As a kid, I had extreme social anxiety. I had a hard time talking to people and making friends. I never felt like I “belonged.”
As an adult, I still have crippling social anxiety.
I can’t speak for everywhere, I’m pretty much only in the U.S., but I’ve noticed that most fellow adults I come across are chronically deprived of social interaction.
My social anxiety doesn’t actually matter. Me being awkward, and weird, and a little bit out there doesn’t actually matter. If you talk to people, ask them questions about themselves, laugh with them when they want to laugh, listen to them when they want to vent, rant with them when they want to rant, and feel pain with them when they’re vulnerable, a sweeping majority of the people I’ve met in the U.S. engage.
And the more you do it, the more you realize the world is actually full of amazing people. They’re all living their lives, making mistakes, getting things wrong, and making bad calls. But overwhelmingly they’re trying to figure life out and get through the best they can; and they want people with them on that journey.
I still have crippling social anxiety but my friend group is steadily growing and it feels good. I still play the fun game in my head of “haha did we all have a good time today or did I actually say something terrible and now everyone hates me or thinks I’m a fool?” on pretty much a daily basis. But I wouldn’t go back to being lonely. Not just for me, but for these amazing people who want more folks with them on their journey.
What I learned is that it makes a huge difference to get a haircut from someone professional. Going to some cheap random mall hair place is a terrible experience. They don't care about their work, it's going to be awkward and it'll look terrible.
I have been going to a fancy hair place in recent years. AUD $85 seems like a lot of money for a mens haircut, but it makes all the difference. It's a proper craft. No "what haircut would you like?", instead it's pretty much at her discretion and suited to the actual person. Zero regrets.
Nah, you can definitely find great people that love their jobs even at places like that.
I used to cut at a Supercuts in PHL (the Rodin place one for those in the know) and there was this great lady there that was both very skillful and incredibly nice, we always had great conversations.
Agreed, I don't doubt that. But starting from a place of anxiety I'd say it is much more likely to come away with a bad experience from there. At least that has been my experience.
I wholeheartedly agree. In my mind it's fancy because it's expensive. It's not the high society designer fashion nose high kind of fancy. More boutique :)
Adding to this, I'd like to say that it's the difference between getting your code written by some outsourced underpaid and overworked junior and someone who has a decade of experience and clearly takes pride in their craftsmanship.
$85 does seem like a lot of money for a haircut. I used to use the Great Clips, $10 places before switching to a “proper” barber that was more like $30 (US). Was it better? Yes. But I’m still not sure if it’s worth the money. I have a lot of hair that grows quickly, so I probably would go for a haircut once every 3-4 weeks. At $30 a pop that’s around $400-500 a year on cutting my hair. I don’t care how nice of a job they do, it’s hard for me, personally, to not feel like I’m just setting cash on fire.
These days I do neither. When the pandemic hit and people were socially distancing, my wife tried giving me a haircut, which wasn’t great but also wasn’t terrible. So we bought a hair trimming kit, watched a few YouTube videos and after a couple attempts she got pretty good at cutting my hair. She is by no means a proper barber, but she also only has a single client, me, so she doesn’t need to become great at cutting hair, we are just fine if she gets good at cutting my hair. And she has. I think the results are at least as good as any barber (and more consistent), and we now aren’t spending half a thousand dollars a year on cutting my hair. Obviously that isn’t a situation that will work for everyone, but I definitely recommend exploring it for those it does.
I'm sorry you don't like your hair cuts, but clippers, like scissors, are just a tool.
IMO thick or curly hair is always best cut dry and washed after. The hair changes way too much when wet to get a realistic idea of what it will look like when done if you wash it first. If time and patience were infinite, sure, maybe, wash and treat curly hair first, but it has to then be fully dry and it has to dry slowly without blowdrying before cutting because it completely changes shape and size between wet and dry.
For short hair or for someone who wants it styled, I'd agree that curly hair should be dry when cut.
I'm not PP but I'm a dude with long, curly hair and I just want an even trim, so it's much better if my hair is wet.
(Also, shampoo is harder on curly hair than straight hair; "wash" curly hair with water every day and use some conditioner, and only use shampoo if it feels dirty. That may only be once week or two, maybe once a month if the hair is short. Yes, really.)
Have you checked out barbers in the Black parts of your town? African hair is very curly and though most men don't keep it long, it's common enough and many barbers know how to handle it.
If you're just looking for an even trim, then almost anyone should be able to do it. (And I usually clean my hair right before I go in.)
I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that the only thing barbershop stylists know how to do is an undercut, a taper fade, or some variation of those two.
"I'd like layers. I don't want an undercut or fade. Here's a photo."
"You got it."
--> Undercut.
I used to have trouble going to get my hair cut after a barber clipped my ear with a blade.
Whenever I go to a new city what I do is, I read up a ton of reviews from multiple sources and find a few barbers I think ill like. Then I go for a quick trim to understand how comfortable I feel around them (this is the hardest part, I usually explain to them about my anxiety before I make a booking except for one instance everyone is really understanding usually), I have been lucky enough to find someone good after trying 2-3 barbers.
My current barber is an awesome older gentleman from Iran who migrated to the same city as I am, knows my exact haircut I want, so all I have to do is show up on time and get a great stress free haircut, and get to hear some really interesting story from him. lol if I go out of the city for a while, I wont mind looking like an escaped lunatic for a few days extra until I come back home.
I went for a haircut in the US once and I didn't know you were supposed to tip. I still remember the offended look on the barbers face when I held out my hand for my change. That was 20 years ago.
Now days I don't care as much and just do my own with the clippers and save myself $40. Can you believe a hair cut at the barber costs $40 now here in Australia. You know you are getting old when everything seems shockingly expensive.
> You know you are getting old when everything seems shockingly expensive.
Or conversely you have vivid memories of how quickly the AUD, or USD or any fiat currency really has been so immensely rapidly inflated in the last 20 years; hell just in the last 3 years its been from tolerable to eye watering to get a haircut. I like my barber, she is the head stylist-owner and I don't mind paying nearly $50 (with tip), but that is also because she does such a good job and we talk shop and what good restaurants still exist. It's also that I can trim it on my own for a month later to keep my sculpted hair style in a customer facing role for that cost.
I used to get a haircut twice a month when I was in HS, and they were $10, because it gave me a place where I could hang out on the weekend and chat for a few hours. I also realized I had developed a taste for aged and smoked whisky at 15 despite hating the smell of cigarettes in that place.
I have several size clippers with all the accessories and while I played around with the idea of doing my own hair, as I had during COVID, the truth is I'd rather pay a pro for something that I don't have to much to look good. Mine always were passable from about 7 feet away kind of things because I can't properly fade, mine always look like I'm 3 weeks from my last haircut as a result.
> you have vivid memories of how quickly the AUD, or USD or any fiat currency really has been so immensely rapidly inflated in the last 20 years; hell just in the last 3 years
I actually think the last 20 years have had remarkably little inflation in the grand scheme of things, compared to the last 100 years, at least in the UK.
I first got interested in this just under 20 years ago when my mum said that my grandma's first house cost exactly £100, and at the time the property market was towards the end of a massive boom (and then was stagnant for about the next 10 years). At the time, her £100 house would have been worth somewhere around £100k, which got me thinking to how crazy that it could have increased a thousand fold. Looking at UK historical inflation rates, it was interesting that from 1900 until the mid 1980s, inflation was pretty constant at around 7% per year, which has the interesting side effect that when compounded, prices approximately double every decade.
Obviously, my data points are skewed towards the UK, but I suspect the US and Europe at least experienced similar effects, because of the ease of international trade, so any imbalances would be rapidly exploited by the market until they equalised. However, one data point I have from the US, which is a bit fuzzy in my recollection so it might be slightly off, was from reading Grapes of Wrath set in the 1930s Great Depression. IIRC the daily salary for a long day picking cotton was around 20 cents, so maybe the specific inflection points in the US timeline were different, but it seems to have followed a similar long-term inflation pattern when considered over several decades.
Things got weird in the UK, as the mid-late 80s had some unprecedented high inflation rates (I remember my parents paying 12% interest on our house at the time), followed by very low inflation for about a decade (the UK government was targetting 2%), which led to a lot of surplus money around, easy borrowing for industry, and ultimately a massive rise in house prices in the early 2000s (and I was interested then because I was trying to buy my first home, and for example where I was looking house prices rose 50% in 2003 alone). Since then, we've had unprecedentedly low interest rates (nearly zero) leading to quite low inflation for a couple of decades.
What's interesting now though is that people are seeing "high" interest rates of 5% and panicking because younger buyers now have only ever experienced relatively low interest and inflation rates, but actually if you consider a longer time frame, the last 20 years with its sudden inflation spurt then prolonged price stagnation and now "high" inflation again, it's probably on average bringing us back to that average of 7% that we saw over a longer period.
Another thing that's really interesting is when and why inflation started happening, sometime around the 15th and 16th centuries, when people started speculatively investing in companies. Prior to that, prices of commodities and housing had been rather static for quite a few centuries.
It helps to get the same person too. It is unnerving having a different person each time cutting your hair, I'd rather have someone who's "done me before" than play with dice over it. A bad haircut is a nightmare
Just keep doing what you're doing. Like with everything, expose yourself to your fear and it'll get better.
> I still play the fun game in my head of “haha did we all have a good time today or did I actually say something terrible and now everyone hates me or thinks I’m a fool?”
Appearing as a fool, saying controversial things, getting rejected over and over again - that is how you get over social anxiety.
- Someone who had a great deal of social anxiety and now has no problem at all meeting random strangers at random events.
Exposing yourself to fear doesn’t work for everyone (though good to hear it worked for you!)
For some it activates the parasympathetic nervous system too much and you won’t have much luck easing the anxiety. Other means are available, often therapy or learning ways to cope with Parasympathetic activation. Usually focussed on calming the nervous system through various methods.
This is a good point. You might become a confident asshole who wants to compensate for all the suffering that you experienced because of social anxiety.
One way around social anxiety: think about how little you care about the person in front of you. If you heard that they died how long would you be thinking about it? That’s how much they care about what you do. Or don’t do.
You're assuming that anxiety can be mitigated by just logically convincing oneself that there's no need to be anxious. This might be the case for some people, but for many of us it's a fundamentally irrational condition; the issue isn't that I think something bad will happen if I talk to someone and make a mistake, it's that sometimes having to talk to someone _is_ the bad thing I don't want to happen. You've probably met people who are afraid of spiders, or snakes, or something of that nature, even the ones that don't pose a threat, and the issue is similar here;
But anxiety CAN be mitigated by logically convincing yourself that there's no need to be (as) anxious in the moment. That's the whole point of various forms of behavioural therapy: to teach you ways to arrest spiralling, maladaptive thoughts and lead them to a more functional landing.
I'm not usually one for drugs, but the thing that helped me get out of extreme social anxiety (I had selective mutism into my 20s), was anti-anxiety meds (off-label Modafinil). I didn't take it for long, but being able to be in a social situation without that feeling of dread and anxiety was actually mind blowing.
It helped me recognize a state of mind where I didn't immediately go to massive anxiety. After that, with therapy and forcing myself to do more social interactions, I got into a much better place. I still have some anxiety, but it's largely manageable - and most people think I'm quite social now.
It's something you might want to consider talking to a doctor about. I don't think anyone should have to suffer from social anxiety if there is some option to help them get out of it.
I have modafinil for a different off-label use, but it has been helpful for some of my anxiety's symptoms. It's helpful for the brain fog and the paralyzing that comes with 'too many things to do = shut down and do NOTHING and PANIC' type of being overwhelmed.
There is off label usage for depression and anxiety.
No idea if it would help everyone but it certainly did for me in the short time I took it.
I didn't like taking it longer term - it made me very irritable. The only time I've ever yelled/got angry on the spot at someone was when on mod - and it surprised and scared me. It also gave me bad stomach cramps.
One thing that helps is to consider how much you've gained by trying and failing to socialise versus not trying at all. My failures to fit in were far less impactful than my failures to try. So I try more.
I know that you can't rationalise your way out of irrational fears, but the thought still helps.
I found that listening is a lot easier than talking. Just plain listening and paying full attention to the person - that is, making eye contact, acknowledging when they say something, asking stuff based on what they are saying etc.
- "modern" also ~optimize for social fluidity, you can do everything alone, in your flat, no need to be bothered by others right ? until you end up sad and addicted to fill the void (capitalism/consumerism makes money on this.. people need money so it's a downlevelling cycle)
- long ago, when i was crippled socially, i ended up at a birthday party, i didn't speak 95% of the time, drank some whiskey to pass the time. the next morning i was happier and healthier than i've been for a long time. somehow being surrounded, seeing others, even afar, satisfies something in your brain
people are weird, i am weird, it's .. weird we don't connect that much, or maybe our lifestyles cut us from a natural emerging habit of being together and we forgot how to bootstrap it back
As an adult, I still have crippling social anxiety.
I can’t speak for everywhere, I’m pretty much only in the U.S., but I’ve noticed that most fellow adults I come across are chronically deprived of social interaction.
My social anxiety doesn’t actually matter. Me being awkward, and weird, and a little bit out there doesn’t actually matter. If you talk to people, ask them questions about themselves, laugh with them when they want to laugh, listen to them when they want to vent, rant with them when they want to rant, and feel pain with them when they’re vulnerable, a sweeping majority of the people I’ve met in the U.S. engage.
And the more you do it, the more you realize the world is actually full of amazing people. They’re all living their lives, making mistakes, getting things wrong, and making bad calls. But overwhelmingly they’re trying to figure life out and get through the best they can; and they want people with them on that journey.
I still have crippling social anxiety but my friend group is steadily growing and it feels good. I still play the fun game in my head of “haha did we all have a good time today or did I actually say something terrible and now everyone hates me or thinks I’m a fool?” on pretty much a daily basis. But I wouldn’t go back to being lonely. Not just for me, but for these amazing people who want more folks with them on their journey.