For the last time, Google, my social ineptitude doesn't make me an incel!

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Hello, I'm RageAgainstTheSurge (a.k.a. R.A.T.S., a.k.a. Surge) [He/Him].
Eight months ago, I moved to a new town, though I would make some new friends on Facebook, I was making 100 karma points on Reddit per week after almost a decade of being banned from that website and getting back into that site hoping Reddit's ban system would not catch up to me. I thought I was making progress.

I'll admit, I'm a high functioning autistic white guy who has had trouble finding work and was finally able to live independently after winning a personal injury lawsuit.

I am the kind of Millennial who has been on the receiving end of some of the worst events in history the last 25 years.
My parents had to lie and say I had Tourette Syndrome so that the local school district wouldn't try to send me to some special school because of my autism. I excelled at math. I had a growing love of computers. I wish my parents had let me spent more time with video games. They were worried that video games would corrupt me so they got me a computer. The computer had better access to porn. I don't hate porn. Heck, the last thing I want to do is be one of those "born-again" losers who say they found Jesus Christ, but actually found Christianity to be an outlet to be an even more hateful jerk. Have you seen those guys lately? Try to ban books. Bragging about "Christian Nationalism" and not understanding theres more nationalism (fascism) than their is actual Christianity. Invading the US Capitol Last Year!!! I mean, what the actual [word you probably can't say here].

But I can assure you had I spent more time with a Nintendo 64 instead of a piece-of-crap used Apple computer (because this was the late 1990s), I definitely would have made more friends.

I spent a lot of time alone. Tried making friends in middle school and high school and college and in social groups. I was always too extreme, too smart, too awkward, or too offensive.

Late sophomore year, April 1999: At a high school 1000 miles from where I was, a notorous school shooting at a place outside of Denver that I never once though about where two morons killed classmates and teachers. Unbeknownst to be, and probably a lot of other teenagers in America, the wheels inside the heads of a lot of school adminstrators were turning as to how they could use this tragedy to expel a lot of other students who were or whose parents were a real thorn in their side. But a fear was implanted into peoples minds, how those "odd kids" probably were "plotting to blow up the school" (where my art projects were and the places at school which were a quiet refuge sometimes and the few people I tried to be friends with were during the day? What incentive would I have to destroy the school or murder anyone there. Never the less the school had this one woman who was like 26 pretend to be ten years younger (but her age was showing; insert that Steve Buscemi "How do you do, my fellow classmates" meme here) shadow me all day to see if I would do anything only for her to report that I was the most BORING person she ever meant. And I sad, with sarcasm, "No, really? You think?!" Regardless, Junior year was hell, I think I had a mental breakdown that year. And by Senior year I was taking classes from home on the Internet, which wasn't doing me any favors socially.

You could say that I had done remote learning 20 years ahead of my time and it was pretty bad in 2000 as it was in 2020.

Went to college in 2001, two weeks into it on a warm sunny Tuesday in September, I walk into my work study where the TVs were turned on and we were watching the towers fall down. Some of my classmates quit college to serve in the military. Others just wanted to hide away in the library and not worry about young, angry, stupid Americans like myself being mad about what happened. (Again, my myopic world view with my conservative parents wasn't doing me any favors in an environment that was primarily based around liberalism and free thought...both which were given bad names at the time because of what just happened.) Freshman year of college went OK. Sophmore year, I had skipped classes, stayed in my room a lot. Taking advantage of all the freedom I had. Again, being socially akward being a math/computer nerd who liked Invader Zim, downloading music, and watching Flash Animation Cartoons a lot more than my school work. After that, my folks felt that I didn't have the emotional maturity for dorm life.

My school was one of those early adapters to "The Facebook" in 2005. Some guys at another, more expensive college was introduced to it. It was a much better website back then. We had social group about what classes we were taking with this one professor, we joked about how ridiculous nobody could solve The Shrine of the Silver Monkey from the original Legends of the Hidden Temple. Facebook's halcyon days were my own halcyon days of web development. I probably should have spent more time working on Java than JavaScript, but I guess every Node.js and React.js developer today would say what I was trying to do with JavaScript was ahead of its time and not as thoroughly recognized as some rich Ivy League nerds who we now loathe today.

Regardless, in 2007, I finally got my Bachelors of Science in Computer Science...right about at the same time the economy crashed. Of course, my mom though that now that I had completed college it was time to start hanging out with more "developmentally disabled" people. This was a big mistake. I literally got no respect for being an intelligent person. My resume meant nothing to these people. I asked if they could help me find a job with web development or computer programming, they assumed that the coding I was talking about was equivalent to medical coding, which I really didn't want to do because I really did not want to be in a medical environment. There was an attempt to finally teach me how to drive, but with no follow up and my neighborhood being a crappy place to take the drivers test, that wasn't happening. One time I went to the DMV to take my test and the lady failed me before I left the parking lot so she could go home at 4PM.

1/3
 
Over the years, I've learn to use the local transit system more and to advocate for public transportation even in places where it wasn't wanted. Still the local transit network continued to shrink. Urban sprawl continued in the next county over where for decades they still have refused to establish a public transportation system in the next county over and parts of the county I lived simply because they didn't like that the current system had access to East St. Louis. In return, I seriously didn't want to find work in areas were a bunch of racist jerks were.

My world continued to get smaller than larger. My mother grew this idea that I should live on Social Security indefitely, especially after a miscalculation as to how much personal assets you had meant that Social Security wanted to clawback $16,000 because my parents didn't know that getting life insurance would count as a personal asset and thanks to the fact that SSI continues to have a $2000 cap on personal assets (which hasn't changed at all over the years, not even with inflation), meant I was not living my best life.

Years passed an there was less opportunity to get the job I want because the recession had created a one year gap in my resume that expanded to nine years, until I finally got my first job with this one guy who didn't pay me for my work, conned me into being an independent contractor. Of course, a month into the job, I was assaulted and robbed on the train home one evening. I gave chase because there was no guard. The guard, who was a guy the transit system hired through a subcontractor, who hired through another subcontractor, who hired some poor sap from an employment agency who found a security job on Craigslist and was eat dinner in his car .

Deposition was quite interesting. The three guys they hired looked like they were all cosplaying as Leisure Suit Larry and would make Saul Goodman from Better Call Saul look like Johnny Cochran. The trial hearing for the case was to be in 2020...and guess what happened.

The pandemic had delayed the trial up to another year. Meanwhile, I had a falling out with one employer who didn't pay me...then another one who tried to pay me in gifts and spent more money on advertising than actually flipping houses. And then of course, to round off the decade, the pandemic.

Honestly, the last time I remember life being "normal" was on February 29, 2020, where I had joined a study group to brush up on my web development skills. Two weeks later, all those classes were cancelled. However, having been prepared beforehand, I had items in my home that would make remote work be easy. In fact, when everyone was having trouble getting set up, I was there helping other set up their homes for remote learning.

Even after the pandemic was winding down, I seriously wanted to consider either working from home or doing remote work. However, my parents had discouraged me from being freelance because freelance meant being an independent contractor and an independent contractor meant having to foot the bill for everything even if the client didn't speak English very well...like literally.

My dad's boss ran a Mexican seafood (mariscos) restaurant, but no matter how I communicated to him (either in English or Spanish) that I needed him to retake pictures or to sent me his design for a new company logo (because he didn't want it to be a jalapeño in a sombrero which I could understand because it was a the emphasis of the restaurant was seafood from Nayarit. Why not something that would be more related to the fishing culture there. This project fell apart because of poor communication, not just because there was a language barrier, but that familiar barrier of bosses expecting employees to be mindreaders and to do thing with computers for free that cost money, only to be boiled down to a "social media manager" which mean having to POST CONTENT on the website for a restaurant with a culture and cuisine that as some white guy from America I can't really express it in a way that someone who is a native of Mexico ("el jefe") would know about. So that project was D.O.A.

2/3
 
Around the same time, I finally got into some slight day traiding with some stocks and crypto. With the meme stock craze, I was able to make about $500 before my mother insisted that I stop doing trading. (I haven't...but I haven't been as active with my portfolio as I should the past year or so). Regardless, I was able to invest in some companies that I liked, swore off most of the meme stocks I bought for more stable companies, and I've just been letting it coast fo the last year.

Meme stocks were also my excuse to want to get back on Reddit and rebuild my relationship with the local Reddit community, which I managed to do for about a year, up until I create a thread titled "The Daily [explitive] Josh Hawley Thread" back in May of this year, which I meant with dry sarcasm, especially since the video of him running like a coward after he was egging on the crowd on January 6, 2021 (an event which I watched in horror because I though "meh, it's a quiet day, let's watch some C-SPAN") showed him what a ******* he was, but it still got me permanently banned from Reddit sitewide, which was completely overkill because I was moderating two other subreddits at the time.

It doesn't help that one of the largest internet forums online encourages you to "find your community" bans you not for being one of those redneck ******** angry that r/TheDonald was removed (that place is a human cesspool along with all those other RWNJ places online), but because your senator who refused to accept the result of the election, expressed support for Russia following the Ukraine Invasion, and supports treating women like broodmares for "Christianity"™®© by taking away their bodily autonomy is one of the top five most spineless members of congress.

Meanwhile on Facebook, there was a falling out between myself and several members of the group who violently wanted to support the establishment of those Bird Electric Scooters which have been obstructing sidewalk accessibility for the disabled. I got kicked out of the group especially after calling one of the women a ***** (something I rarely every do, but her ableist behavior was more than enough to get under my skin). Of course the group moderation was nowhere in sight when it needed to be to break up the fight before it accelerated to this level, especially when opposing forces starting doxxing people so they could have their ableist scooters that have no place being on the sidewalks or in streets for that matter because of the lack of helmets used, in a town with hilly terrain near intersections.

So I've been more alone than ever lately.

It's strange how everytime you search for how to get yourself unbanned from something, Google just pulls up some article about incels ("involuntary celebates" or men who don't seem to understand that the reason they can't get laid is that their own behavior sucks but they blame women anyway because they are stupid). My Reddit permaban wasn't from "incel behavior" and somehow an argument over how an ableist scooter company had one woman insult me by calling me an "incel" despite the fact that I had no sexual interest in her in the first place, especially since she is the mother of five kids. (Yeah....trying to score with a woman more liberal than I am who has her hands full with her kids is right up there with "Build the Lego Batmobile" and "find a job where the boss isn't an idiot who thinks I'm can read his mind" (That was sarcasm, if you didn't get that.))

There are other reasons people get banned from social media forums that have nothing to do with their raging hard-on for a gross 74-year-old tentacle monster that commits financial fraud every day for my lack of girlfriend...such as thinking about other people who can't use some crappy electric scooters or understanding the fragility of democracy even as your elected officials (and wannabe elected officials) domestically abuse it. It didn't help that their was a lack of accountability in the Facebook group to respond to conflicts when they were small. It didn't help that Reddit's policies use an atomic bomb instead of a scalpel to excise a problem. It doesn't help that Google makes finding sites like this one like finding a few drops of rain in a scorching desert.

At a time when I want to find my place in the world and not feeling accomplished in life, my anger is not spurn from my shallow sexual needs which Google seems to imply when my search never included the word "incel" to begin with, but by the fact that existential threats are being ignored for collectively selfish reasons.

If the Facebook group had better moderation, I could have used my interest in meteorology and emergency preparedness to warn more people in my community of a flooding deluged this summer that effected my community. Instead, fragile and dangerous scooters mattered more to them than being a welcoming and open community. I find myself more isolated from the community that I live in than ever, and with not way to apologize (because almost everyone has blocked me), I may as well have been murdered with pitchforks and torches for talking about evolution at a Tennessee elementary school. I can't ask for favors. I can't make friends with anyone. Heck, I couldn't even get anyone to come to my apartment this evening to help me finish off all the food I made for a bunch of real estate investors who visited my place yesterday. I spent $250 on groceries, several hours in the kitchen, and two days trying to clean up this place, only for my food spread to be ignored like it was left out in the sun for a week.

Reddit claims it is a place to "find your community" when it was too easy to break the rules and their ban system that checks emails, IP Addresses, and if someone is using a VPN makes forum participation impossible.

I'd love to do more meetup and use sites like Facebook or Meetup to create events, but that is nearly impossible since the algorithms favor who pays Facebook more than the level of activity or proximity of a group. There's barriers and gatekeeping in places that claim they don't do nor allow gatekeeping, but they still do it anyway. and the means of discipline used (or not used) means more loneliness, isolation, ostracization, and bitterness.

It didn't help that Kurzgesagt posted this video which at the end encouraged them to join this subreddit thread about find more friends on this subreddit....and I can't even use it. That red band on top of the page reminding me of my permanent ban. It's like being told about a new treatment for cancer after it has metastasized.

I'm hoping to fix a problem that the solution is becoming harder to find and the time in which to solve it is running out.

Thanks for putting up with this long post. I had to break it into three parts.

3/3
 
That is a pretty through introduction.

Welcome to the forums :)
 
...maybe shy away from Reddit? Am I that old and out of touch, the hell are karma points?

Anyway, welcome lol.
 
Welcome to the site!

"For the last time, Google, my social ineptitude doesn't make me an incel!"

Doesn't Google know everything? Maybe you are just in denial. Just kidding! Ha! ha! **** Google!!!!
 
I forgot email was enabled on posts. [Disabled those settings] That's better.

At any rate, It seems like whenever you try to find something on Google, the default answer slowly becomes "maybe not be such a hateful misogynist". Which is strange considering most of my discussions were never about women or relationships. Which is odd considering just about everyone who complains about how "they didn't do nothing" to get banned from a forum.

I miss the old days of there being plenty of search engines not owned by just a smaller group of large corporations. The Exctes, Lycoses, Alta Vistas, and the Ask Jeeveses of the world. Part of the reason we have this Google-Microsoft Dichotomy is the fact that there seems to be this consolidation of mindshare. Now, even new search engines fizzle out after a few months because they can't compete with the FAAMG (Facebook-Apple-Amazon-Microsoft-Google).

Just go to the Internet Archive sometime and see how all those Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, and Webring pages were replaced with what feels like interactive television which tries to give people the answers most people want to hear rather than the honest truth. It's like a vicious cycle which often makes people who follow crazy conspiracies get wrapped up in even more crazy, unproven disinformation, which just makes communicating with some people unbearable since they would rather accept alternative facts rather than admit they had been used to become part of some hate group or fringe organization.

I mean, I asked Google "what is an alternative to Reddit." For some reason it listed "4chan" and "8kun" and "Kiwi Farms"...like WTF. I don't want to be part of any of those communities. Most of the people in those communities are f'd up in the head or trying to recruit people to join some alt-right extremist group. "Say there, Johnny, it looks like you are sad and alone. Wanna join me and a few of my friends and burn some crosses this weekend?" Uh, no.

There is something inherently wrong with how we provide answers to people's loneliness. Instead of fixing the problem with communities that offer a place to socialize in person, the Internet now provides places for people who have been ostracized from the mainstream (which Reddit is not a niche community, it's a mainstream community governed by people who are more worried about their advertisers than making sure the people who have a social media meltdown can resolve their problems or provide better people with them to connect with) access to even worse communities that drive them to do terrible things because they've been told "you don't belong" and sets that group up to encounter people who pretend to be their friends but the truth is they see the ostracized as easy prey for recruitment for their terrible ideology.

No one should feel like they don't belong. And nobody who feels like they don't belong should be drawn to more antisocial behavior because the FAAMG algorithms show the wrong results for how to find a community of like-minded people who who aren't posing as those like-minded people but as recruiters for something far more sinister.
 
I'm also told about how I should "join a Meetup group". The problem with Meetup is that you have to PAY to create a Meetup group. You could go to Facebook and set up a group, but a lot of people aren't on Facebook or have left the Social Media juggernaut because they were tired of their friends backing fringe groups.

This one person I've know since high school. Over the years, she started hanging around police groups...then she started down the path of pro-MAGA crap, even backing bad police officers.

So yeah, we had a falling out, especially since she would rather simp for the bad cops than back the ones who know a lot of things about modern policing is wrong and doesn't reflect their values to uphold the law rather than use their authority to justify civil forfeiture, killing persons of interest (especially if they are people of color), and then go to their supporters and say "These people don't back the blue!" OK, then why the Punisher Skulls with the Thin Blue Line. It's giving off "are we the baddies" vibes.

A lot of that stuff has alienated people. Sure, you want to have a police department in town to ensure the communities safety...but the truth is the police do not have a legal responsibility to protect you. Unfortunately, there's a lot of people who don't seem to get that. Remember when I talked about what happened in 1999? Well, for some reason there was a violation of my Fourth Amendment Rights because those same people who tried to get me kicked out of school (who were school adminstrators) accused me of collecting guns for said school shooting that I would NEVER do, and decided to take a look at the ONE firearm that my dad had that was safely locked up in our house, you know like a RESPONSIBLE MATURE ADULT would.

Unfortunately, a lot of school districts don't have anyone who want to be responsible, or mature. So, remind me how I should just kiss a cop's ass after the school's student resource officer was sent on a wild goose chase on behalf of some paranoid people who spend more of their time trying to segregate people than they do trying to get everybody to get along?

We need people to being terrible to each other. That's what causes a lot of the loneliness. They encounter people who suck, either directly or indirectly, and it just makes living a good life impossible because for some people all that matters is making other people miserable because they know that odd person could change things.
 
Welcome OP.
Glad to see I'm not the only person that does wordplay.
I also, don't really have a community and spend the majority of my time alone when I'm not at work, or online.
I assume solidarity even when I'm not in solidarity, entirely because I've learned that I just don't fit in any one particular group or community, and very often the multiple ones that I do fit in, if mixed, would probably rip each other apart.
So because I don't have the social elasticity for all of that, I mostly just ride solo.
 

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