“Imagine you have a time machine or another magical way to communicate with your past self, what would you tell them?”

In order to feel happy, you first need to get a better understanding of yourself. It’s probably going to take like the rest of your life to figure it out, but accept that. First, acknowledge your emotional instability and insecurities. You are perhaps at best a partially neglected, sheltered, stupid fool and a sweet summer child. You have encountered basic human malevolence that is perhaps at its climax in middle schoolers, and you never learned to let things go. High school will be pretty bad too, but that one is mostly your own fault. There will be signs, and you ignored them. You defaulted to inaction because you were scared. If you don’t want to do that, pick up on the signs and ask yourself, “why” and seriously try to find an answer. And by the way, your mental cache capacity and hit rate is ehhh so write things down. You do your best thinking writing, even if most of it is garbage, the practice produces second order effects you do not understand.

You believe you will be better than other people if you neglect the social games and focus solely on academics and your hobbies. You are wrong LMAO. One of THE most important skills you should’ve been developing is human relations. Yes. You cared too much about upholding your false image of “good boy who does good in school” and failed at the bigger game. You wanted to maintain “gifted student” status and ride its coattails forever, but even if you succeeded that’s kind of sad. You will become a lonely shell of a person, and you don’t want that do you?

How do you build human relations skills? Some tips:

• befriend older people as mentors, use the internet to study how to talk to people, how to think about other people and try to understand and build a model of how other people think too (media centering the human condition can be helpful)
• practice! talk to friends, acquaintances, people of authority, AND strangers. Talk to non-violent homeless people. Talk to people who your social circle tells you to NOT talk to. I don’t know, just practice. Increase the volume of practice. It’s going to be uncomfortable, and you will likely fail multiple times but I believe in you.
• be genuine BUT not radically transparent. Radical transparency is a beautiful idea, but we need to be safe here and practice just a teensy wheensy bit of opsec, which you will probably blow down the line anyways, but let’s not talk about that right now. Controversial take but you should learn to lie well! Yes, learn to lie! You suck at lying, like a lot. It’s better to be a good liar who does not lie voluntarily than a person who does not lie because they are so bad at it that they might as well can’t! Learn to lie and manipulate! You will always be outclassed by like teenage girls who are apparently always engaging in constant social warfare unlike the boys you grew up with who just play video games and whatnot and just say no homo whenever we get too comfortable around each other every now and then…jk.
• you and everyone else are deeply molded by the overarching mainstream culture, smaller subculters, and the super niche cultures. you are kind of socially retarded and don’t know this explicitly at the time, but keep this in mind. Individuals have baked in personas from birth, but the existence of the hierarchical cultures is important to understand and learn about in order to understand how each individual you interact with will think.

It kind of all comes down to you’ve failed to uphold the social contract that is laid out by society that your peers, family, and friends all poked and prodded you at. You cannot just be a free-spirited child or whatever the fuck you are trying to be. One key facet of being an adult is being fake for the greater good or the stability of the social order around you. They don’t do it because they want to! Nobody does! They do it to survive and to be happy. Social rejection has like a 10x muliplier damage due to inherited social survival instincts from your primate brain. Hack that shit. Gather social points. IRL is probably better than internet social points, but hey you got to start somewhere buddy.

Besides social aspect, which is a pretty big part, you also need to get out of your comfort zone more. You will I guess, whether you wanted to or not, but doing so voluntarily always helps! And understand the concept of skill issue. I don’t want to say it but “the message is the medium”. Saying this means that writing for my simple blog on the web where its not in an easily accessible and popular medium like YouTube or TikTok with wide reach and scalable social interaction features makes me feel like I’m wasting my life away on this little hobby…But yes the way the message is conveyed is often overlooked and really important in comparison to the actual message itself. Another way to understand this is the funny hot guy says hello vs ugly guy says hello HR meme. They both say hello, the difference is the medium of the person that invokes a difference in response. I think the hilarious phrase “skill issue” is a great medium for conveying the message that “you’re not good enough at X”. The former I can digest and take actionable steps to improvement while the latter probably just makes me feel bad about myself. Is failure to adapt to traditional non-toxic masculinity a skill issue? Maybe. That’s another thing you’ll have to wrestle with btw young me.

Ideals of masculinity differ per mainstream culture and promote different behaviors in subcultures too, and honestly globalization and the mixing of cultures makes it more confusing BUT is not a bad thing. Haven’t figured this one out, but instead of worrying about this focus on routines and skills: eating well (learning how to cook), sleeping at regular intervals, and doing BOTH cardio and strength training exercises. I think the rest will fall into place (eventually).

And let me help you out, you are vanilla cishet man lol. You like women but are just shy to talk about girls, and unfortunately no older boy or man has given you any advice on this topic. It’s also really confusing because a lot of advice on this topic is either enfringing on or completely deep in toxic masculinity or in the manosphere and it’s really confusing. Figure out regular basic human relations first, then romantics. I still haven’t figured this one out, so good luck young me!!! I don’t think we are aromantic, and we mean no offense to anyone identifying under the umbrella term aro, but I think for us we believe we can fall in love given the right person. But who knows, maybe I’m wrong about this.

I’m not sure if modern western therapy will help you. You probably should seek more spiritual approaches. Your other problems do not lie from chemical imbalances or mental pathologies imo but come as a natural response to the insane world you live in. You have to adapt to the insanity without going insane. In other words skill issue. Your failures are mostly the results of skill issues.

Hilarious edit not sure what original source is but here’s an ifunny link, or the actual article.

And it looks like I’m out of time. Act with swiftness, your mental facilities are decaying as we speak…I didn’t spend all my Robux to travel back in time to give you this advice for nothing. And don’t join Boy Scouts, whatever you do, just don’t. That’s a character arc we REALLY didn’t need. The writers of your life were smoking some shit. Godspeed.