FrameBenignly comments on Open Thread, Feb. 2 - Feb 8, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I've recently had a discussion about ethics here in this thread, and the conclusion I've arrived at is that a big reason for my lack of motivation is lack of social support.
I don't know if this is the right place to post this, nor am I fully clear on what kind of response I am expecting. I guess I would like advice and emotional support with this issue.
I have basically been in shutdown mode for the past year because I'm not getting the kind of support I need, and I have my doubts I will ever get the kind of support I need.
I am in my mid-twenties, highly intelligent and have nonconformist opinions - I also have had personal difficulties and not lived a very happy life so far. I find myself unable to connect to other people when it comes to personal stuff because most people, even well-meaning ones, can't understand what's going on for me. That goes for mental health professionals as well. And unfortunately people, even mental health professionals, can be surprisingly mean if I point out that their well-meaning opinions or advice aren't working for me - which usually ends up with them going into a death spiral of self-justification and/or hurt feelings.
I doubt therapy would work for me (based on previous experiences), because of the personal connection with the therapist not working, and the information and strategies offered to be of rather mediocre quality - mostly things I already know, things that are rather obvious, things that aren't generally true and things that don't apply to me. I doubt anything would actually work for me actually, except actually solving the underlying problem which is that I don't have a support network, "tribe", or whatever you want to call it. Or at least having a possible solution in sight.
It's not so much about receiving support (although that's a part of it) - I guess I would like to have something meaningful to do. Right now I have an at least partially altruistic mindset, and nothing to direct it at, because I have a hard time liking "people" at large. I would like to have a personal connection to a person or people who I actually feel that I like - because otherwise when I feel like being doing something positive either for specific people or for the world, I don't even have an accessible example of someone who I would want to benefit from the results of that.
So yeah. I'm not sure what to do about this, because I'm not feeling very hopeful at the moment. I find that for whatever reason even things I imagine to would be very basic (like being understood by other people) are really hard to find in reality.
...I notice I am feeling confused about this, because the particular set of experiences I just described seems to be extremely non-typical among people in general, and I'm not expecting it to be
Edit: I don't live in the US (I feel this is worth sharing because it affects the advice/options available).
Why do you find it hard to meet like-minded people? Have you tried meetup.com? The only solution to not having a group of people you like is to meet more people. You're certainly not lacking for options. It sounds like you just need a better searching method.
I like having reasonable suggestions - at the very least it's a good idea to consider these things if I haven't tried them before.
I don't know why you seem to think it would be easy to find like-minded people, though. Inferential distance?
That seems to be hard by default, unless you're living in an area with a high density of like-minded people.
Anyway, I am familiar with meetup.com. I have some meetups I could potentially participate in, though they seem to be mostly for people who want to socialize rather than specific groups for things I am interested in.
And simply meeting people at random seems like a poor way for me to try and find like-minded people. I might do that anyway for the social experience, but it seems to be a rather low return-on-investment strategy.
Random has to generally be deliberately planned for. Any kind of search is likely to be non-random, and there are multiple methods for increasing filtering even before you meet the person. A chess club will result in very different encounters than a soccer team. You could also change your culling methods when evaluating people to improve hits. It's possible that you're over or under filtering in casual encounters or that your search parameters are poorly tuned. Studying personality types can help with that. Still, there's nothing better than just to increase your number of interactions.
What are you interested in?