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Swimmer963 comments on Open thread, October 2011 - Less Wrong
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That's actually exactly what I usually try to do. Unfortunately, most advice-givers in my experience tend to mistake #4 for #3. I point out that they've made an incorrect assumption when formulating their advice, and I immediately get yelled at for making excuses. I do actually have a tendency to seek excuses for non-action, but I've been aware of that tendency in myself for a long time and counter it as vigorously as I am able to.
I suppose it couldn't hurt to explain my actual situation, though. Gooey details incoming.
I live in the southwestern suburbs of Fairfield, California, on a fixed income that's just enough to pay the bills and buy food, with a little left over. (Look the town over in Google Maps to get a sense of what kind of place it is.)
Most critically, i suffer from Non-24, which, in the past, was responsible for deteriorating health and suicidal depression during high school, for forcing me to drop even the just-for-fun classes I was taking at the community college, as well as causing me to completely lose touch with my high school acquaintances before I figured out what I had and that there was a pattern to it and not just random bouts of hypersomnia and insomnia. It rules out doing anything that involves regularly scheduled activities; I even had to quit my World of Warcraft guild because of it.
Before I lost touch with my high school acquaintances, I did get to experience some normal social gatherings, though to me there was never anything particularly fun about being pelted with straw-wrappers at Denny's or dancing to Nirvana under a strobe-light or watching them play BeerPong. None of those people were ever my friends or even much of a support structure, and I don't actually miss any of them. I've been on several dates through OkCupid and my brief time in college, but they were all failures of emotional connection and in each case I was relieved when the girl told me she didn't want to go out with me anymore. I mention this to show that I'm not just assuming certain generic solutions won't work for me; I've confirmed it by experiment.
So, I'm living without much disposable income, with a sleep disorder that precludes regularly scheduled activities of any kind, in a highway-tumor town, with no friends or contacts of any kind. Oh, and I have a mild photosensitivity condition which means I'm slaved to my sunglasses during the day and even with them can't do anything that involves exposure to direct sunlight for more than a few minutes at a time, just for the sake of thoroughness.
That's the summary of the situation.
My career goals aren't actually precluded by any of this, though becoming a successful graphic artist, or writer, or independent filmmaker or webcomic author or whatever I end up succeeding at, is made more difficult. I only included the professional category because my social goals mostly pertain to my career goals: I'd like to have a useful social network. It'd be nice to have friends just for the sake of having friends, but that's of low value to me. My only high value purely-social goal is meeting and befriending a woman with whom I can have a meaningful and lasting intimate relationship, which dissolves away the romantic category as well.
Have you seen doctors about this or tried any treatments? I did a quick Wikipedia search and the 'Treatment' section suggested light therapy or melatonin therapy. It said they don't always work well and may be completely ineffective for some people, and it sounds like a lot of work for not much gain, but if you haven't tested it out, it might be worth at try.
Are online classes perhaps a better option? I don't know how flexible they are in terms of what time of day you can view the lectures and stuff, and I don't know whether you've already tried that.
Actually, there may be online work opportunities as well. I've never investigated this personally, but it might be worth hunting around or asking some other LWers.
RE: writing, that's something that fits pretty well into an irregular schedule. You can do it at home at whatever time of day. What sort of material are you interested in writing? I've been working on writing fiction for a number of years now, and I would happily do an email exchange and read/edit your work. I can't offer to do the same thing for graphic art, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are other people on LW who can.
I can understand that. Those things are pretty boring. Feeling emotionally connected to the people you're doing them with is what makes it worthwhile, and if you don't, you just don't.
As for your original comment about having some cognitive flaw, it might boil down to the fact that you just aren't interested in the same life experience as, say, your high school acquaintances were. Having a group of acquaintances and doing regular social activities with them is a conventional solution for a lot of people, but it if doesn't work for you, it just doesn't work. And when your reward structure isn't the same as everyone else's, there will be fewer "opportunities to be rewarded" that automatically presen themselves.
What will work for you is another question. Finding a job that would self-select for coworkers who had similar interests to yours could help. Also, learning how to steer a conversation from something banal towards something interesting to you is a skill that can help deepen your social connections. (Although the first step is to have enough practice with conversations that you know how to make yourself interesting to the other person. This took me a long time and a lot of conscious effort to acquire.)
Also, depression is its own form of cognitive bias that might make you more likely to see opportunities negatively or as a "waste of time", when otherwise you might think "why not?" If you were depressed for several years, these kind of thoughts or more subtle versions might have become habits.
I wish you the best of luck with this. It does make a huge difference once you can find that person.
I've made some inquiries. According to all the information I've seen, success of treatment seems to correlate with undersensitivity to light or outright blindness. Since I'm oversensitive to light, that places me on the extreme end of Untreatable.
Not really; I was taking those classes for social reasons, not educational reasons.
I'm actually reasonably good at this, but it has usually just accelerated the exposure of lack of common ground with whoever I was talking to.
I think meeting the right people is a much bigger problem for me than interacting successfully with those people.
If you haven't given several potential treatments serious attempts, I think you should. Improving this issue seems like it would be worth a lot to you, so even smallish probabilities of success are worth investigating.