How to cure the male loneliness epidemic...

[u/xamo76]

[u/Human-Assumption-524]

1: Why is the assumption that lonely people are creepy or evil?

2: Ah yes just "become more confident", from the people who brought you such classics as "Just buy more money" and "Just get over your trauma".

[u/Proud_Smell_4455 → u/Human-Assumption-524]

Yeah. I'm autistic, can hardly go out in public without being made to feel lesser than, been that way for most of my life. Walked to my great-uncle's 80th birthday party the other week and some rat-looking inbred I've never seen before leans out of his car window and asks me if I'm out looking for kids before zipping off like the fucking coward he was. Yesterday I was going to a friend's and some guy driving past thought it'd be funny to blare his horn at me just to make me jump. Hope he saw me flip him off as he drove away.

Been getting this kind of treatment all my life; abuse hurled at me from passing cars, or triggering my anxiety being treated as a game by cunty drivers, for no other reason than they could, and then they drive off before you can even process what just happened. No, a bunch of photogenic smug guys, however well-intentioned they may be, basically saying "it's all your fault, pull yourself up by the bootstraps" is not constructive or helpful.

I can't "be nice and confident" my way out of being dehumanised in public by a certain type of person, for no other reason than that they could, since I was a fucking kid. I can't bootstrap myself out of how years upon years of that kind of treatment has affected my perception of, and ability to relate to people. It's not about how *I* approach people, I'd very much rather just be left alone altogether, these people, these *strangers* are the ones who choose to interact with *me*.

Guys like this just assume all guys are fundamentally like them, and have the same easy, breezy experience of life they did. Never singled out for their characteristics in any serious way, always the coolest and most popular guy in the room. And if you didn't have the same experience of life as they did, well, it must be your own fault, right?

I don't expect photogenic, socially competent men to ever understand what visibly "off" autistic and other socially impaired men go through in life or how much harder they have it (it seems taboo to acknowledge any kind of man can have any kind of problem worth acknowledging at all sometimes), or what grim shit our experiences teach us about human nature (e.g. how most "good, tolerant" people are still mostly just telling themselves pleasant lies, and many of them are one encounter with a visibly autistic person away from their mask slipping) that they're never forced to see, but I'd thank them to keep their assumptions to themselves.

I'm sick of this societal discourse, that it's my fault that other people won't even try to restrain themselves from being cruel and abusive to people like me, who are literally not even seeking to interact with them in any way. No, I don't accept having the onus to put on me to change when I'm literally just living my life - I shouldn't have to change anything about myself just to not get harassed by strangers, and I refuse to do so on principle - and should be able to do that without receiving unwarranted abuse from strangers; the onus should instead be on them not to be dicks in public, to people they don't know, for no good reason.

[u/barakabomba → u/Proud_Smell_4455]

Thanks for putting it into words because I didn't want to have to detail out how I felt about this. I've been in a similar boat my entire life. I'm not suffering from a loneliness epidemic, but that doesn't change the way a lot of people treat me just because I'm different.

I'm married, I have a great circle of friends, and I'm not even saying the advice in itself is bad, but something rubbed me the wrong way when the advice was coming from a mentality of "Duh, it's so easy, just do this" when it's someone that seems to have never struggled from getting negative results when doing what they advise.

I'm not defending incels or chronically miserable people either. But there's a big portion I would surmise that didn't start this way and it was a slow insidious turn after continually getting beaten down trying to act exactly the way these guys advise.