MossyHabitat

I can circumstantially pretend to be outgoing and enjoyable for short interactions with strangers or people with little impact on my life. Phone calls and virtual work meetings for 1 hr or less are OK, but you bet your ass I'm walking away from my desk immediately afterwards to decompress.

The kicker is I question whether I'm actually introverted. I've always had an incredibly difficult time making friends, even as a kid. The isolation is absolutely soul crushing sometimes. I crave and thrive on very close friendships... Even 1-2 is enough, which in our society is conducive to dating -- and I eventually met an extroverted ray of sunshine who I'm still with. I still don't feel like I belong around her friends, though, all these years later. Social anxiety is a bitch.

A strange observation: I've found myself far more comfortable with people from a certain region, about 3 hrs from where I grew up, but had no exposure to as a child. Interactions with them tend to be relatively effortless and enjoyable (is this what extroversion is like?).

In summary, I very much despise the way I am, but most people are on a significantly different social wavelength than I. The energy required to match those foreign wavelengths is measured in gigawatts... except for my wife and a few prior long term girlfriends.

I plan on someday experimenting with psilocybin as a therapeutic tool to better understand and potentially (partially?) mitigate some of my social puzzle and trauma believed to be a source of "introversion".

Perhaps this resonates with you or someone else reading this.

Discord is OK for real-time chat or VC, but is awful for forum-like discussions. Comment-specific context is lost in the single-threaded noise and search is borderline useless. The true forum-designed format of Lemmy, Reddit, and predecessors is far and away better. In my opinion Twitter - the legacy, ubiquity and tech - would be a better forum than Discord. That was hard to type and I need to quickly bleach my fingers.

I'm going to suggest possibly irresponsible advice, but step 1 - you need to solve your depression and porn addiction, and ASAP. For that you could try therapy, and/or psilocybin or DMT... Not a heroic dose, but enough to get introspective from an altered POV. Therapy is the obvious long-term recommendation, but the psychedelic route may get you there faster, and you might learn a few things, such as your social obstructions or root causes.

Second, you need a close friend, at least one, preferably one who is also your desired romantic demographic. Maybe not someone who you'd normally "go for", but who you'd be happy spending time with - platonically, romantically, whatever it does not matter. The goal is to ground yourself with empathy for that person, and they for you too.

If this was Reddit I'd give an award or whatever they push now. Amazing, thank you.

Would you be willing to provide more info regarding the sect you're referencing, for instance the name? I have a fascination with "original" gnostic/apocryphal beliefs, but this one is extremely intriguing & I want to learn more.

It's back up now. They apparently use Bing as the backend search and Microsoft fsck'd it for a few hours: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/23/24163094/microsoft-bing-search-outage-copilot-duckduckgo-chatgpt

No offense, but you're not worth the compromise of my privacy. Good day, fellow time-waster.

This is the internet, friend. I could be a nobody, a deputy commissioner at the FDA, or a published researcher. Your mind will not change either way.

Pharmacology implies drugs or synthetic compounds. The RDA stats are officially "guidelines" - Just ask your doctor or nutritionist to explain the fuzzy landscape to you, as well as the interactions & interplay between various compounds as they're processed & stored by your body. Perhaps get a CBC to determine what you specifically need; they're usually covered by insurance (assuming you're in the states).

You're ignoring the overarching debate, but fine I'll address your nit-picky distraction.

"Small" is a relative term, and to the amounts that would be harmless in all situations would have negligible health benefits, to the point of questioning "why bother". Also even small quantities add up, such as the example of 2-gallon consumption on a hot day. What isn't controversial or subjective, though, is pure water.

The simplest solution is usually best - instead of a one-size-fits-all "medicated" water approach, just take a multivitamin that works best for your individual biology and preferences... assuming you can't consume foods which contain the variety of compounds our bodies need, being the ideal solution. Even the USDA recommendations for vitamins & minerals are mere guesstimated guidelines which varies per individual & lifestyle.

I was being facetious and think your argument is completely preposterous, but continuing for fun. Let's say you are dictator of your loyal subjects, and decide to medicate their water with... vitamins, including copper. What if someone is sensitive to added copper, either because of damage to their copper plumbing, copper cookware, or a metabolic issue? What if someone is working outdoors in the summer heat and consumes 2 gallons of water per day, but begins to experience symptoms of copper toxicity due to the volume of water intake? The water is excreted, but our bodies do not excrete most excess vitamins, such as copper. This copper intake then causes an imbalance/deficiency of zinc and subsequently magnesium.

Should we add prozac/SSRIs to our water to thwart depression and make the populous happier?

Most of the world doesn't medicate their water, and their citizens are surprisingly healthier than us in the US & Australia where we "medicate" our water. How about we give people access to clean, pure water and let them supplement as they & their doctors see fit?

Do you consider water to be medicine, or a resource? Why don't we add caloric value to our tap water too, for the sake of malnutrition in impoverished communities?