something_else

then don't start arguments on a forum lmao

This is basically saying "my arguments don't stand on their own, so I need charisma and manipulation to make people believe them"

Saying you are 'bored by small talk' is a classic defence mechanism for avoiding action and bolstering your own ego. "I'm so deep, I just can't tolerate small talk, everybody else is so boring." No, everybody is bored by small talk. Small talk is a tool used to advance to deeper conversations with new people. Socially skilled people know how to advance past small talk with almost anybody. It is not someone else's responsibility to provide you with interesting conversation, it's a shared effort, and that starts with small talk. I've made several life long friends from hosteling around. It's such a good environment to meet cool people and make friendships. You will need to tolerate some small talk though Then put together a solid profile too. I've had good results on dating apps using almost entirely photos of me taken while travelling, so another advantage of hosteling is building up a solid collection of good dating app profile pics.

I do know Scandinavian countries are quite reserved, but I feel like joining activities is a good way to meet people. Have you actually managed to make a solid social circle of friends? I don't mean 'social circle' in the pickup sense, I mean like actually building some deep friendships. Even if you are introverted, this will have a huge influence on your ability to date. You could also try to find communities of other non-native Scandinavians who may be more sociable. It sounds like a bizarre idea, but consider travelling to the more remote cities in Sweden, or other Scandinavian cities and staying in social hostels. You'll meet tons of really cool people that way.

Yes! I get those comfortable energy flows too, especially when combined with a cup of tea. Elvanse and a little caffeine create this serene state that doesn't feel like a high, just an ability to be fully present. I could be present before, but it always came with an underlying sense of fear. I'd developed this association between being present and making stupid mistakes, so being fully in the moment felt almost dangerous. Now I can experience that same feeling without making those mistakes. It also feels much easier to enter the flow state that, before medication, would strike randomly and inconsistently. Sometimes the flow is almost too powerful though, and I find myself stuck on something long after I know I should have moved on. I don't really notice the medication itself anymore. There's no obvious "Oh, it's kicking in" moment like there was during the first month. But the effects are still incredibly noticeable when I compare my life now to how it was before taking it.

What has been your approach to building a social circle of friends there?

Ehm, this is a bizarre take. Almost every argument is easier to express cleanly in written form than spoken form.

The reason for this is that humans always want what they see that others have, but they don't have. It's all relative. Humans have always been this way and likely will be for a long time to come. If you took a hunter gatherer or a caveman, they'd look at a snapshot of modern life and think: "How can you be struggling to survive when you can source all the food you could ever want by walking 5 minutes to a supermarket round the corner? And you have unlimited clean water pumped directly into your house?? And all you have to do for this is type on a computer all day???? And you still feel like you're lacking??? What is wrong with you, you have everything you could ever need to be happy." Yet we are not happy. The same would be true between now and say 100 years time in the world you are imagining and calling "post scarcity". There will still be things that are scarce. Just different things. And we would look at that world and think "You have a device that can produce anything material you could ever want for zero effort? Perfect health with zero effort?? And all you have to do is cash in your government distributed tokens which you get for zero effort???? And you still feel like you're lacking??? What is wrong with you, you have everything you could ever need to be happy." Yet I would bet a large amount of money they are not happy. Because their frame of reference views those things as normal and not special or valuable. Whatever is scarce at that time will become desirable. Maybe it's power, freedom, happiness itself, spiritual achievement, expression of oneself. A slightly more capable device that produces all material goods 10% faster. Who knows. It could be anything. But it will be something. There will still be some kind of hierarchy, and there will still be those who are at the bottom of it, and those who are at the top of it. As the hierarchy becomes shorter, like it may in such a world, small differences will start to matter more and more. It's also very possible that genetics and who your family is will become the defining source of value a person has to offer, which would not be a good world. As though that's the only luxury in the modern world? And besides that, try living somewhere with limited hot showers for a month. Suddenly they start to seem a whole lot more valuable and you start realising how much you took your hot shower at home for granted. I have experienced exactly this while trekking in places where cold showers are basically all that's available, except a few scarce places that charge you $10 for a solar powered hot shower. How can you know this for certain? Certainly about this is at best unwise and arguably delusion. There is no way to know how this would go. Maybe it will be beautiful. Or maybe it will cause a massive increase in obesity, depression, drug addiction and short term pleasure chasing. Maybe many humans will go insane when there is no purpose provided, or no obvious path to take in life. And maybe even those who do have a purpose or drive will find that there is no way for them to compete with the tech owned by those at the top of the hierarchy. Maybe AI will kill us all first. There are so many ways this could go which are not a happy ending. In a world like this, those at the bottom of the hierarchy could be viewed by those at the top like you view fruit flies in your kitchen. A minor inconvenience that can be removed with a small amount of effort. Not caring about something and having the power to eradicate it once it causes minor inconvenience is a very dangerous world.

This is like saying "just make X.com, uncorrupted ". Yea, that's the easy part, even before AI a college level software engineer could get a prototype working in a weekend. The hard part isn't the software, it's getting people to use it.

This is just not how the human mind works. If everyone has everything they want, the hedonistic treadmill kicks in and suddenly you get bored of having everything, and you start wanting whatever it is other people have that you don't have. And there will always be something others have that you don't. For example if you took cavemen and showed them the modern world, they'd wonder what the fuck we're all so unhappy about because everything is amazing, luxurious and so easy. They'd probably argue we're already in a post-scarcity world. Yet we're all still pretty miserable on average because everyone else around us has the same luxuries and we all still want whatever it is that's just out of our reach. The caveman would look at people buying a £20k handbag and think they were fucking insane idiots. In a post-scarcity world we may end up with bizarre things becoming desirable because there will always be things that are more scarce than others. If literally everything material becomes immediately available to you, then the people who own whatever tech makes that possible hold an insane amount of power that other people don't have. Which means there is still lack, and scarcity. Just in a different form. There will be a post-scarcity equivalent of the 20k handbag. That also assumes that in a post-scarcity world there is any reason to keep most of the population around, which beyond "it's the ethical thing to do", there is no logical reason to.

It's less about enforcing norms, and more about ensuring that dating app companies are transparent about how they operate. I should not have said "isn't in the interest of finding people partners" as that would involve enforcing norms. It was an offhand comment that doesn't actually represent what I think all that much. To expand, generally I don't think dating apps should be allowed to exist with the sole goal of making a profit at all, but I understand that's very wishful thinking. More realistic is regulation. Algorithms in particular should have requirements for transparency, right now they are optimised to make the apps money, which benefits few people aside from the dating app company itself. Bans should also have more transparency, and clear channels for appeal through a human. Being banned from a dating app (which often happens for unfair reasons) can genuinely have quite a big impact on somebody's ability to date nowadays. That's a lot of power for a single private company like Match group, which owns all major dating apps, to have. There are others too, for example clear guidelines/regulation on how user safety is handled. I don't think either of these forms of regulation really 'enforce the patriarchy'. It's more like the health and safety inspectors for a restaurant. Making sure restaurants prioritise customer safety rather than purely profit.

How so?

The way in which you framed the thread is absolutely whining. It was not shared from a neutral POV.

Dating apps should be more heavily regulated. They shouldn't be largely for profit organisations because that incentivises them to do a lot of sketchy shit that isn't in the interest of finding people partners. But there's little any of us can do to make that happen, you have to deal with how dating works in its current state regardless of how you think it should work.

Competent, emotionally engaging, dresses well, looks good, good hygeine, has things going on in his life, has purpose, has friends / is sociable.

Yea, I've heard this a few times from friends who took methylphenidate first. Personally I found it completely fine, but for many it has strong side effects. All of those friends found elvanse much MUCH smoother. I'd recommend trying it out. Basically the only side effect I have left from Elvanse is slightly diminished sleep quality. But I started taking it 4 months ago or so, and just a few days ago in my catchup with my boss (who doesn't know I have been diagnosed with adhd) he specifically said to me "your work in the past 3 or so months has been exceptional" and I'm now being offered a promotion. So it has genuinely been life changing. The biggest thing I notice is that I can now build momentum, which is the key to success in most areas of life. Previously at work I'd have a good month, then a bad month, then a few good months, then a few bad months. Never consistently improving. And I'd make the same mistakes over and over. Now I feel like each month I am actually getting better because I'm much more consistent. And I don't make the same mistakes more than once. I also have the mental bandwidth to do things beyond the bare minimum of what's required from me.

Nah, you should expect some euphoria when you first start taking stimulants. It usually lasts about 1-3 weeks.

Lol, I can't imagine how bad the chemicals inside a glowstick are for you. That cannot be healthy

He's right, though. This thread is just you complaining about others instead of accepting that perhaps your model of the world isn't ideal. You want the dating world to conform to your model, rather than building your model around the realities of the dating world. And worse, you're getting angry when the world doesn't match your internal model of how it should work, which leads to intense bitterness (what we see in this thread). In the original post you interpreted a girl at a hobby event not actively flirting with other men there but using a dating app as "dating apps are evil" because that is what you want to believe, and it soothes you. But there are hundreds of other explanations for that behaviour.

That's cool! Karaoke is my worst nightmare

I used to do this a lot, and I know it works well. Counterintuitively I can dance just fine on my own in the middle of the the busiest dance floors, like at a rave. But most of the places I'm going out to now are bars or bar / club hybrids which typically have very well lit small dance floors, which I find it very hard to relax and dance on because literally everybody can see you, and most people are barely dancing anyway. It's a minor issue in my life at this point, I go out to have fun with friends rather than to really push myself. Some nights when I'm out with my closest friends and the vibes are there dancing becomes super fun. But if it's a regular night out I tend to prefer chatting to cool new people rather than dancing.

I’ve become pretty confident, starting from a place of huge social anxiety, but dancing is the one thing I still struggle with a ton. It seems to bring out the worst of whatever is left of the social anxiety I used to have.

@Valach by there's nothing wrong with it I just mean I'm not judging anyone for it specifically. Sure some people sleep around for unhealthy reasons but you can identify that through other indicators.

This is a googleable stat.

It's probably not that insane. I reckon there's a high overlap between ADHD and having lots of partners. It certainly wouldn't surprise me. There's also nothing wrong with it either.