Welcome to the place for people like us! It's all we have, really, and some people want to take even that away...

(You'll see some people viciously shaming others for commiserating about loneliness online; as if they can't just ignore it and move on? No, they have to comment and express their disapproval that someone would have a problem they don't personally face and seek a sense of community and belonging in the only spaces where they might find others with similar experiences. As if the internet is only for approved circlejerk content, and they only approve of the ones they understand).

Last time I tried joining a community of that sort, all their looksmaxing stuff made me feel very uncomfortable.

Yeah, it's so strange how "I never developed social skills due to social isolation and thus I've been perpetually rejected by society and as a result have never been able to catch up on social skills" always gets the same cookie cutter answers: "Just shave bro, get a haircut, dress fly, go to the gym, etc."

As if the only viable solution is "conform or die," while simultaneously also ignoring the key component which is the lack of social skills, and replacing them with shallow vanity and social prescriptions for what a "normal" person should look and act like.

I'm not wearing the fucking clothes anyone says that I have to to be respectable, and if they'll only respect me for wearing certain brands then I don't want their respect. The same goes for haircuts, and shoes, and music, and hobbies. I'm not a fucking automaton and I won't act like one just to fit in.

And the fact that that's so absurd is a testament to how far society has degraded! In the nineties, grunge was cool. Automatons were lame.

Every decade had their beatniks, their hippies, their punks, their indies. What do we have now? Corporate astroturfing and mindless shills seem to be the vast majority, and everyone else is algorithmically sidelined. Downright shunned in person.

The corpos already won, dude.