Funny story: I actually did try tracking daily ‘social interaction time’ for a while. It’s much harder to track than anything else, because it is such a fluid and unpredictable activity, and I don’t have access to my spreadsheets while socializing.
I’ve had moderate social anxiety for many years, starting because of issues (mostly inside my head) in early public school. It was severely exacerbated when I switched to online school because I spent so much time, locked in my room, on pleasurable activities.
I have a small group of friends who I met in public school; we still meet once every couple of months to play video/board games. This results only in casual interaction centered around the game, never anything serious that involves personal issues or philosophical debates. And of course, the entire time, I am thinking that I could be doing something more productive or fun-efficient. Those friends are not exactly positive influences: they spend a lot of their time on video games (CoD etc.), and they are constantly laughing at internet memes or terrible sex jokes. I’ve tried meeting other people online, but I never really can get engaged with them, also because I feel that I am using time inefficiently. So, in the social interaction department, I am not really making any progress. That could be considered another big problem in my life; I probably should have included it in the main article.
A great way to track time spent on activities (especially fluid and unpredicatable ones) is an app called TagTime. It works best on Android, but you can also get it on your computer if you’re hacky. It pings you at random intervals that average out to be worth 45 minutes each, and asks what you’re doing at that exact moment. You create tags for different activities, so you just click on the relevant tag(s), and don’t have to type in anything. It also integrates with Beeminder, if you’d like to track things that way.
If insightful conversation is something you want out of social interaction, and there’s a LessWrong meetup group you can get to, it’d probably be worth trying it out. I’ve found the conversation there is usually very good.
I take a pen and paper everywhere I go. It is a small pen; and I put it and a small piece of paper in the casing of my mobile phone. It helps me note any ideas, and it’s faster and more convenient that using a smartphone. (There is an inconvenience with processing the pieces of paper later. But it’s not a trivial inconvenience against making notes.)
You might look for homeschooling groups in your area, sports leagues, etc. Athletes make more money. Or work at a coffee shop. Consider brainstorming ways to meet people and then trying them out systematically. Is there a local LW meetup?
I take Taekwondo class and will have a black belt before I enter college, does that count? There are other methods of meeting/working with people that I have looked into, but I can’t seem to find one that I can get engaged in. There aren’t are local LW meetups, but there are a few that would be practically accessible; I will be considering them as well.
Partnered social dancing is a good segue into human interaction for those with social anxiety. The crowds tend to be very positive and friendly, but you take them in bite sized chunks, a dance at a time. And the crowd gets more positive as you get better at it.
IMO, it beats the hell out of video game playing as a past time.
What you have described here and in the OP doesn’t lead me to believe you have any issues that would prevent you from developing into whatever you wanted, socially. I would estimate that most humans have “mild social anxiety” in the sense that the social situations cause them some level of anxiousness, especially during the uncertain adolescent years, where your status is objectively low because you are young and have no independence or financial means. This gives you essentially no information about what you are capable of growing into. If it helps, imagine some extremely debonair person or fictional character who you like, and trust me that if you start at age sixteen, you can probably become as socially powerful and confident as that person/character by age twenty. I have seen such transformations happen many times, and flatter myself to think that I was such an example. Human social circuitry is hella powerful stuff when you lean on it.
However, this can only happen if you surround yourself with actual humans. Your post is well thought out but you seem to be trying to bend over backwards to avoid engaging with physical human beings. I actually understand why all too well, it is uncomfortable and unaccommodating, but neglecting it would be like neglecting algebra and still expecting to be able to help with FAI.
Possibly even more importantly than all of the above, the effort required to bootstrap yourself toward being better at performance across a wide domain of tasks will be far more difficult without actual people in your environment to give you critical feedback, support, and anchors to sanity. In more colloquial terms, you gotta have good friends around to tell you when you’re being an idiot, because you will always be the last person to see it. I would emphasize that one shouldn’t just view socializing time as a box to be checked off. Socializing and friendship is an utterly critical cornerstone of human existence and friendships are the things that retrospectively end up being most important to you.
Your time schedule doesn’t include anything about spending time with other people. Social skills are very important in life.
Funny story: I actually did try tracking daily ‘social interaction time’ for a while. It’s much harder to track than anything else, because it is such a fluid and unpredictable activity, and I don’t have access to my spreadsheets while socializing.
I’ve had moderate social anxiety for many years, starting because of issues (mostly inside my head) in early public school. It was severely exacerbated when I switched to online school because I spent so much time, locked in my room, on pleasurable activities.
I have a small group of friends who I met in public school; we still meet once every couple of months to play video/board games. This results only in casual interaction centered around the game, never anything serious that involves personal issues or philosophical debates. And of course, the entire time, I am thinking that I could be doing something more productive or fun-efficient. Those friends are not exactly positive influences: they spend a lot of their time on video games (CoD etc.), and they are constantly laughing at internet memes or terrible sex jokes. I’ve tried meeting other people online, but I never really can get engaged with them, also because I feel that I am using time inefficiently. So, in the social interaction department, I am not really making any progress. That could be considered another big problem in my life; I probably should have included it in the main article.
A great way to track time spent on activities (especially fluid and unpredicatable ones) is an app called TagTime. It works best on Android, but you can also get it on your computer if you’re hacky. It pings you at random intervals that average out to be worth 45 minutes each, and asks what you’re doing at that exact moment. You create tags for different activities, so you just click on the relevant tag(s), and don’t have to type in anything. It also integrates with Beeminder, if you’d like to track things that way.
Although it doesn’t provide real-life interaction, it still sounds like you might find the LW study hall useful.
If insightful conversation is something you want out of social interaction, and there’s a LessWrong meetup group you can get to, it’d probably be worth trying it out. I’ve found the conversation there is usually very good.
I take a pen and paper everywhere I go. It is a small pen; and I put it and a small piece of paper in the casing of my mobile phone. It helps me note any ideas, and it’s faster and more convenient that using a smartphone. (There is an inconvenience with processing the pieces of paper later. But it’s not a trivial inconvenience against making notes.)
You might look for homeschooling groups in your area, sports leagues, etc. Athletes make more money. Or work at a coffee shop. Consider brainstorming ways to meet people and then trying them out systematically. Is there a local LW meetup?
I take Taekwondo class and will have a black belt before I enter college, does that count? There are other methods of meeting/working with people that I have looked into, but I can’t seem to find one that I can get engaged in. There aren’t are local LW meetups, but there are a few that would be practically accessible; I will be considering them as well.
Taekwondo sounds like a very good thing.
Partnered social dancing is a good segue into human interaction for those with social anxiety. The crowds tend to be very positive and friendly, but you take them in bite sized chunks, a dance at a time. And the crowd gets more positive as you get better at it.
IMO, it beats the hell out of video game playing as a past time.
What you have described here and in the OP doesn’t lead me to believe you have any issues that would prevent you from developing into whatever you wanted, socially. I would estimate that most humans have “mild social anxiety” in the sense that the social situations cause them some level of anxiousness, especially during the uncertain adolescent years, where your status is objectively low because you are young and have no independence or financial means. This gives you essentially no information about what you are capable of growing into. If it helps, imagine some extremely debonair person or fictional character who you like, and trust me that if you start at age sixteen, you can probably become as socially powerful and confident as that person/character by age twenty. I have seen such transformations happen many times, and flatter myself to think that I was such an example. Human social circuitry is hella powerful stuff when you lean on it.
However, this can only happen if you surround yourself with actual humans. Your post is well thought out but you seem to be trying to bend over backwards to avoid engaging with physical human beings. I actually understand why all too well, it is uncomfortable and unaccommodating, but neglecting it would be like neglecting algebra and still expecting to be able to help with FAI.
Possibly even more importantly than all of the above, the effort required to bootstrap yourself toward being better at performance across a wide domain of tasks will be far more difficult without actual people in your environment to give you critical feedback, support, and anchors to sanity. In more colloquial terms, you gotta have good friends around to tell you when you’re being an idiot, because you will always be the last person to see it. I would emphasize that one shouldn’t just view socializing time as a box to be checked off. Socializing and friendship is an utterly critical cornerstone of human existence and friendships are the things that retrospectively end up being most important to you.
Yes, that’s good. Martial arts are a good physical activity.