I live in a small town, in which there are few alternatives
There’s the root of the problem. You can’t develop socially if you’re trapped at home. And make no mistake: if you can’t reliably get to a city or public transit hub without calling in a favor, then you are very much trapped. A small town that you can’t routinely leave is a toxic environment, and you need to escape it by any means necessary. Free housing is not a favor if it’s in a location that destroys your life.
The “that you can’t routinely leave” part seems more important than the “small town” part, to me—it’s a special case of the more general observation that the harder it is to leave a situation, the more likely it is for that situation to become problematic.
You might find it useful to use Second Life as a venue for practicing social skills, if you don’t have RL opportunities to do so. It’s not perfect—the userbase is skewed toward technophiles, with a disproportionate number of auties, so the range of conversational topics is different from RL-normal, and you can’t learn to read or emit body language usefully there (though with voice chat you can practice with tone of voice at least), but it’s more RL-like than most kinds of online interaction, especially in terms of meeting new people.
There’s the root of the problem. You can’t develop socially if you’re trapped at home. And make no mistake: if you can’t reliably get to a city or public transit hub without calling in a favor, then you are very much trapped. A small town that you can’t routinely leave is a toxic environment, and you need to escape it by any means necessary. Free housing is not a favor if it’s in a location that destroys your life.
Wow, I didn’t know small towns were “toxic environments” that were the death knell for social skills. Next time, mention that sooner.
The “that you can’t routinely leave” part seems more important than the “small town” part, to me—it’s a special case of the more general observation that the harder it is to leave a situation, the more likely it is for that situation to become problematic.
You might find it useful to use Second Life as a venue for practicing social skills, if you don’t have RL opportunities to do so. It’s not perfect—the userbase is skewed toward technophiles, with a disproportionate number of auties, so the range of conversational topics is different from RL-normal, and you can’t learn to read or emit body language usefully there (though with voice chat you can practice with tone of voice at least), but it’s more RL-like than most kinds of online interaction, especially in terms of meeting new people.
Insert “can be a” … “if it does not provide an acceptable social network” and I’ll have to agree.