Category Archives: Introvert Survival

Introvert Survival: Basic Protection From Ostracism

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

Over the years, I’ve learned most of the social skills I missed out on as a kid, but I’ve grown in my own direction and I can’t ever completely hide that.
Being overtly different from the people you meet puts one in danger of ostracism.
Over time I’ve found a few ways to reduce the likelihood of this outcome.

People are psychologically geared to live in small tribes. Whenever we meet strangers, they are not truly people in our eyes.
Thus, the importance of initial impressions.
This is the time in which you are either grouped into the ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ bin.
Once a person you have met has succeeded in establishing an empathy bond with you, you can begin to gradually relax, but at first, a single misstep can end in ostracism. You have to establish that you’re someone who can be sympathized with.

-Always eat meals with the people you’re living/working with if possible.
Humans instinctually form communal bonds when they eat together.
Eat what they’re eating, even if it tastes horrible, at least for the first few months.
This is the easiest and most effective way not to get ostracized.

-If you are offered some food, a ride, whatever—never refuse, even if you don’t want or need it. Even if the one who offers isn’t your favorite person. To accept is to become a person in their eyes and a member of the community.
Helping others makes people feel good. By extension, they will feel better about you.

When younger, I interpreted what people were saying much more literally. I got in trouble countless times by offending people who were just trying to be nice.

-With members of the opposite sex who are close to your age, never, ever try to ignore them. Both males and females will subconsciously feel rejected, even if there’s no attraction.
Courteous attention and some polite conversation can prevent what could otherwise cause the worst sort of social tensions.
Females especially, are prone to mobilizing all their friends and boyfriends against you if they feel you’ve given them the cold shoulder. And they will nearly always succeed in kicking you out.

This is one of the most common ways I’ve gotten myself ostracized.
Because of the general negative social feedback I got, I didn’t realize until my late teens/early twenties that women found me attractive and were trying to flirt or just trying to feel personally validated by receiving attention from a man they found attractive.

-Keep divergent interests in sci-fi/fantasy, computer games, any unusual hobbies concealed until you’ve known people for a few months. Anything nerdly or out of the ordinary that’s put fragrantly on display right away will cause people to judge you quickly.

-Show familiarity with their favorite brands, TV shows, bands, etc. Go on wikipedia if necessary.
I generally don’t research the group’s belonging tokens online because it’s usually not necessary to achieve the bare minimum of avoiding expulsion. Besides, I don’t want to clutter my mind with that stuff. Worse, one can come across as a douche or a soulless walking encyclopedia if you know the requisite information but clearly aren’t enthusiastic about it.
But wiki-clicking is worth considering if the stakes are particularly high.

-If you see public opinion turning against you, control the damage as best you can and make an exit plan.
Once you’ve overstayed your welcome, things will get ugly.
This one took some years to sink into my head. Socially inept, I would always think that things would just proceed normally, willfully ignoring or missing all the little warning signs that people drop.
I eventually stopped lying to myself and formed an axiom: If you are not seen as part of the group, the group will devise a way to eject you sooner or later. On the instinctual level, you are not a person to them. Beware!

The good news here is you mostly just have to handle the introductory first few months reasonably well. Once people feel that you are an ‘ordinary’ human being they usually won’t begrudge unorthodox habits and interests.
You won’t be everyone’s best buddy, but people will tolerate you and let you live in peace.

Advice vs. Counsel

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

Loud people like to give advice.
Advice in my mind is telling other people to do what worked for you regardless of whether they’re anything like you.
There’s inherently something glib, dismissive, narcissistic, and shallow about advice-giving.
This is why people generally don’t like advice—especially from elders—and tend to ignore it.

I distinguish ‘advice’ from ‘counseling’.

A counselor is someone who genuinely tries to step into the shoes of another person and tailor their counsel accordingly.
The difference is that the counselor strives to understand and empathize when recommending a course of action.
People tend to take genuine counsel seriously because it is personal, personalized, and sincere.

To really counsel someone you have to care.

Advice can be flung around at any time, at anyone.
Often it is just a means of trying to socially dominate someone else by representing oneself as the wise one and font of knowledge. One might as well patronizingly pat the advisee on the shoulder as one shows them the way to the light.

Introverts are given a lot of advice and in my experience it is almost never helpful because I have little in common with those who give it.

If one is lost, counselors are the ones to listen to. Few people are willing to stop, talk one-on-one and really try to understand first.

Where giving advice is to profess that one has wisdom.
Even a shred of ability to counsel is a proof of some measure of wisdom.

Is advice worth listening to, then?
It depends.
One needs ask only one question to find out.
“How much is the advice giver like me?”
If the answer is: “not at all.”
Consider doing the opposite.

The Hypocrisy of Being ‘Emotional’

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

People who feel at ease in the larger society tend to believe the world’s troubles are caused by all the “bad people” out there. They’ve never really met these bad people, except on television and in the movies, but in any case, it suffices to blame all these other people out there for social ills.

To some extent, it takes someone viewing from outside to see that pretty much all problems are the emergent result of millions of everyday people pursuing their self-interest.

Except we don’t directly tell ourselves: “I’m pursuing my interests today.” when we wake up in the morning. That’s what our emotions help us out with.
They steer us towards survival and reproduction without us having to think about it.

However, few people actually recognize these survival impulses for what they are.

Thus a group will quickly eject someone who doesn’t like the same bands or wear the same clothing. Something will just feel ‘off’ to them and they’ll invent some kind of excuse based on how they ‘feel’ to justify carrying out the will of their collective.

Problem: Someone who doesn’t fit in is a liability to the group:

-Opportunity cost. A human can handle 150 or so social relationships at once. It is not rational to spare a slot when better applicants are available.

-The person in the group who feels the least unity is the one most likely to sell everyone out.

-Or leave for a group that’s a better fit. All the time and energy invested in them has gone to waste.

Solution: Eject them.

But to think like this would be Machiavellian and calculating.

The solution: Don’t think. Just be emotional.

But people who don’t understand themselves as human beings or as human animals(most people) fail to recognize that “just going with emotions” will consistently guide them down exactly this path of Machiavellian self interest.

And so long as most people are unable to reflect on the true nature of their drives and actions, there can be no change in the overall nature of societies.

You can have a revolution, lock up lawbreakers, play with political reforms…

But there’s been thousands of years of this with no significant change in the basic function of your typical pyramidal agricultural society.

There’s something important in this for the lone introvert who’s struggling to survive.

Even if you lack social skills, you can predict what the people around you will do next.

Just figure out what is in their best survival/reproductive interest, then watch them actually do it. Each action will be accompanied by some sort of justification that puts them in the best possible light.

After this elaborate process, not one of them is the wiser about what actually happened or why they did it.

Beyond Introvert Survival: Finding Allies in an Extroverted Society

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

Builds Upon: Best Possible Persons,
Introvert Hobbies

For many introverts who find themselves isolated, the advice they receive seems reasonable enough:  “Get out more.  Meet some people.”

Yet in practice it never seems to work.  One ends up exhausted and without having made any real friends.  One might continue this routine out of a certain need to be passable within society, but this doesn’t change the fact there continues to be little change.

Eventually, one, might arrive at a certain truth: time spent surrounded by people is no solution to the basic problems of the introvert.  Without a genuine sense of commonality, group belonging is in vain.

If the introverted person doesn’t want to completely resign themselves to a hermit-like life or continue hanging with company that does more harm than good, what are they to do?

There is a key error in the typical advice:  “Get out.  Meet some people.”   Get where?  Meet who?  Most people answer these questions without really having to think about it.  Their instinct guides them where they need to go.

For the more difficult introvert situation it becomes important to perform some of these functions manually.

An extrovert advisor might not realize it but ‘some people’ isn’t just any people.  In most cases, the extrovert ‘some people’ = the type of people they like to hang out with.  They do not realize that an introvert has different needs.

Introverts, being lost already, tend to take their extrovert buddy’s advice literally.  They go out and  make themselves participate some place where they don’t belong.

Who then is ‘some people?’  One has to find new groups that will bring them closer to the answer.

Instead of trying to subordinate yourself to the common standard, ask yourself: “Where would people who don’t like the common standard go?”

In general, atypical persons are going to group around places, hobbies, activities viewed as atypical according to the common standard.  If one examines the extremes of acceptability, the chances of meeting compatible persons rises from near zero to somewhat probable.

Relying on sample size over sample quality is the big mistake introverts make when looking for social belonging. Looking in the right place once will accomplish more than looking in a thousand random places.

The Surface society has manifold ways of weeding people out and sorting people into various categories.  An introvert can observe the techniques the larger society uses to eliminate people and then apply them in their own personal life.

The right place isn’t necessarily easy to find or access.  This is because the right place by its nature weeds out individuals who are In Tune.  The right place has some kind of barrier that prevents most people from accessing it.  Insufficient socio-economic incentives?  Impossible if one has lots of commitments to the larger society?  Is it a category that makes participants socially undesirable, thus only those who are truly Out of Tune would ever want to do it?  Does it require a sacrifice or leap of faith a well grounded person would never make?

You know you’re on the right path when you’re meeting a lot of these conditions.  And truly passing from the surface realm into the Void underneath it often requires a certain action of sacrifice, severance, and renunciation.  Those who remain are the few who were able to perform that act and pass through that trial.  These people are highly likely to be viable colleagues.  They are the distillate from a seething mass of millions.

If one understands how to follow a process of rigorous social distillation, isolating any sort of person with any sort of proclivity becomes possible.

Moving towards extremes is one way to practice social distillation, but it’s precisely tough hurdles that make it work.

There are easier ways…

One way is finding simple unobtrusive ways of  ‘pinging’ groups for compatible persons.  An easy way to do this is to simply make subtle in-references to things only the right sort of person would understand.  In my experience, nonsensical speech barely registers on most people’s senses.  If the ‘ping’ fails there’s not really any consequences.  The occasion that it works can be life changing.  I met one of my best friends by asking jokingly if he was related to an obscure historical figure sharing his surname.  He got it!

We pass our colleagues in crowded places every day.  We just lack means of knowing one another.  Surface groups usually know one another by a certain fixed style of dress, music.  The introverts who feel mostly like hiding also succeed in hiding from one another.  This is a paradoxical problem that every isolated introvert faces…

In Korea, the number of U.S. troops is greater than the country’s largest ethnic minority ( about 40,000 Chinese.)  The rest are some thousands of guest workers from all over the world.

I lived in Korea for a short time and non-Koreans were highly conspicuous, Japanese tourists most of all.  When you’re in a crowd that’s 99.9% locals, anyone that’s phenotypically or behaviorally variant is instantly visible amongst thousands of people.  It was not uncommon to run into people I knew even though Seoul is a city of 12 million people.  A distinguishing trait is clearly an extremely efficient method of social filtering.  A clear difference from everyone else can allow one to completely rewrite the odds.

Yet true introverts are not about to all adopt purple Mohawks in order to stand out.  Exposure results in vulnerability after all and this is what we all want to avoid. How is one to proceed?  I think the subtle social pinging approach is on the right track.

An idea that’s occurred to me:

Make a custom shirt on a site like cafepress that makes a reference to something obscure or atypical.  I would make it in such a way that it would seem normal enough to the casual observer, yet would serve as an ostentatious beacon for the right pair of eyes.

If one was creative, there’s probably many possible Subtle ways to advertise oneself.  But we don’t search for these ideas because most of us are stuck in a typical ethic for finding the right people to associate with.

Recognizing the underlying meaning of well-intended extrovert advice is a necessary first step before one is free to construct one’s own ethic of human association.  For true introverts, the establishment of such an ethic is tantamount to a declaration of independence from the Surface world.  An alternative to social life on the Surface is a ticket out of  the directionless, unspoken, heavy sense of disenchantment that seems such a dominant feature of an introverted life.

Introvert Survival: Diaries

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

Leads to: A Dream Diary

When we think of diaries the first image that comes to mind is the popular image.  A slim volume with lots of pink hearts all over the cover.  It might have a little toy lock on it so that its contents might be absolutely private.  Most of us probably know the common irony of these teenage diaries as seen on movies and TV.  Under lock and key, guarded like treasures are the most mundane and unremarkable of thoughts.  The whole joke is that having ‘secret’ writings is just another ploy for attention with little real content underneath.

Clearly such a diary is just a toy for overgrown, self-indulgent children…

I began keeping a diary around the age of 17.  I have kept it going continuously for several years to the present day.

Keeping a diary is an enormous asset to an introvert on the edge of survival.  When there’s no one to talk to, the blank page always lends an impartial ear.  Discussing pressing issues, even on paper removes mental weight and relieves an overwrought mind.  To put experience and feelings into words makes them more tangible.  And problems that can be grasped can be dealt with.  Over time, one might well discover that once insurmountable problems have been mapped out in detail and overcome, all without one even being aware of it.

Diary writing is a skill.  At first one might be amazed at just how difficult it is to get past all the mental noise and discover our true feelings and concerns.  Diaries no doubt have their terrible reputation in part because most people who attempt it never get past their petty internal noise.  Yet any person accustomed to regular inward thought should be predisposed towards quickly moving past the initial barriers.  The rewards of doing so are inexhaustible

Keeping a diary is a ritual act of emptying oneself.  Hence one always feels lighter afterwards.  When one feels isolated and alone, even the removal of a feather from one’s personal burden makes a huge difference.  In a life where one’s soul lives at the subsistence level, a diary can sometimes be the margin between starvation and survival.  Since diaries are made to seem silly and frivolous in the popular culture:  I cannot sufficiently emphasize their importance in keeping a healthy mind.

A diary is a means of keeping track of one’s own personal progress and patterns.  A long term diary writer can hold themselves to account in a way most people never can.  Most of us make excuses about what we do and why we do it.  This becomes a lot harder to do when we look back on an entry from a year ago and see ourselves doing the same old thing.  One who keeps a diary can perform audits on their books.  In time the inherent mission of a diary writer becomes obvious: That the future self reading back on each entry be a better, wiser self.

A diary is a time machine:

It allows us to exist more gracefully within the flow of time.

It allows us to see the flow of our thoughts from outside of time.

When I first started keeping a diary as a teenager, there were some things I quickly discovered:

I found that every time I wrote ill words about someone, I always looked back on it later with shame.  It always seemed so petty and shallow in retrospect, so obvious that my written disenchantment only placed me under their power.  I never again mentioned people I didn’t like by name and never again went out of my way to focus on them.  In one step I was liberated from a good measure of my own reactive spite.  This new control over myself also made me less vulnerable to social expectations.  I was a step closer to social immunity years before the idea ever occurred to me.

The people and events that seemed important in a given moment were rarely still important when I looked back even a few months later.

The overhead, extra-temporal view given me by the diary allowed me to discover what things were truly important.

I learned what things endure and which quickly become irrelevant and forgotten.

I learned that the big, central things are not always important and that it’s often small or peripheral things that stay with us through time.

The size of events does not matter so much.  A diary helps reveal to us what things are spiritually the largest in our lives.

In a matter of months, I was learning lessons that most people don’t seem to learn in an entire lifetime.  A diary is one of the greatest teachers one can ever have, without a doubt one of the supreme tools of introspection.

Diaries are ideal for recording and developing ideas.  I’m sure most people have good ideas all the time.  The trouble is that they remember only a few of them.  The few that are remembered have to be held in valuable mental space until they too are forgotten.  A diary allows us to grasp these fleeting moments and store them.  The mind is then free to come up with more good ideas.  Actively focusing upon and storing these ideas makes it progressively easier to come up with them in the first place.

Many of the ideas that became this blog began as diary entries.  At first these ideas were mere ventings.  Because they were written down, however, I was able to develop them and then build on them.  Taken one piece at a time, one can actually attempt to make some sense of this world.

A diary can allow us to sort out and make some sense of a cluttered confused mind.  A simple blank book and something to write with can accomplish feats that expensive paid professionals could never aspire to.

A diary is one of the greatest possible assets for one who has a quiet spirit and feels renewed in times of solitude.  It can nearly by itself sustain one through loneliness and suffering.  It serves as a chronicle and repository.  It provides friends and a social life.  Every time you open that book, you’re in a room full of people from the past who share your name and identity, but are never the same person as you’ve become.

Subsistence of the Soul

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

Builds Upon: Any Small Thing,
Introverts: Denizens of a Social Ghetto

Especially in youth, an extreme introvert feeling little commonality with the surrounding society must find ways to nourish the spirit even through the most trying times.  A life on the fringes is sink or swim.  You either find ways to take care of yourself or you just don’t make it.  To this day, I tend to be very reverential of food and intolerant of wasting any usable resources.  A subsistence survival sort of mentality got drilled into my head early on.  Though I never went hungry growing up, I’m the sort of person who likes to eat every last grain of rice or sop up the crumbs and juices left over from a meal with a piece of bread until my bowl is clean.  My stomach lurches when I see someone throwing out food.

Most people I meet dread the passing of time and aging.  I feel the passing of every day to be a gift, especially if it passed without too much trouble.  I will see having a white head of hair as accomplishment because I have a feeling of good fortune and privilege to make it even as far as I have.   My life has rarely been in serious physical danger, yet I feel I’ve had to claw every inch of the way out of stone.  I feel I’ve already been alive nearly forever yet most others consider me to be quite young.

This sort of mentality, this subsistence of the soul is an attitude that utterly baffles most people I encounter.  Rather, they find my actions strange because they know nothing of the code by which I act.   How would one even begin to explain face to face in a way that really made sense?  Would one want to if one could?

Do I really want to explain that every grain of rice, every red cent is another precious second of my life won from the birth society’s capricious standards and demands?

That I still make the most out of every grain of rice as I had to with every good feeling and happy moment?

That cultivating such reverence produces the sort of emotional rewards that make life worth living?

Though it could be tough to hold myself together in the worst times, I would find myself inspired to joy by things people around me didn’t even seem to notice.

Living with a lean soul has had its advantages.  I find I require far less than others around me to be content with life and therefore there are less things I fear losing.  I have an ongoing relationship with death in my everyday life while others postpone the very thought of it until telltale signs of aging can no longer be ignored or covered up with denial.

Most importantly, living by subsistence of the soul has the potential to teach one: fulfillment when distilled to its quintessence has very little to do with pleasure.

Introvert Survival: Any Small Thing

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

Builds Upon: Survival in the Void

One of the most powerful remedies for feelings of depression, loneliness, and rejection is a hobby or discipline that commands your intimate attention.  As a kid I loved insects and all kinds of small life.  I gained an appreciation early on by dissecting bugs from the garden under a stereoscope.  I realized just how intricate and otherworldly they were.  I had already seen how most people passed them over, only noticing them long enough to kill them.

Years later during the deep black states of mind of my teen years, I learned that by doing something intimate and intricate with my surrounding environment could revive me.

Once as I high school junior, I was crushingly depressed and lonely.  It was a depressingly sunny cheerful day near the end of the school year when everyone else seemed so happy and unified.

I turned my attention as I had done since childhood to the leaves and branches of various shrubs.  I knew well how to search.  I soon noticed small bumps that I instantly recognized as plant galls.  Plant galls, I well knew were the nurseries of the larva of tiny parasitic wasps.

I broke off some galls and snuck into the biology lab.  No one was there but me.

I delicately cut open the galls and extracted the larvae for viewing under the microscope.

My state of mind was much improved when I was done.

Something, any small thing that makes you appreciate the enormous intricate beauty of our universe will save you.

Any small thing at all will work.  Sometimes all I had to do to ground myself was simply to stop and watch the afternoon shadows of swaying tree branches, a single autumn leaf drift all the way from its branch to the ground, a ray of sunlight suddenly shoot through a high window as the sun rose just the tiniest bit higher.  The key is shifting one’s attention from the social plane and becoming aware of the vast, chaotic extra-social reality that surrounds us.  Eventually that outer Void becomes home.

School As Introvert Prison Sentence

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

Leads To: Knowledge Monopolies: The University

I got pretty good grades in school.  Homework was easier for me than for most kids.  Yet as an adult it’s easy to look back and realize that none of that was important.  Once one gets into college it doesn’t matter.  Once one decides not to go to college it doesn’t matter.  We were told grades were important by all the authority figures, but it was a lie just to try keep us all in line for another day and to justify the system in which every one of us was trapped.

I look back on twelve years of schooling and can’t think of much beyond basic literacy that was truly important in the long run.  Even with literacy, my first reading lessons took place at home, not in school.  Classes at school did teach me useful things.  A lot of the classwork that was boring for other kids was pure fun for me.  Yet did it really need to consume 12 years of my life?  By the time we’re 18, the better part of our youth is irremediably spent on years of school.  Yes, humans have higher life expectancies now but the fact is we start our slide into aging soon after we hit biological adulthood.  With schooling, we get barely a decade to be active in the world at our peak.  People in past generations generally had begun adult-level activities by their early teens or even younger.  Now a college graduate at age 21 is only beginning to be functional in the adult world.  Is our increased life expectancy nearly as great when we have nearly a decade less in which to do things?

What is it all for?  One obvious purpose is the simple containment of youth who would otherwise be roaming around the streets all day.  With child labor laws, there’s nothing better to do than lock them up.   The result is a strange combination of minimum security prison and daycare.  It just doesn’t make much sense to the Subtle understanding.  To really ‘get’ the spirit of school it is most illuminating to examine the extroverted view and justification.

Every well-adjusted person I’ve talked to gives me the same message when I dare criticize compulsory education and public schooling.  “But it’s for socialization!”  Having tipped my ideological hand more than was wise, I end up with an earful of reminiscences about fun extra-curricular activities.  This always confounds me.  Whatever happened to the 7 hours a day sitting at a desk doing nothing?  That wasn’t fun!  It wasn’t particularly social either.

When I express desire for there to be some alternative from regular schooling, I get a blank stare for a second or two followed by “Your kid wouldn’t be able to develop properly.  He/she would be lonely and cut off.”  Every time I hear this ubiquitous answer, I pause for a few seconds before finding a way to just change the subject.

As an introvert in the system, I felt lonely and cut off.  I didn’t fit into the school society at all.  I was non-socialized in school.  I can pass as mostly normal now, but when I first graduated high school, I still had the social skills of a small child.  I’ve spent the last several years learning everything from scratch and I’m finally feeling as though I’m somewhat caught up.  I’ve been through several halfway houses, but I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m establishing a life for the first time after a long prison sentence.  I spent a good portion of that time, especially the later years in something akin to solitary confinement.

It took me a long time to figure out why extroverts assign such importance to collective schooling.  Every well-adjusted person seems to understand the reasons on some intuitive level but lack the ability to analyze their beliefs and articulate them.  I will do my best to translate the idea of ‘Socialization’ into Subtle-ese.

I gather that extroverts value schooling primarily for its ability to imbue millions of children with a common formative experience so that they may smoothly interrelate as adults.

This ability to relate to others is like being able to speak the same language.  It is one of the most critical things we’re supposed to learn.  It’s the base of belonging we need to be able to establish romantic relationships and find careers.  In Subtle terms, I suppose we could consider compulsory schools as a massive network of commonality factories.  In the Surface world, these factories are not idle or pointless, they are busily producing vitally important social commodities.

I think the idea of social adjustment helps explain why nerds are portrayed in popular culture as morally stunted, silly, contemptible, short-sighted, petty people who have missed everything that is really important in life.  The nerds were focusing on all the wrong things in school and they serve as  symbols of everything one should not become.  They are representative of defective units that were never properly calibrated despite the best efforts of the factory workers.  In the movies, nerds are rather unsympathetic characters because they usually rudely reject the efforts of well-adjusted people to save them.  The overall thesis:  social adjustment is open to everyone, but there will always be a few who insist on being self-destructive.

The truth that they never realize is that most people don’t ask for a clash with the system.  Some people are going to have the wrong configuration as they roll down the assembly line.  The standardized parts that seem to fit with most other people just don’t apply.  The true introvert frame reaches the end of the assembly line not only bare of all the necessary components, but dented and bent from going through a long series of incompatible processes.

When I tell a regular person that “School was awful.”  I am often met with agreement.  If the conversation goes on, it becomes clear that most of the perceived awfulness for the Surface person stemmed from completely different problems.  They don’t complain about homework or classes usually.  They talk about all their human relationships and ultimately how it was a time for social learning and tough lessons in human interaction.  From the way they talk about it, it doesn’t sound like it was awful at all.  Most of the time it seems they were having fun, but it got bad for awhile whenever  some conflict arose.  When I realized that this is their definition of  ‘awful’ it was clear there could be no bridging the gap.  In moments like that, it becomes clear we don’t even speak mutually intelligible languages and that we’ve lived our lives in separate universes.  I have difficulty explaining my experience precisely because I was never properly adjusted.

Introverts: Denizens of a Social Ghetto

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

Leads To: Subsistence of the Soul,
The Mark of Cain

When we say the word ghetto, we generally think of rap, thugs, and crime.  What we usually think of  is a modern economic ghetto, a neighborhood where all the poorest people live  and can’t afford to leave.

I would be bold enough to suggest however, that true introverts live in a social ghetto.   We don’t fit in and are forced to live as misfits and outsiders on the margins.  Most extroverts barely even seem to realize that we exist.  We are pushed aside into a separate ‘neighborhood’ where we live out an isolated existence.  Our state of existence is one of social poverty.

Growing up and even into college, I had to fight off resentment whenever extroverts complained about relationships and other forms of social connection I hadn’t even the luxury of aspiring to.   I understood that these people lived in another universe and that there was no way I could hope to make them understand that I had truly lived most of my life at the bare subsistence level.  Even if I could explain my situation to the other person, the response might be bewildered pity or possibly even contempt, but never understanding.  Part of the torture is that I couldn’t even really talk to anyone about my situation.

Over years, a lot of my energy had been focused on merely surviving.  It makes long term planning very difficult for me to this day.  Not long ago, I was bewildered whenever someone asked me questions about marriage, or having children.  That was all so distant as to be completely off my map.  The asker, usually a girl, would see my deer in the headlights look and conclude I was weird or just stupid.  To me, stable social relationships and settling down was a thing that the Accepted liked to talk about.  It had no relevance at all to my life.

Every encounter I had with normal people became akin to a clash of understanding and values sooner or later.  Usually sooner.  Our expectations of life were on different planets.  They were counting on a comfortable life and a family.  I was hoping for survival.  I could very well be in the same economic bracket as the person to whom I was talking yet clearly I was in some way impoverished.  Truly I lived in another place altogether from these normal people, a social ghetto of sorts.

On the internet, I’ve been discovering more and more people who grew up in the same neighborhood that I did and I’m enjoying it very much.

As a final note:

The first ghetto, Il Ghetto, was not an economic ghetto.  It was a holding area in the city of Venice where all the Jews in town were forced to live.  These Jews were often quite economically wealthy, but their social unbelonging led them to experience another, equally oppressive form of poverty.

Introverts and Prostitutes

Posted by Gluon the Ferengi on

I’ve been hesitating to write this one. I’ve been considering the potential of this information to do harm. I’ve been considering the opposite sex. I’ve been considering whether it’s wise to make this sort of information public in the nominal anonymity of the internet. However, I have to give in. Most of the time a male true introvert lacks any fellow human beings with which he has anything in common. Most of the time there are absolutely zero even mildly suitable female partners in his immediate circle of acquaintance. Attempts at internet dating are no less hellish. The only option(short of everlasting celibacy) within mainstream society for men who don’t fit in is to try to ‘game’ females for which he has no personal affection. This activity involves lying to someone else. For an introvert, it must involve a fair measure of lying to oneself. It is yet another scenario where the introvert’s need to conceal his true personality is critical. This approach is destructive and/or unethical for several reasons. It:

-Acknowledges and reinforces the larger society’s belief that introversion is a mental sickness.

-Reinforces a lifetime of having to conceal one’s true self.

-Reduces one to lying for one’s own selfish purposes. Forces one into a lifestyle of operating under false pretexts and diminishes one’s character.

-Consumes huge amounts of time and money. Becomes a distraction from the acquisition of knowledge, the sharpening of the intellect, from every other pleasure life has to offer.

Every time I was faced with the dating scene and how I would have to lie, lie, lie to get anywhere, I thought of how devoting myself to such a toxic environment would diminish me and force me to deny myself. I never could bring myself to truly devote myself. Yet, like most men, I was unwilling to live a life of celibacy. I had my needs, the unfulfillment of which proved another annoying distraction in my life. There had to be another solution. A solution that consumed a minimum of time and resources while being as ethical as possible. Mainstream persons might be shocked at the answer that occurred to me:

prostitution.

Perhaps the main appeal was simply the stark honesty in it.

-There is no lying or misunderstanding. Both parties are absolutely clear in their intent and motives. There is no possibility of misleading or deceiving someone. One need not stoop to becoming a deceiver.

-There is no need to act like someone else or hide one’s own personality. One need not suffer the indignity of denying oneself in order to get the prize carrot at the end of the stick.

-The cost of a prostitute is usually going to be less than the cost of dating.

-The cost in time of a prostitute is always going to be much less.

-Once again, honesty to oneself and to others. Unless a man feels genuine affection and affinity for a girl he mostly wants just one thing. Lots of men on the dating scene have to lie to themselves about this, but it’s the truth.

I was already in my twenties and still hadn’t lost my virginity. My body had lusted ceaselessly since my earliest teens. After a decade of eternal unfulfillment, I’d had enough. I needed sex, but I was both unwilling and unable to trick a girl into doing the deed with me. What I needed above all, even as much as intimate physical contact, was to have the knowledge of what sex was actually like. All I had to go on was the obviously distorted images of it in hollywood movies and TV shows. To lose my virginity was to engage in exploration, same as reading a book on a new subject. It was also to attain another degree of separation from my birth society. I needed my own definition of sex in my head apart from all the televised nonsense.

I finally got my chance in Amsterdam’s red light district while travelling across Europe. It is illegal for the prostitutes there to have pimps, most I’m told are independent agents just making money for themselves. They are just like any other self-employed people under the law of their country and can get themselves checked for diseases whenever they like. I chose this place in particular because I wanted to reduce my risk and be sure I was going to be with someone who was in the business by her own choice. The experience was very satisfying but it didn’t feel extraordinary at all. Yet, I felt as though I had been cheated all my life of something integral to human existence. It felt like one of those normal pleasures that ought to be daily and routine like eating a good meal or taking a good dump. It was just as natural as eating. In fact, I best enjoyed it on an empty stomach and then I’d go eat at a restaurant with that pleasant buzz still in my body. The experience confirmed what I had already known. The hype in pop-culture is completely undeserved and it exists because of the simple fact that sex makes money. It makes money because it is so hard to find a desirable partner in real life. People tend to want what they can’t have, even if it’s not deserving of such intense desire.

I am aware that what I did would be considered by most people to be ‘sleazy’ at best.   Some of my friends were horrified when I admitted what I had done(they asked). However, I still understand what I did to be the most ethical solution and that is why I’m writing about it today. The majority culture in English speaking countries strongly disapproves of prostitution. Yet the same culture is perfectly OK with men who just want sex deceiving women who are searching for long term relationships.  It seems rather warped to me. Just another indictment of my silly birth culture. Just another reason to turn away from the accepted orthodoxy. For the most part, people aren’t trying to be ethical. They’re just mindlessly following whatever they were taught and reacting to the values of the majority of others so they don’t get crushed.

In any case, I benefited greatly from my experiment. The experience helped put things into perspective that my birth culture had distorted. I had known intellectually that women, like men were creatures of flesh and blood but until I educated myself, I had not known this truth on the visceral level. After this experience, women had far less power over me. As a result, women were far more attracted to me.

I hadn’t the luxury of thinking about fine cuisine until I had escaped famine conditions.  Once I knew I had some potential outlet for basic sex, I could turn my mind to the possibility of actually building a relationship with a woman for the first time in my life. Because I had an appreciation of just how ordinary sex is, I was able to pursue my private studies without any doubts that I was indeed missing out on something unfathomably great. I was more focused in my solitude than ever before and more content. I could finally look on all the extroverts who always seem to pair up with ease without any particular envy or insecurity. All because of a few nights not very good sex.

And when I say not very good, I mean it. You can pick any girl you want, but I have to warn prospective johns. She will try to do as little as she can for as much money as possible. You should haggle over the price and be 100% sure that it is mutually understood what you’ve agreed to do together. It’s not very good sex because one must constantly be on guard against being cheated. Also because a guy has a strict time limit to finish up. Knowing that the clock is ticking doesn’t make for the most relaxing of sessions. It’s not very good sex, but it is sex and with whoever you want.

And something that goes for anywhere in the world: DON’T USE STREETWALKERS. Most of them are under the control of pimps, might even be sex slaves, might be trying to fuel a drug addiction or all of the above. They’re also one of the best ways in the world to catch a disease.

While in a puritanical English speaking country, the best bet is undoubtedly to call up escorts and gradually find out which ones work out best.

A very important thing to know: If you are a virgin, don’t EVER tell them that you are a virgin. It’s the equivalent of going to a car dealership and telling them you’ve never bought a car before. If she knows you don’t know anything, she will use every trick in the book to quickly separate you and your money. If she thinks she can get away with it, she might even try to extort you once you’re too far along to easily stop. These ladies are not the victims they’re portrayed as in the movies. They’re tough and they’ve seen it all. They are quick to manipulate and intimidate when they think it will get them somewhere. The john and hooker relationship is not one-sided and it’s more complicated than moral puritans realize.

The bottom line: take all the cautionary measures you would if you were making any other purchase. This is business and male introverts who remember this will get the basics of what they need, what has always been impossible to get within the hostile confines of their birth society.

Most important of all:

Ability to satisfy the basic male need for sex without being forced to subjugate oneself to the standards of the accepted orthodoxy.  Sex no matter how uncool one’s hobbies are or how divergent one’s personality and interests.  Sex without having to spend months learning courtship procedures all the other guys learned as a part of basic socialization.   For introvert men, this means removal of the last great means of leverage society still has on their lives.  It is a form of emancipation; the ability to simply bypass all the usual onerous steps and get to the truth and purpose of the matter.