it is probably no secret to devoted readers of this site that i don't have too much trouble making friends and have a lot of them, though i suppose somebody out there could have gotten the impression that every time i vaguely referred to “my friend” it was always the same person. out of the usual insecurities i often have trouble acknowledging this fact, despite how obvious it is from an objective perspective. i’m still good friends with people i met in middle school and then high school, and i did fine making some new friends after moving away for college. during my relatively-brief study abroad in unspecified distant foreign country i made a bunch of friends too, who welcomed me back for a visit two years later with open arms and let me crash at their places. i’ve even had far more modest success online, i met one of my best friends playing minecraft over a decade ago now, the “friend/business partner/former minecraft arch-nemesis” that's one of the recurring characters around my site, and ever since we started hanging out more in person than online i’ve even become friends with some of his friends too. then, just a couple months ago, there was the whole thing with the random twitter guy, and in the time since then we’ve even managed to meet up a second time for a few days. sometimes i see those graphs people post about the loneliness epidemic that say the average guy my age has only 1-2 friends and think smugly “couldn’t be me”.
however, careful observers may have picked up on this, my ability to meet people and make new friends has one shameful weakness –
it does not work at all with girls. every single friend i’ve mentioned is a guy, in fact i pretty much do not have a single female (platonic) friend and basically never have, the only girls i come into regular contact with are the girlfriends of my friends. obviously this is also why i never mention having a girlfriend or hanging out with any girls on my site, a meaningful absence some may have picked up on.
now, things weren’t always this dire, i did spurn girls throughout high school with the expectation that there was no point in pursuing until collegeisn’t it odd how we’ve developed this norm where every student goes off alone to different colleges across the country, high school graduations like mushrooms releasing an explosion of spores..., when things really get serious. in college things could have been better but started out promising – until everything was rudely interrupted by covid halfway throughthe gap in zoomer socialization skills left by covid is akin to the hole left by the christian dark ages. then, i wisely followed that up with an additional two years of intermittent travel for work (and sometimes leisure) while living at home with my mom (and crazy brother), not exactly a situation conducive to forming any relationships. i didn’t think much of it because i knew i wasn’t alone in being alone, many of my friends weren’t in relationships either and according to graphs people would post online fewer and fewer young people were in relationships too, the “new normal”. it still felt like whenever i’d go outside i was surrounded by couples, but i knew it was just an illusion, whenever i saw them i reminded myself “YOU ARE STATISTICAL ABNORMALITIES!”, of course i am not seeing the silent majority of lonely people – they do not go outside (perhaps that’s exactly the problem?).
the thing is, my five years of “mitigating circumstances” are nothing but excuses, all Cope. the fundamental issue is that i simply did not Want It, and if i have learned anything these past years, it’s that You Gotta Want It (see: my post about learning japanese). the truth is that nothing ever happened because i was lazy, waiting for something to fall into my lap, i did not try at all. i hid at home writing and barely went out in public when i had downtime between work trips, the few times i was around girls i never approached them or tried to interact with them, i never downloaded a single dating app. this is what investigators looking into the causes of the “loneliness epidemic” have found, the root cause is that people simply aren’t trying anymore, they're not going out, they’re not asking anybody out, they’re not even doing the bare minimum like using The Appsthus, to really explain the loneliness epidemic you need to figure out why people don’t want it anymore, why they’re not even trying. there are plenty of theories: people aren’t horny enough anymore because of environmental contaminants or antidepressants or something, the ever-expanding array of fictional/parasocial relationship simulacra are good enough now that many are fully satisfied relying on them indefinitely, maybe everyone’s just decided things are hopeless and given up. comparing my single friends vs. my friends in a relationship, there does seem to be a sharp divide with regards to effort. by and large my chronically-single friends have never had a gf nor have they even tried to date, whereas my friends currently in relationships went out with or dated multiple girls before getting into their present circumstances. one friend in particular was always prone to loneliness and the second we hit college he was off on The Apps like a horse at the races, in just a few months he went through half a dozen girls before settling down with the one he’s been together with up until this day. all i can say is that he simply wanted it more...
now that i’ve settled down a bit, i’m finding that without all the distractions (among other factorsit appears that drinking just one or two cups of coffee a day has been having an effect on my libido equivalent to heroic doses of antidepressants or castration. doctors are baffled, i even got an inconclusive mri. i'm sure i can cure it with the correct supplement...) it's starting to weigh on me, i’m Wanting It more now that i don't have any job keeping things at bay. having neither a gf nor a job right now is making me feel like i’m not a real person and everywhere i look something or someone seems to be calling me out, and therefore i should get to work and start actually Trying.
to prepare, for the past several weeks i have been reading every “dating advice” substack post i can find (trust me there’s no shortage), but i’m finding the majority aren’t particularly applicable to my situation – most seem written for people like 5-10 years older than me (these days actually quite a generation gap), targeted at hip urbanites with no issue landing dozens of dates but trouble spinning any of them into a real relationship. where i’m currently hung up is somewhere far earlier in the process, how to even meet girls in the first place, a substantial issue for a generation for whom all the old social rules and methods have completely collapsed... what i need to do is figure out what the new meeting girls meta is. the following is essentially a literature review, an attempt to put together all the possibilities based on my research, sourced from substack personal essays, tweets from random schizos, graphs of dubious provenance on the level of folklore that people repost endlessly, and memes. you may not like it, but this is the future of rigorous study. i'm sorry to disappoint anybody who was expecting practical advice based on actual experimental evidence, this is all strictly Theory. please direct any objections to my email, if they're convincing i may publish errata or issue a retractionmaybe i still don’t want it hard enough, after all instead of getting out there i have just spent hours procrastinating by writing this gigantic analysis. if i’m really serious about this, i think i will have to quit writing....
GETTING BACK INTO DATING STUDY PLAN
• read one substack personal essay every day about relationships or something
• read 80 hrs visual novels
• watch 10 romance anime (so far i have watched school days)
• practice messaging with ai chatbots
• norwegian wood
i put this at the top for a good reason, it is more or less the “default” option now. in the wake of fourth-wave feminist movement, it is no longer socially acceptable to approach women in person in pretty much any situation, leaving The Apps as the only viable alternative. the only problem is that pretty much everyone unanimously agrees that The Apps suck. apparently they weren’t always bad, gen X/millennials speak rapturously about how perfect okcupid was (technically it was a website tho) and zillenials of the golden age of tinder 7-8 years ago, however as usual everything was ruined in pursuit of the bottom line. the fundamental structural issue is that the incentives of the platform operators and users are not aligned, the owners want to milk users as long as possible whereas for the user the ideal experience is immediately finding their true love and never using The Apps againwhile we're getting all economic here talking about the sexual marketplace, might as well also remark that one major problem with The Apps is that they tend to be a "market for lemons". i’m not sure there’s anything that can be done about the misalignment besides nationalizing The Apps and operating them as a public service, the United States Department of Love, but like with anything the government does that will lead to a whole different category of issues.
girls always complain that guys' profiles on The Apps look awful, while there are certainly plenty of bad ones i think the fundamental issue is that guys largely have no idea what kind of things look cool or attractive to girls so they just use pictures that look cool to them, which unfortunately girls may not find cool at all, or might even find off-putting... i can't really really explain why, i don't have the theory of mind to understand how somebody could possibly find a picture of a dude wearing sunglasses and half a russian paratrooper dress uniform driving a convertible not cool... though now that i think about it, it could use a cig or some booze or a gun as well...although everyone hates them, they still begrudgingly use The Apps for lack of any better options. but from what i'm hearing i worry that now it may finally be too late, the vibe has genuinely shifted against the apps, younger people are finally making good on their promises and abandoning them. i saw some stats showing that use of The Apps among young people is dropping off, and in my own experience it feels like i mostly see millennials and up using them, hell even my mom was on hinge at one point which totally changed my perception of The Apps as being a young person thing. the thing is, if we give up on The Apps, then what’s left? it doesn’t seem like The Apps are being replaced with anything, everyone is still extremely socially anxious or awkward and all in person approaches are still forbidden, so is it just officially Over? are we doomed? great note to start off on here...
ah yes, the "traditional" places to meet girls or just people in generalimportant to note that selection bias applies to nearly every option - obviously if you're looking for certain types of girls you won't find them unless you go to where they are, e.g. girls that go to clubs will generally be more outgoing, if you're really into shy hikki girls you're better off not going outside at all, instead get online and fire up discord or something. the problem is, the times have changed, they’re all now places to go with people you already know, whether it's with your friend group or on a date. what ALWAYS happens is that you show up with your date or group of friends and stay glued to them the whole time, bouncing like a blob off all the other friend groups/couples milling about the venue in the exact same situation. girls always show up in these intimidating and unapproachable groups, and we hang out across the room observing them from a safe distance like we’re at a zoo looking at different species, one particularly crass friend might go “damn she's a baddie” and then everyone nods “yup” and we continue to sit there cradling our beers doing nothing. at some point someone always gets out into the "action" for a sec to shoot a quick video on their phone "YOOOOOO THINGS GOING CRAAAAZY AT THE CLUB 🔥🔥🔥" before returning and settling back down. sometimes it feels like we’re only going to torture ourselves, or like we’re going through the motions trying to perform some poorly-understood ancient ritual, the purpose and proper methods long since forgotten, now continuing only in simulacra form, there's so many people who go out and don't even drink anymore...
they do love my moves at the club though, i have insane footwork and seemingly-limitless stamina. my secret? i'm actually one of the world's top steppers-on-panels-to-onscreen-arrows, i just imagine i'm playing pump it up, executing stepcharts in my head to the beat on the dancefloordid i just have a poor sample? i don't think so, i get around, i have a pretty wide sample across both time and space, across years and on opposite sides of the world with different friend groups, and this is ALWAYS what happens. you can still have plenty of fun at clubs, just go without any expectation of meeting people, and if that's your primary reason for going maybe stay home because you'll probably just end up disappointed.
this is a major "your mileage may vary" category depending on what your hobbies are, many are practiced at home in solitude and aren't particularly conducive to meeting people in person. the greater problem, though, is that a large proportion of hobbies/subcultures have participation heavily skewed by gender - off the top of my head, crypto is dominated by menpeople routinely make fun of crypto guys for having "zero hoes" at their "cool" parties or rented boats in miami, i also recall that when bloomberg journalist zeke faux went to an extremely hyped bored ape yacht club party in nyc, one of the things he remarked is that there were almost no women there., while fanfiction is overwhelmingly womenAO3 demographics survey 2024. if you're lucky enough to to be really into something that's heavily skewed towards the opposite gender then you're probably having no issues dating in the first place, otherwise i would be hesistant about getting into something just to meet people, real passion is hard to fake and people are good at detecting inauthenticity which will probably set them against you.
i can't help but wonder sometimes if we're entering an era of increased gender division - the election revealing how men are leaning more right and women more left, the appearance of new misandristic and mysogynistic movements, etc. more innocuously, men and women just aren't casually hanging out together as much, possibly due to the internet. one factor is the general atomization that means everyone has fewer friends and hangs out less overall with anyone, but the accelerating feedback loops of the internet may also be sorting men and women into separate hyperspecific interests/communities, memeplexes that have evolved to appeal only to the specific sensibilities of one gender. historically, a stark divide between male and female social spheres is nothing new, however the issue now is that we may lack adequate social technology to "bridge the gap" and bring men and women together, there's no relatives matchmaking or arranged marriages, only The Apps... society divided between fujoshis gooning to yaoi and incels gooning to yuri, and never the twain shall meet; the allegory of the gooncave.unfortunately (as is probabilistically the most likely outcome) my main hobbies like rhythm games are all male-dominated, even within my "specialty" (so to speak) of dance games where you might expect ratios to be a bit better the difference is only marginal. literature might also seem promising, however despite reading now being skewed heavily towards women, if you go to any new bookstore and see the kind of stuff that's selling well now, you'll find that what people are reading is not literature, the vast majority is YA or romantasy.
there’s been a major backlash against relationships in the workplace, though i think it's gone way too far and thrown out the baby with the bathwater, demonizing even the innocuous like asking out your fellow lowly coworkers at the grocery store or fast food restaurant like it’s even close to problematic "boss forcing himself on the secretary"-type scenarios. i think people secretly still yearn for the workplace romance, i mean look how much everyone rooted for jim and pam. in the most lowly customer service jobs especially i don't think there should be anything to worry about, there's no massive power imbalances as everyone's a lowly pawn of some massive faceless corporation, and the jobs themselves are relatively low-commitment and replaceable, either party can easily quit and jump ship to a comparable job somewhere similar if things get too awkward. sometimes things go the other way, one of my friends is dating someone they met at work and neither of them work at that place anymore.
based on vibes and employee gender ratios i think my top three options would be:
▶Bookstore
▶Coffee shop
▶Chick-Fil-A
one added benefit of customer-facing jobs is that customers can be potential romantic prospects too, my friend tips cute waitresses generously (on the company card) and writes down his number on the receipt, after many attempts i think it's netted him one brief text chain.
lately for inspiration i've read multiple general guides for meeting people and making friends (or maybe i read the same guide multiple times) that encourage getting out of the house and becoming a “regular” at a local café or something, after a while recognizing who the other regulars are and greeting them with nods or knowing glances, and then eventually that somehow magically turns into a real friendship. does this actually work? obviously you have to get lucky, but i think the general idea is that if you never leave the house you don't even have a chance of getting lucky and meeting someone, it's like expecting to win the lottery without buying lottery ticketsNOTE: this comparison is not an endorsement of lottery games, they have the biggest house edge of any form of gambling, it's something absurd like 40%.
at least if you don't meet anyone, you can get some work done on your laptop... or whatever it is people are doing on their laptops in cafés...one of these days i want to go through an entire café and survey the laptop people, asking them what they’re doing. shocking truths might be uncovered. i think i'd also try to hasten the whole process along a bit by showing up with something really odd, a conversation starter that people couldn’t help but comment on. i think the best option would be my typewriter, plus i’ve been thinking of using it more anyway to stay more focused on writing, so it’s a win-win. it wouldn’t be the most absurd thing i’ve seen anyone bring to a café before, recently i saw a guy with a full dual monitor setup and fancy mechanical keyboard.
these days there seems to be a large focus on "figuring out" exactly want you want in a partner beforehand and then trying to find people that meet those specific requirements. i think the problem with this view is that people think they know what they want but don't actually know what they want, or perhaps more accurately, what they need. i've seen something like this happen before, a very neurotic girl i knew had a little wine and put together his laundry list of "non-negotiable" requirements for potential boyfriends, flashforward a couple years and now she's been in a long satisfied relationship with one of my friends who fulfilled precisely none of them. your true needs and desires have to be uncovered, and this is one of the major flaws with dating apps - it makes it too easy for people to filter based on what they think they want, thereby eliminating a significant source of spontaneity or discovery. within the safety of The Apps, it's easy to never leave your comfort zone and never falsify your preconceptions, never realizing you've been searching all along for the wrong things. this is why i'm going to try and go in with an open mind, not rely too heavily on the things i find most attractive on the surface (plus i'm almost positive those kinds of girls would definitely be bad for me...)this one is very similar to the above, i have only broken it out into its own section so that i can try and hit my goal of getting to 69. it's simple, just appear in public openly reading some book girls might feel compelled to comment on, i'm talking something like banana yoshimoto or dosto. has murakami fallen out of favor yet? you can use different books depending on what kind of girl you're trying to target, if you want a real freak you can be out there reading industrial society and its future or fanged noumena or something. maybe i could even bust out some manga, hang out reading shimeji simulation in public. avoiding broad appeal can counterintuitively be a good strategy - appealing to niche interests from the outset will get you much less attention overall, however the effect of the filtration will be that the interest you do bring in will be much higher quality. anyways, if it doesn't work at least i get some reading in, which i would probably be doing anyway.
read something once that said apparently zoomers are just shooting their shot cold dming random girls in their area on snapchat or instagram. only one of my most normoid friends actively maintains an instagram account but did apparently get approached in dms by a girl there once so there could be something to it. i’ve never had instagram, though if i ever do decide to use it i have at least a decade’s worth of incredible photographic content i could slowly drip out to make myself look active there, spend a week scheduling an entire year’s worth of weekly posts and forget about it unless i get a dm notification.
one of the most regrettable lies we tell teenagers is that college is about “learning” and “education” and “job skills” when those don’t even make the top ten actual most important functions of college. let me set the record straight: the most important function of college is meeting girls, which the college helpfully facilitates by getting a bunch of eligible girls with no ties (from out of state) your age in one place that have been filtered by the college application process for intelligence and ambition, and then they give you plenty of excuses to hang out with them by assigning a bunch of fake work and tests which you can form “study groups” for. now everyone knows we're all about the data here, here's what it says: "Nearly 60 percent of all college students today are women." could they be making it any easier?! and yet to think that some people just spend the whole time gaming in their dorm room or solo studying to grind out the best possible grades in each class!
unfortunately, at the time there was nobody telling me all of that so i did not take enough advantage of the opportunity when i could. in more than one of my precious college months i clocked over 100 hours playing minecraft, then again i thought i had a lot more time to get my act together before covid came out of nowhere and kneecapped me. luckily, in this case there's a second chance: GRAD SCHOOL! this time, i won't make the same mistake as before and study computer science, instead something sexy like japanese literature. i am certain i could immediately get into any program in the country solely by submitting the contents of my "secret" page.
one problem with going back to school is that it's expensive, both financially and temporally. plus, in my field another degree is not exactly going to aid my stillborn "career". the more efficient option would be to find some way to reintegrate myself into the college ecosystem without having to make such a huge investment. one possibility is tutoring college students, realistically there's probably half a dozen or more subjects i could comfortably tutor, some of which i've never even taken classes in. the only problem is like half of those subjects are stuff like math or computer science, where i might end up tutoring mostly a bunch of dudes. i guess i could turn away every guy who comes to me claiming to already "have a full schedule" and wait for the girls to come, if ever...
now that i think about it, there’s absolutely nothing preventing me from just hanging out around the university acting like i belong there. there’s no security guards checking student ids at the entrance to the library or the student union or lecture halls or anything. in the past, i’ve seen people online bring up the fact that at most schools you can just drop in on random classes for free without anybody bothering you, colleges are fine with it because of course what you’re really paying for is not the lectures at all, but i digress...
obviously there’s a line you can cross at which you're pretty much actively pretending to be a student, which starts to become a bit of a moral hazard zone. it’s probably ok to hang out in the library during the day writing or whatever... but something that’s theoretically possible and almost certainly crossing the line would be looking up lecture schedules and room assignments in the publicly-available master schedule, buying a used copy of the textbook, showing up to every class starting at the beginning of the term, bringing an old clicker and pretending to answer clicker quizzes, then insinuating yourself into a study group for the test, using cracked css skills to make a duplicate canvas to submit fake assignments on...
there's always more fish in the sea they say, but some fishing spots have a lot more fish than others... moving to any city bigger than where you currently live is guaranteed to increase your options from a purely numeric perspective. the most interesting and ambitious people all seem to live in the same couple of cities and that’s also not a coincidence. note that some cities are better than others, We Looked At The Data and the gender ratio on the west coast is Not Great, san francisco especially should be avoided. the city with by far the most favorable ratio is NYC, for some reason girls are irresistibly drawn to it. unfortunately it just has to be the most expensive damn city in the nation. if you want to go easier on the wallet, according to The Data the best option is Greensboro, North Carolina.
this can be a good one but it won't really work for me since i don't really have any female friends, and all my friend's girlfriends either have no female friends either or they're all taken. as you might imagine, there is always a severe lack of girls at the parties we throw, and the ones that do come are always spoken for.
i think people frequently forget "met online" doesn't just mean The Apps, it includes the whole internet and i think there's an increasing proportion of people meeting through twitter ("the best dating app" or "meet your moots", i've heard many say while tweeting pictures of wedding rings) or even discord. the thing is i'm basically clueless when it comes to online socialization and have no idea where you'd even start with this, mainly because i spent my formative online years trolling people in minecrafta couple months ago when i was down in san diego hanging christmas lights i worked one day with an old minecraft buddy from way back and we got to reminiscing about old times. it was fascinating because despite the fact that we played alongside each other for so long, in a way we managed to have almost parallel experiences (or the parts that were important to us and lingered in our memories were totally different), i kept bringing up the epic raids and legendary battles we’d taken part in, the fearsome enemies we’d gone up against and defeated, meanwhile he kept throwing out this endless array of girls’ names like “ remember vanessa? damn she was pretty cute, or what about emma? or liz?”, none of which i could recall at all. apparently that’s all he remembered, chatting up this succession of egirls, he even sheepishly admitted to having some kind of enormously awkward teenage “esex” in skype with one of them once. is this another example of simply Wanting It more? (he has a girlfriend currently). i have this theory that the social realm has now split into two distinct domains, online and offline, both of which require different sets of skills. success in one of the domains does not necessarily imply success in the other, there are countless real life losers who are extremely popular online and have amassed massive followings, likewise many people popular and successful in real life who have absolutely no idea what they're doing online. a different environment means that new social rules have evolved online, shaped by contours of platform mechanics: your use of emoji reactions, your writing style, when and how to jump into group convos, when is it ok to ping someone, at what stage can you send a friend request, start a dm chain, form a group chat, etc. etc. there's equivalents to status online, like having lots of followers or being a moderator, even stuff akin to "fashion", choosing an appropriate profile picture and so on. the digital native socialized online understands all the ins-and-outs intuitively, navigating without a single digital faux pas...
unfortunately it may be too late for me, i have difficulty even conceptualizing how a full digital social life might function, even though on a theoretical level i know it exists, i've met discord power users before whose entire social lives are mediated through the app (like that korean guy i once met who learned english entirely from using discord and would say emoji reactions out loud). i can barely imagine what casual socialization in discord might even look like, i've always used it in a strictly-business fashion, using it to plan minecraft hijinks back in the day, and now we use it to coordinate our actual business schemes (funnily enough there's an app called "slack" that's literally just discord marketed towards businesses)i also worry that i might have permanently crippled my ability to communicate via short-form text messages like dms from too many years spent trolling people in minecraft chat, people always complain about how bad i am at texting (though this also includes other issues like replying too late or never). the only problem is that thanks to the way dating apps work, being good at texting is suddenly one of the most essential skills for dating....
GOD i wish the hobbies available now weren't all Lame As Hell, it’s all rock climbing or the damn “one piece trading card game” or board games or DnD, nonetheless my friends are all succumbing to them with no resistance, transforming into cringe millennial redditors we swore we’d never become. is this how the devoted hippies felt back in the seventies, when everybody who’d been involved in the sixties counterculture stuff aged out of it and got “respectable” jobs as corporate drones just like their parents, the kind of “selling out to the man” they swore they’d never do?
i’m somewhat infamous for being a hater and knocking things without trying them but i really have given most of them the old college try, in freshman year i had a big optimistic “i’m gonna join clubs to meet people!” phase and joined the board game club. i showed up to every meeting religiously for several months, even a couple of times when there were only three or four other people. then, one day while sitting around waiting for the next round of some game, i had this sudden realization: “this whole time i haven’t really been having fun nor do i care about any of these people. what am i doing here?” i got up and headed towards the bathroom, but instead of going in i ducked out the back door and left without a word, never to return.i lasted longer in the video games club, though there were some weird moments like that time i was pulled aside and chastised for exclaiming “son of a bitch!” after missing a jump playing super mario odyssey because that word could be offensive to women (there were none present, as usual). i weakly tried to defend myself by arguing that i didn't mean anything with it and it's just a stock exclamation largely divorced from its literal meaning but they weren't having it. there was one girl i thought was kind of cute who showed up on occasion, one night we were walking home after a club meeting and chatting, one of those ideal opportunities, and i torpedoed it because she was telling me how much she loved fire emblem fates and i asked “what’s your favorite thing about it?” and she responded “the worldbuilding” to which i could not help but reply “oh REALLY? so then what’s the name of the continent the game takes place on?” (the developers hadn't bothered to name it). then again i don't think things could have ever worked out between us anyway.
i took a rock climbing class in high school (yeah, our gym had a kind of shabby old rock climbing room built in a tall closet-like room adjacent to the gym) for PE credits and it was the only class i nearly failed (by this i mean getting a B), mainly because i had this traumatizing experience midway through where i fell from the very top of the wall (maybe 16 or 18 feet up?) all the way to the bottom. normally you’re not supposed to fall even close to that far when you’re climbing top rope and have somebody on the ground belaying like we were doing, but my friend had set up the belay device incorrectly, though to his credit he made a valiant effort to make up for it by using his bare hands to try and stop the rope, receiving a nasty burn. after that i was terrified of climbing to the top of the wall and didn’t do so again until the very end of the semester where it was part of the final exam, and i heroically conquered my fear and got through it all. then after that touching moment of redemption the teacher OF COURSE forgot to enter my grade into the gradebook, but i didn’t bother correcting him because even without that i still had an A from getting good scores on the written exams. i should clarify that i wasn’t really enjoying it at all even before the “incident”, though, this is not one of those situations where when i get over my “trauma” i’ll rediscover my love for rock climbing or anything.
everyone knows there's nothing sexier than a musician. sometimes i regret spending all that time i could have used learning an instrument playing rhythm games like pop'n music instead, basically an instrument simulacrum where you slap huge brightly-colored buttons, it looks and feels like an oversized baby toy sometimes...
this is basically the inverse of "appear in public and hope somebody approaches", go out and try to talk to girls that seem interesting, like ones writing with typewriters in cafes. the only problem is that it's scary, in a way this whole list is all so that doing something like this can be avoided. i also can't help but associate cold approaches with the ancient long-discredited pickup artist tradition, this was a pillar of their teachings, it was called "daygame", one of their most important rites of passage. they kind of took an extreme approach to it, you'd go out to some public space and spend hours just walking up to girls getting rejected again and again, i'm not sure if the point of it was to build up a resistance to rejection or to hope you get lucky and stumble upon some insane girl who is willing to go off with a random guy.
the thing is, maybe it's not so strange to be scared of cold approaches, after all what we now think of as the "old normal way to meet girls" of cold approaching in a bar was in fact a relative historic oddity, a generational blip in a long history of almost semi-arranged marriages between people living in the same social sphere.