track of the words, body language, and emotional states of both oneself and one's interlocutor, and that is too much for my brain to handle. Literally there will be moments when I realize I should probably stop staring at the floor and make some normal brief eye contact, and in the second it takes me to adjust, I will lose track of the other person's sentence, and therefore be unable to respond appropriately.

Roughly from 2016 to 2019, I aggressively (by my standards) sought out chances to practice socializing and attended more meetups / hobby groups than I wanted to. Looking back, I don't think my social skills improved much, and socializing didn't ever get more fun or bearable. I did, however, get better at noticing the social skills I lack. Some things I've learned are

  • the chasm between how normal extroverts experience life and how I do is even wider than I thought

  • the facility and graceful precision with which sociable people can smooth over a bad joke, off-color statement, or awkward silence is incredible

  • the returns to social skills in every aspect of life - friends, dating, career, learning, general wellbeing - are much greater than I realized

I am now trying to decide whether I should redouble my efforts in this area (which is tiring and demoralizing) or essentially give up, and just live my life in the way that is natural to me: avoid talking to people whenever possible, one or two close friends excepted, never leave home except for work and necessary errands, and accept that I'll miss out on the benefits of human connection.

Other facts about me:

  • My coworkers are brilliant, most clearly smarter than me. In general this makes small talk more difficult since the bar for a comment being passably interesting is higher.

  • I am temperamentally boring and don't really enjoy most activities people find fun, especially if they involve leaving the house. Books and movies are good enough for me.

  • I started taking Vyvanse recently, which probably doesn't help here. But my social problems predate Vyvanse.

Yes, I've changed my personality quite a bit over the years. One other thing that I was very surprised by is just how much being jacked affords you social leeway. I've been losing weight recently, slowly revealing the muscles I've built over the past 8 years of gym training, and I can literally perceive the difference in social treatment that each additional 10lbs lost makes. I'm planning on writing a longer post on that once I get to where I want to be.

I've been lifting on and off for about 7 years, making slow and unsteady progress, but I'm still skinny by American standards and with a shirt on I look like I've never stepped foot in a gym. I'm aware of the things I need to work on, including consistency, diet, and sleep, but I don't know if I'll ever manage to do everything perfectly. The low reward/effort ratio is honestly frustrating. Do you think it would be worth getting on PEDs?

Do you think it would be worth getting on PEDs?

It might be, if you estimate that increases in your social desirability would do more for your happiness than the decreases from possible steroid side-effects. If you start taking steroids, you better do a shit-ton of research first on endocrinology, maybe freeze your sperm before you do this if you really want kids later on (you can still have kids, but you need what's called a "post-cycle therapy" to make your body restart producing testosterone on your own). And be aware that once you start steroids, you're basically committing yourself to a lifetime of TRT. Be aware that you could get enlarged organs, really fucking bad acne on your body, small testicles, high blood pressure, weird mood swings, etc. But it still might be worth it for you.