something_else

@Yimpa @Jannes Thanks for your insights! It depends on a lot of factors. If I'm interested or excited by the work or if there is a deadline for it tomorrow then it will be quite easy to focus on it and get it done. Sometimes on a good day I can also focus on stuff I have to do but that I don't enjoy, but that feels like maybe a couple of days out of every two weeks. If it is an average day, I don't enjoy the work that needs to be done, and there is no deadline then it will take me 3x as long as it would take someone else because the mind just continually gets distracted and hunts for dopamine. And even if I manage to get my mind to start doing something hard that I don't want to do, it will not give it it's full effort. It will half ass it or rush it just so it can be 'done' but then the work will often be full of careless errors. From the outside this can look like laziness, but that is not really how the experience is on the inside. It's more like knowing what to do, knowing how to do it, knowing all of the right things to do, but your mind just will not co-operate.

I've recently been diagnosed with ADHD. When I look back on my life, especially childhood and early adulthood, it really should have been much more obvious. However it never really occurred to me that a lot of my troubles could be caused by ADHD until the last year or two. I thought a lot of the stuff I struggled with was just 'normal' and that everybody was like that. Anyway, I've been prescribed Elvanse (Vyvanse for people in the US) and it will be arriving shortly. I have tried Ritalin and Vyvanse a couple of times before (just as a one off) and based on that I feel like consistently taking these meds has the potential to be life changing. It was truly insane to experience what it is like to have a mind that just does what you want it to do instead of fucking around all of the time and self-sabotaging you at every turn. I also notice that they significantly improved my social anxiety and made me realise that most of my social anxiety came not from shame, but from a lack of ability to trust my mind to pay attention and behave during conversations. I'm curious if anybody here both has ADHD, and has experience with ADHD meds and the effects they had? Thanks

For me I think it is the other way around, I think the ADHD causes social anxiety. I did not have social anxiety as a child, in fact the opposite, but I did have quite noticeable ADHD symptoms. Looking back, the ADHD behaviour from my childhood is likely what caused me to get bullied so badly which is what ultimately caused the more traditional rejection-fearing social anxiety that I struggled with for many years. I'm now over that rejection-fearing social anxiety and just left with what feels like the social anxiety caused by a chemical imbalance in my brain. I know I'm socially capable and I don't really feel any more scared of rejection than a normal person, but it feels like when I'm having a conversation my brain is just not locked in most of the time, it just will not produce words to reply to the person I'm talking to. This causes me to run on stress instead of the relaxed playfulness and presence that creates fun conversations. Trying out medication completely reversed this. It felt like I actually had space to breath and relax in conversations instead of being fuelled by stress all of the time. It also felt like my brain started naturally producing replies to other people without me needing to use stress as a motivator to get my mind to produce words. Have you ever tried it at all? Even just as a once off?

Dude... just admit you made a mistake, it ain't that hard. This is some weapons grade mental gymnastics I used to vape and have largely quit. I still do it occasionally when out socially with friends but it's not something I do daily anymore like I used to. The 95% figure comes from the NHS (health service in the UK). It is somewhat misleading in the sense that smoking is SO bad for you that being 95% healthier than smoking cigarettes is still pretty bad for you. But realistically when you look at what you're inhaling into your lungs in a vape versus a cigarette it's pretty intuitive that it should be orders of magnitude less harmful. e-liquid is basically vegetable oil with flavourings and nicotine. Nicotine isn't that bad for you itself, just highly addictive. The biggest risk is probably heavy metals from cheap vape coils, which is bad, but if you have anything other than a cheap disposable vape it's a non-issue. Compare that to the (literally) 7,000 different combusted chemicals you inhale from a cigarette. 250 of those chemicals are confirmed to be directly harmful to the human body. 70 of them are confirmed to cause cancer. You're inhaling carbon monoxide from cigarettes, hell there are even traces of hydrogen cyanide in cigarettes. Compare all of that to some super-heated vegetable oil and flavourings. There is really just no way it's possible that vaping is even remotely close to being as bad for you as smoking cigarettes is.

It is undoubtedly better for you than smoking according to all major modern research. Obviously it's still really bad for you, but if you are a smoker it is like 95% better for you to switch to vaping instead of continuing to smoke. You do typically consume more nicotine with vaping if you use full strength e-liquid, although there are two things worth noting here: with vaping you can control the dosage very precisely because you can choose the amount of nicotine in e-liquid you use — a common way to quit smoking or vaping is to continually lower the strength of your e-liquid by 2mg every week or two until you hit zero nicotine without even really noticing nicotine itself is not all that harmful to your body, just very addictive — it is the delivery mechanism (cigarette tar, heavy metals in vape coils) that harms you This is like a 101 course on exactly how not to talk to people with an addiction

I have dated casually for extended periods of time, and it's for a few reasons. Firstly, most relationships I see look pretty miserable. You sacrifice most of your freedom and lose a lot of yourself in a relationship. Secondly, the consequences of getting it wrong are high. Especially once you've been together for 4+ years it becomes very hard to end things, yet it is often not until around the 3-4 year mark that you really see the core issues actually start to develop. Thirdly, dating casually, especially as a man, grows you quite a lot in many ways. Gotta face a lot of fears. Fourth, sex with lots of different people is fun, and if you make sure to follow safe sex principles, the risk is low as well. This is not to say I don't want a long term relationship some day, just probably not in my 20s. I would rather live my own life throughout my 20s than sacrifice half of it for someone else in a way that ends up blowing up. I'm probably on the avoidant scale to a degree, but I am also capable of forming deep emotional connections. I don't mind opening myself up to other people fully, or sharing my authentic self. I just fundamentally hate the loss of freedom that a long term relationship requires and so it is not worth the risk/sacrifice for me just now It's pretty easy as long as everybody involved knows that it's just casual. Treat partners with respect, treat them as humans, and enjoy their company. Don't just use their body and then discard them

Perhaps. In my case, I go on a date every few weeks with somebody from a dating app who also has similarly casual intentions, or maybe once per month (or less) I go out to a bar/club with my friends and sometimes end up hooking up with someone. It's not really clear to me what the negative impacts of that on my life would even be.

Majority came from a year of backpacking, but in total this came from around 3 years of being single.

It's how I got to over 100 partners, lol Never had an STD, unwanted pregnancy, and I've also had two healthy long term (3+ year) relationships as well.

You're allowed your preferences, but it seems extreme to call it a mental illness. Especially if you do it responsibly by focusing on having safe sex, regular STD tests, not leading people on, communicating clearly that everything is casual etc. having a lot of partners isn't really inherently a negative thing. Context is important.

I find low effort mass appeal marketing to be quite annoying as well. Occasionally I see some really clever and creative marketing that I feel shows marketing can be appreciated as an art form.

That sounds like a pretty accurate assessment of pickup, although I (perhaps because I am biased) do not think avoidant attachment style is really a negative. I have quite a few deep friendship bonds and I've been in several long term relationships where there was a deep emotional connection, so I'm capable of attachment. I just don't really see why it's necessary to completely attach on to a person to the degree that a long term relationship requires. That is all very fair, I agree with basically everything here

I think the primary reason men end up casually dating for extended periods of time (probably myself included) is avoidant tendencies. You must sacrifice so much freedom to be in a relationship and to me that is rarely worth it. I think freedom is one of my highest values. Whether that is healthy or not is debatable. I can just maintain friendships and casual relationships and get all of my emotional and physical needs met while still also maintaining the freedom I enjoy. Most long term relationships I see are pretty miserable, though there are exceptions. Hedonism is chasing only pleasure in your life. Chasing some pleasure in your life is not really hedonism. Doing nothing fun or pleasurable sounds like a miserable way to live life, like at that point why even bother being alive. Life is about finding a balance of pleasure seeking and achieving longer term goals.

It's not really clear to me why pursuing pleasure is inherently wrong. It only becomes a problem if it is pursued to the degree that it severely interferes with other things in your life. Also, especially as a guy, dating casually can force you to confront a lot of your fears as well. It definitely grows you.

The guys who have success doing this have mastered convincing a woman that she was just so special that he had to approach her on the street. Meanwhile he has executed this exact same deception on 30 other woman that passed down that high street in past few hours. Success in this kind of thing is fundamentally based on deception because if the girls knew what you were doing they'd be repulsed.

It is not really inherently high value or low value. Some people who have a lot of casual sex are doing it unethically and unconsciously and some are doing it ethically and consciously.

If every now and then you approach a women you see while going about your day, that's totally fine, lots of perfectly normal but confident dudes do this. I don't think anybody takes issue with it. It's spam approaching every girl that passes down a high street that is quite toxic and rightfully perceived as creepy by women. The reason is because a man who actually had value and a social life would not need to do this, and so it makes you come across as incredibly low value, to the point of being a social outcast.

Mine is pretty high, but I never set out to "sleep with 100 women", I just kind of got there over several years by partying and travelling a lot. Largely all of this was done under the lens of improving my social skills and overcoming social anxiety rather than actual 'pickup'. Setting yourself a goal of sleeping with 100 women is quite odd, and I think pickup as a framework is quite degenerate in general. Especially the spammy high street kind.

This is nuanced, I suspect a lot of the stats here are skewed by things like gang activity, which your average man does not really need to worry about just walking down the street. An average woman is probably more likely to be attacked/injured/assaulted/harassed by random men on the street just because she is a woman. Your average man has probably rarely or never been bothered by a stranger on the street, while the average woman has somewhat frequently. This is why women fear walking down the street on their own more.

Yes, and if you give her nothing other than boring mechanical and logistical texting she will largely feel nothing towards you. Again, I'm not arguing you shouldn't be direct, I'm arguing that you should try to be engaging and interesting as well as direct, and that combining all of those together is where the skill in texting lies.

I'm not arguing you shouldn't be direct. I'm arguing that the skill lies in being both direct and flirty enough to build some chemistry over text while also moving things forward. Don't be so direct that you scare her or are boring, and don't text for so long that you end up wasting her time and yours. The text message chain you gave there is very formal and honestly quite boring. You should be playful, direct, and flirty. The age plays into it because most women from my generation have grown up on phones and thus expect you to have basic texting skills. If you end up in a relationship you're going to text a lot, and if you cannot do that in an interesting way from the beginning many women will interpret this as poor social skills / poor communication skills.

Yea I'm not suggesting you text for ages before going on a date, but you need to build at least some basic chemistry with a few texts. Even on dating apps, I generally send 2-3 flirty messages on the app then ask for a whatsapp, then a little bit of flirting, then invite out for drinks. If you are good at texting you can build decent chemistry with only a few messages. That is where the skill in texting lies. There's a dating app called Breeze which streamlines the dating app process by removing any ability to chat, they plan the date for you. It works somewhat well, but I have suggested it to something like 4-5 women and most of them were irked/scared by the idea of zero texting before meeting a guy, which shows to me that texting is at least somewhat important.

The vast majority of Gen Z or younger millennial women are going to want to establish some kind of chemistry over text before meeting up with you, which is very understandable. Yes, you should absolutely be using text to set up a date to see if there is real life chemistry but you should be doing this in a flirty way and not just a very logistical "hello, let's go for a date a location A at 8pm" kind of way which is what it seems like you're suggesting.

Having multiple accounts is a bannable offence

You're a 100% certified fruitcake bro