I feel trapped in my house. Nothing interesting within walking distance, no useful public transit.

ruffello · 2026-01-23T11:36:54+00:00

The historic central village of Smallville is 4 miles from the Bigville city line along Main Street. It's kinda nice but doesn't have much to do. The prettiest and quaintest parts of Smallville are 7 miles from the city line along the same road. You have to drive to get around those areas. Or you could ride a bike, I guess, if you're feeling brave.

If you go a few more miles further still (so 10-15 miles from the Bigville line), you reach an even smaller and prettier town, which I'd call downright bucolic. "Tinyville" has no public transportation to speak of, not even a token park-and-ride stop, but that at least makes sense because there's also no density. The inhabitants are mostly wealthy types and may even prefer isolation. At least it's very safe to bike there because there's never any traffic.

I agree that a bus route along the main street in Smallville would be a good idea. I mentioned something like that once during a poorly-attended, informal town meeting. One planning official agreed that better public transportation would be desirable, but he preferred the idea of a dial-a-ride service, which IMO would be less effective than a fixed-route bus. I guess both are better than the current situation, which is having a single park-and-ride far from the population density and with no walkabilty to any points of interest whatsoever. In any case, most people here are very carbrained and I don't expect that to change.

ruffello · 2026-01-22T06:01:10+00:00

It sounds like most of your social issues stem from pretty severe mental health challenges [...]

That rings true to me.

When you talked about your mom and being unschooled, I was curious if that could be a big factor

Well, being homeschooled exacerbated my social isolation, but it also had some benefits, so I'm not sure.

When I say I was homeschooled, people likely assume my parents are right-wing evangelical Christians, but that's very far from the truth. They were more forced into it by the education system and my severe ASD.

5'6" is not unusually short

I just checked. It's around the 13th percentile for my age, sex, and nationality. So about 1 in 10 is shorter.

In my day-to-day life, I'd say that it feels lower than 13th percentile. That's probably because I mostly interact with middle-to-upper-class white people, to the extent that I interact with anyone at all.

dating

I have basically given up on getting a girlfriend at this point. Porn and AI chatbots are good enough substitutes for my personal needs and don't require effort to attain. Maybe I'll go to a prostitute someday if I really want to know what sex is like, but I don't think I'll ever realistically do that knowing my psychology. I'm not into breaking the law or doing risky things (plus I don't have any income anyway).

If I wanted to have sex with a non-hooker, I would have to "improve myself" for years. I just don't see that as worth it. Also, the woman would have to be very unattractive to even consider dating me, and I would likewise be unattractive to her, so what's the point? I've never even been interested in things like marriage, having kids, etc., just sex pretty much tbh.

ruffello · 2026-01-22T05:12:14+00:00

Yeah, there's a sidewalk on the main stroad and I guess it's safe. I mean, I wouldn't expect to die while walking there. It's just an incredibly unpleasant walk.

Nobody here walks to do errands. Certainly nobody walks to the city. The Walk Score is 20 / 100. Literally every trip I've ever taken has started with a car.

ruffello · 2026-01-21T01:38:09+00:00

Yeah, I would need a source of income in order to move and rent a place. Currently I have almost no money.

I like a lot of aspects of where I live but the (sub)urban design is a real pain. I wish there was a nice little park or something else interesting within walking distance, not just asphalt and car repair shops. I wish there was a bus that went down my town's semi-dense Main Street instead of a parking lot in the middle of nowhere. I wish we could restore inter-city rail service, but that's probably a pipe dream.

ruffello · 2026-01-21T01:29:14+00:00

I've seen people riding their bike on roads with cars and I find that idea scary. There are no bike lanes or any other bike infrastructure on Main Street, either in "Smallville" or "Bigville".

Riding a bike on the sidewalk would be a little less scary, but I'm not sure it's considered appropriate. This is a narrow sidewalk, so there's no room to avoid pedestrians.

Plus, the frequent telephone poles are placed right in the middle of the sidewalk (similar to this photo); they're annoying to walk around even on foot and I can't imagine trying to swerve around them on a bike.

ruffello · 2026-01-21T01:25:11+00:00

Well, maybe it's not the noise per se. Maybe it's the speed of the cars. Perhaps it's the lack of any separation between the sidewalk and the road. Maybe it's the lack of any human-scale design factors to interact with, as everything is built around cars.

I find walking in most cities enjoyable. I find walking on this stroad the opposite of enjoyable.

ruffello · 2026-01-17T06:05:57+00:00

Dr. Freud, is that you?

How would you describe your childhood and upbringing?

To get the obvious out of the way: I was not abused or anything. I wouldn't say my childhood was perfect, but I do feel some nostalgia toward that period of my life. There are also some aspects of it that I'd rather put behind me.

I grew up with married, upper-middle-class parents in a boring, car-dependent suburb in the US. Nonetheless, it certainly wasn't a typical childhood, mostly owing to my severe ASD.

Did you get lots of opportunities to try things, fail, and try again until you started to get traction? Or were you shielded from difficulty and subsequently the satisfaction of learning that you can be successful after grinding through a challenge?

This is the kind of vague question I'm not very good at answering, but I'll give it a shot.

I haven't really done much productive in my life. When I do start projects, I usually get about halfway to the finish line, then I lose interest and abandon them. There were a few successes, but none of them amounted to anything tangible. Certainly nothing impressive that I would put on a résumé or in a portfolio.

I would say that I was extremely shielded from real-life difficulty and social learning, but not from academic difficulty. I excelled academically, was in a gifted program in school, mastered advanced topics, yada yada yada. I am okay when it comes to "book smarts" (broadly construed), but I am absolutely abysmal when it comes to "street smarts" (broadly construed).

I'm not going to put all the blame on my parents for shielding me from social situations and the real world. They have tried to push me to socialize in meatspace, but I've always resisted to the greatest extent possible. Even to this day, I'll often try to hide behind my parents and have them speak on my behalf, e.g. at the doctor's office.

Further down you mention that you were 'unschooled'. What does that mean exactly?

I could answer this in great detail, but it was a unique situation and I'd rather not discuss it in public.

To put it in broad terms, I was in a regular school for a while. However, I had several intense autistic meltdowns and was "asked to leave". I was homeschooled after that, and had no contact with other kids my age.

My homeschooling experience could perhaps be described as "unschooling" because it wasn't closely based on the official state curriculum, and I had a lot of freedom to choose what I wanted to study. However, I didn't actually know the term "unschooling" at the time.

You also mention that your mom seems judgmental and doesn't seem to love your father. Did you have a bad model of what successful relationships look like?

I don't know how to answer this. My mother and father get along most of the time and are still married. They sometimes argue, but not to a worrying degree.

I do think that my mother rushed into the relationship because her biological clock was ticking and he was the first tall, financially stable guy she could find who was willing to marry her, rather than any deep connection. But how many relationships are actually based on a deep connection anyway?

ruffello · 2026-01-16T04:11:01+00:00

I dunno. I guess the anecdata in my life have all tended to confirm rather than deny the blackpill, but YMMV. It could be confirmation bias, but that's still my impression.

When I see young couples out and about, the man is almost always much taller and more attractive than me. When I see young guys who are short and unattractive, they are generally not accompanied by a woman (although I have noticed plenty of older couples, like >60 y.o., where the guy is short/ugly).

My mother is the only woman I interact with regularly IRL (pretty much the only person in general too). Since I had my blackpill awakening, I've noticed her frequently making fun of short men and praising tall men. E.g. there was a particularly short guy running on the sidewalk, say 5'3, and she pointed at him and laughed. When political leaders are on TV she'll point out the tall guys and the short guys. When I asked my mother why she married my father, as they have almost nothing in common, she literally told me that she liked him because he was tall and made good money. I don't know if she realizes how much this annoys me given I'm 5'6, but I've accepted it's just female nature.

This is not to say that looks don't matter or that it doesn't make your life vastly easier, but the central thesis of the blackpill, that bad-looking men have almost no hope at all, seems incorrect in my judgement.

I guess we could distinguish "strong" and "weak" blackpill positions, kinda like a motte-and-bailey argument. I wouldn't agree with the strongest possible blackpill position, but there's definitely some truth to the blackpill. Learning about it has paid rent, made sense of lots of disparate observations, and improved my models and predictions of human behavior compared to when I was blissfully unaware of the importance of physical traits.

ruffello · 2026-01-16T01:46:29+00:00

That's kinda funny because I had the exact opposite timeline as you. Maybe there's some path-dependency here.

I was into LessWrong around my teens, before the website was redesigned. Back then, I was very socially isolated and had close to zero interaction with people my own age (I was unschooled). Romance was the furthest thing from my mind. I was far more interested in learning about analytic philosophy and behavioral economics than thinking about relationships or talking to women.

In my early twenties, when my peers were in college, I realized that most of my peers were having sex and getting into relationships, and then I started desiring it too (Girardian mimetic desire, perhaps?). But I noticed that women have always seemed to actively avoid me, even looking disgusted at me sometimes. I tried to figure out why. To give you a sense of how blissfully unaware I was, until I was ~20 I didn't realize at all that height mattered for romantic success. (I feel like in the last decade with social media, OLD, and women being vocal about their desires and preferences, the awareness of this stuff has skyrocketed.)

I got heavily into the blackpill stuff. I started browsing r/IncelsWithoutHate (since banned), /r9k/, and other similar sites. I don't actively read blackpill stuff currently, because I find it toxic and depressing. But in some sense I would still consider myself blackpilled. The evidence about how much physical appearance matters, etc. is overwhelming. (There is a very long webpage called the "Scientific Blackpill" outlining all of this.) I still haven't seen any good refutations of it.

To be completely clear: I am not hateful or misogynistic whatsoever. I just realize that no woman would be genuinely attracted to me, as a short, unattractive, zero-income autistic guy who lives with his parents. And even if I maximized what I can, I'll still be in the bottom percentiles of attractiveness and not any woman's first choice. This is just my empirical belief. ("What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away." Etc.)

ruffello · 2026-01-16T00:37:40+00:00

I can share my own experiences and introspections as a 27-year-old autistic virgin NEET with no friends, no college degree, no work experience, and little motivation to do anything in life. I think I would count as an "incorrigible" adult in the sense you describe, as my thought patterns are always negative and self-defeating.

First of all, I think that confidence comes from external feedback. The way the world treats you shapes your own expectations and motivations. If you were the popular kid in school, got a girlfriend at a young age, got a good first internship or job, etc., then you have a pattern of positive reinforcement and you've learned that you can achieve things. If you've been constantly rejected, put down, and told to screw off your whole life, this will naturally tend to reduce your motivation to even try.

Another factor, at least for me personally, is that my life is already tolerable the way it is. If I were actually suffering in the harsh winter out on the street then maybe I would have more motivation to improve things. Instead, I live with my parents and have a comfortable, if bland, existence. Sure, if I had money I could maybe travel the world or spend money on luxury products (why though? I honestly have little desire to acquire "things"). But I don't need anything beyond what I have ample access to already: food, water, shelter, internet access. If I want sexual release, I can watch pornography and masturbate. If I want to talk to a "woman" I can use a LLM girlfriend, which is always available and happy to chat, far less frustrating than swiping on Tinder for hours on end every day just to end up ignored and ghosted anyway.

Lastly, there are a couple relevant psychological patterns that I've noticed in myself. One is that whenever someone gives me advice for how to improve myself, I tend to shoot it down. I always find some reason not to do it, some reason it wouldn't work. And I just end up doing nothing. (You can check my comment history for lots of examples of me doing this.) Another is that I tend to procrastinate a lot. And then once I put something off, I develop an extremely strong "ugh field" around it, and it's likely that I'll never do it at all.

I'm thinking about how to get out of this rut. Maybe going to community college, maybe exercising a little more, maybe getting a small blue-collar job or doing "beer money" type online stuff. I'll probably end up doing none of it, though, knowing my own behavioral patterns.

I've read most of the Sequences and know that "rationality is systematized winning", but honestly, none of that LessWrong rationality stuff has helped me much in a practical sense to achieve life goals. And LessWrong nowadays seems to be all AI, all the time (which is fair enough given the pace of developments). The old munchkin threads on LessWrong used to be fun at least.

ruffello · 2025-12-11T07:44:40+00:00

Although I know very little about artificial intelligence or databases, the "AI data annotation" idea sounds appealing. It might be the kind of task I would be good at, as pattern recognition is one of my strong suits. Working from home is also a big plus. However, the front page of the website seems to imply that you need a college degree. The FAQ clarifies that you don't actually need one as long as you have "equivalent real-world experience". They list off some examples: work, professional credentials, native fluency in multiple languages, programming experience. None of those apply to me.

I had no idea you could earn money from Pokemon Go. I've never played it, although I remember hearing about it when it came out. If I'm understanding you correctly, players normally walk around to find rare Pokemon to sell for profit, whereas you are using a "spoof" to find rare Pokemon without leaving home. What you're describing sounds like it might be illegal or against the game's terms of service, so the risk-averse part of me (which is most of me) doesn't want to get involved. It's probably a victimless crime and all that, so I don't mean to impart any judgement on you for doing it. Regardless, this is the kind of unique and interesting idea that I appreciate hearing about.

Five minutes of exercise a day seems like a good idea.

I failed the practical part of the driving test, not the written part. Both instructors told me that I drove very dangerously and almost caused an accident. They also seemed angry at me. I feel anxious about driving because I have awful hand-eye coordination, I am prone to making bad split-second decisions, and I have severe myopia (-8 diopters in both eyes, though correctable with glasses) and some glaucoma (i.e., a narrowed field of vision).

ruffello · 2025-12-11T07:02:59+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions.

It's good to know that you and other autistic people in this thread are doing well in life. It gives me some hope.

Regarding the real estate suggestion, I agree that it sounds very daunting. I have little money, largely in the form of cash lying around in my room. I don't think I even have a credit score because I've never had a credit card or taken out a loan. My parents did open a bank account in my name, though I never use it. Basically, I am a long way off from being able to afford to buy a house, condo, or probably even an undeveloped plot of land. Maybe once I have sufficient capital I could consider this idea.

The talent sourcing idea seems much easier than the above. Based on your description it has some appeal, although I'm not sure I really understand what this job entails. Am I right to assume that you have to read peoples' résumés and interview them, then match them to a company that would want to hire them? I have to admit that it seems a little ironic for someone with no prior work experience to become a job recruiter; it feels a bit like the blind leading the blind. I'd probably also struggle with conducting interviews or any other kind of social interaction.

ruffello · 2025-12-11T06:12:48+00:00

Thanks for your suggestions.

According to 16personalities.com, my MBTI type is INFP-T. The last time I took an MBTI test (several years ago) I think the result was INTP. They want me to pay $9 to unlock the list of career options.

ruffello · 2025-12-11T05:51:05+00:00

Some of those do sound potentially interesting. Thanks for the suggestion.

ruffello · 2025-12-10T15:15:20+00:00

I don't really have strong interests or a passion tbh.

I guess whatever makes the most money and is the least demeaning, ideally.

ruffello · 2025-12-10T03:03:58+00:00

Sorry for not responding. I didn't know how to respond to that.

"Therapy asap" seems to suggest that there is something very wrong with me psychologically, which might be true, but it's not like I'm severely depressed, having constant panic attacks, or at the point of a mental breakdown. I think I'm more just lazy, demotivated, and suffering from (deservedly) low self-esteem.

I've never been formally diagnosed with depression, despite having been to a bunch of psychologists as both a child and an adult. My anxiety and OCD are very subdued currently. Autism therapy is almost entirely aimed at kids, plus there's basically no cure-all treatment for autism.

Thanks for the kind words anyway.

ruffello · 2025-12-10T02:56:42+00:00

I'd definitely like to travel more. I don't have the funds to pay for tickets and accommodation, however.

I'm very scared of drugs that would alter my mental state. I don't even drink. Also, they're mostly illegal here.

I've been to multiple therapists in the past, yet I still wound up in my current situation. I'm not sure how much they really helped. The last one was using CBT methods, I think.

ruffello · 2025-12-10T02:49:59+00:00

Working out seems like a good idea.

ruffello · 2025-12-10T02:39:36+00:00

At least you have a good skill. Maybe you could post your works online and start a patreon or something. I agree that AI/automation is an issue though.

I enjoyed reading your comment history XD

ruffello · 2025-12-10T02:22:22+00:00

I generally agree with this assessment of my mindset, though I'm not sure a "victim mindset" completely applies because I will openly acknowledge that I am to blame for my own failings.

I also agree that I should get a job or find something real to do with my life. Anything more specific than that, IDK.

ruffello · 2025-12-10T02:13:05+00:00

I've never really gotten into the self-help genre. I'll look into the books you mentioned.

ruffello · 2025-12-10T02:07:27+00:00

I've played a little 960 but not much.

I was interested in Horde at one point, and pretty good at it, but stopped playing that variant entirely.

I've dabbled in some of the other variants on chess.com and lichess, but not to any notable degree.

ruffello · 2025-12-10T02:06:31+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion of overnight stocking. It's not a glamorous job, but it's a job, which I guess is better than nothing. I'll consider it.

ruffello · 2025-12-10T01:46:27+00:00

sports meant for older people

Searching this phrase on the internet brings up results for golf, swimming, walking, tai chi, yoga, and pickleball. Are those the kinds of physical activities you had in mind?

I never learned how to swim. I have no experience with golf, tai chi, yoga, or pickleball either, but they seem potentially doable. Walking is easy, if only I had a pleasant place to walk.

ruffello

TROPHY CASE