my suggestion is that if you’re lacking in social contact, or even if you just want to open up more opportunities in either social life or professional, don’t “suck it up” and pretend, but learn to understand and appreciate how socializing works by engaging in it like a game, learning what’s actually happening in “small talk” and how to make people feel comfortable with you and gaining emotional intelligence, empathy; qualities that most people look for in friends and romantic partners.

This is a severely neglected field of understanding for a lot of younger men right now and I don’t think we should be making whole communities that provide validation for people avoiding the discomfort and instead we should treat it like exercise and diet. We don’t exercise and diet because it feels good, we do it because the results are worthwhile. We tell people struggling with it “Just stick with it, it gets easier” and we treat that like good advice.

And again, it wouldn’t be such an issue if there wasn’t such a massive problem right now with social isolation. It’s a message of public health, not social conformity. If you’re happy as things are, nobody is forcing you to do anything, but if you battle depressive episodes or are lacking in relationships, if you don’t feel like you have people to talk to, if you’ve never had someone give you comfort and support and you would like that, well the good news is you can have that. You can have people in your actual, real life who care about you, which can then open up more opportunities. But it takes exercise.