I don’t mean this snarkily, but have you considered drinking or taking up a sport?
Low level sport (where everyone’s a bit rubbish and no-one takes it seriously) is superb fun. Obviously, you’ll be terrible at it, but if you find a club that’s short of people and loses all the time anyway you’ll probably be more welcome than you think. And just by taking part you’ll get much better at it. It might change your life.
And if you’re embedded in a society where social life revolves around alcohol you’ll miss out on a vast amount of the fun and happiness that comes with being human if you don’t join in. You don’t have to overdo it. Just try having a glass of wine with someone you like one day and see how it goes.
I am a pretty nerdy guy, but if I had to relive my life without ever drinking alcohol or playing cricket or rowing or playing rugby I just think I’d probably not want to bother. ( I am unbelievably bad at rugby. )
If it helps encourage you, for a long time I coached novice rowers for King’s College (part of the University of Cambridge). Occasionally we’d get a hopelessly non-sporty introvert turning up wanting a go. Some of these guys were so shy they could hardly speak. And they were often the people who enjoyed it the most, and became most committed and most likely to come back year after year.
I’m not going to lie to you, with one exception they never became any good. But they all became much better than they had been, and seemed to enjoy the process, and are some of the people that I most enjoyed coaching.
It helps of course that rowing is actually technically complex and I could talk to these people about how best to turn energy into momentum and how it is that a boat can balance even though its centre of gravity is above its centre of flotation and so on.
I think one of the reasons that rowing is so popular amongst the sciency types at Cambridge is that it is a sport that you can think about in terms of physics.
But it really doesn’t matter what the sport is. Just go and find a small club doing something where they have trouble getting enough people together to make a team, and where there’s someone nice who knows how to teach it, explain that you’ve not done anything like this before and ask if they could use you. Stick with it for a month, and if you really hate it give up.
One nice thing about sports is that the skills are easily measurable. Working out what to do in order to make your scores better is part of the fun. Don’t miss out. It will teach you so much about life.
I like sports, specifically basketball, which I’m decent at. But I dislike almost all sports people, who are the ones who are drinking the most and doing all of the things that I dislike. There are probably good people in intramurals activities, but I don’t want to be a teammate to the bad ones to get there.
Non-competitive (i.e. no traveling to tournaments) sports are very likely to have a different (and possibly more receptive-to-you) culture than varsity sports (or their college equivalents).
I don’t mean this snarkily, but have you considered drinking or taking up a sport?
Low level sport (where everyone’s a bit rubbish and no-one takes it seriously) is superb fun. Obviously, you’ll be terrible at it, but if you find a club that’s short of people and loses all the time anyway you’ll probably be more welcome than you think. And just by taking part you’ll get much better at it. It might change your life.
And if you’re embedded in a society where social life revolves around alcohol you’ll miss out on a vast amount of the fun and happiness that comes with being human if you don’t join in. You don’t have to overdo it. Just try having a glass of wine with someone you like one day and see how it goes.
I am a pretty nerdy guy, but if I had to relive my life without ever drinking alcohol or playing cricket or rowing or playing rugby I just think I’d probably not want to bother. ( I am unbelievably bad at rugby. )
If it helps encourage you, for a long time I coached novice rowers for King’s College (part of the University of Cambridge). Occasionally we’d get a hopelessly non-sporty introvert turning up wanting a go. Some of these guys were so shy they could hardly speak. And they were often the people who enjoyed it the most, and became most committed and most likely to come back year after year.
I’m not going to lie to you, with one exception they never became any good. But they all became much better than they had been, and seemed to enjoy the process, and are some of the people that I most enjoyed coaching.
It helps of course that rowing is actually technically complex and I could talk to these people about how best to turn energy into momentum and how it is that a boat can balance even though its centre of gravity is above its centre of flotation and so on.
I think one of the reasons that rowing is so popular amongst the sciency types at Cambridge is that it is a sport that you can think about in terms of physics.
But it really doesn’t matter what the sport is. Just go and find a small club doing something where they have trouble getting enough people together to make a team, and where there’s someone nice who knows how to teach it, explain that you’ve not done anything like this before and ask if they could use you. Stick with it for a month, and if you really hate it give up.
One nice thing about sports is that the skills are easily measurable. Working out what to do in order to make your scores better is part of the fun. Don’t miss out. It will teach you so much about life.
I like sports, specifically basketball, which I’m decent at. But I dislike almost all sports people, who are the ones who are drinking the most and doing all of the things that I dislike. There are probably good people in intramurals activities, but I don’t want to be a teammate to the bad ones to get there.
Non-competitive (i.e. no traveling to tournaments) sports are very likely to have a different (and possibly more receptive-to-you) culture than varsity sports (or their college equivalents).