Shyness lives at the identity level. At some point you decided you were the kind of person who is not safe to be fully seen, and every shy moment since has been you obeying that decision. Most people think shyness is about other people. It is not. It is about the relationship you have with yourself when other people are watching. You are not afraid of strangers, you are afraid of being witnessed inside an identity you do not fully believe in. The discomfort you feel in a room is the gap between who you are pretending to be and who you secretly think you are, and that gap gets exposed the moment eyes land on you. This is why advice like "just be confident" does nothing. You cannot perform confidence on top of an identity that does not include it. Your voice shrinks, your shoulders round, your eyes find the floor, because your body is loyal to the picture underneath, and the picture says you should not take up space. Shyness is almost always a protection strategy from childhood. Being seen got punished at some point. You were laughed at, criticized, or raised by someone whose attention felt unsafe, and you learned that staying small was how you survived. It is an outdated survival response that nobody updated. For most people pushing yourself into situation after situation only works on the surface. The identity underneath stays the same, and the moment your effort drops, it pulls you back to where you started. Actual change happens when you shift who you believe you are in private, since that is the version of you that shows up in public. The shift happens when you stop trying to overcome shyness and start questioning the identity that produces it. You sit with the actual belief, that you are too much or not enough or fundamentally not built for this, and you ask where it came from. Most of the time it was installed by someone whose opinion you would not trust today, and your entire shyness is built on a foundation laid by a person who no longer has any authority in your life. Then you build a new identity through vivid daily imagination, rehearsing the version of you that has nothing to hide, until it becomes more familiar than the old one. The behavior follows on its own. The version of you that emerges on the other side of this is not someone new. It is who you would have been all along if you had not been busy managing how you came across.

Female attraction is often responsive and contextual (what is he doing, where are we?) when imagining romantic fantasy. Work is desexualized; 3rd places are gone. I wonder if it’s harder to place imagined scenarios for attraction to known people in a setting that feels real?

ooh i’m zohran mamdani. my wife is hot. my favorite soccer team won the league for the first time in 22 years. my favorite basketball team won the championship for the first time in 53 years. fuck you man.

if you're a jealous nut with a horny promiscuous husband then take some ownership of the situation and kidnap your husband in the basement or something, but stop fucking trying to make your husband's behavior and your insecurity into other women's problem

It's very annoying to take the weight of someone else's insecurity on when you really don't have anything to do with their relationship. If you're a hot woman who doesn't care about monogamy people wanna make all sorts of shit your problem

This is the kind of thing you people are encouraging with your whole "we must all collectively enforce everyone else's monogamy agreements" nonsense

communists just blatantly lie but state it as matter-of-fact and then get a bajillion likes for it

Paradoxically, if you can build sexual tension while keeping your expectations low, you’ll get laid more than someone who’s always trying to close the deal NOW

Seeing a woman as a sexual object is totalizing. you reduce her to an instrument with no purpose other than to end your need for pleasure Yet, to see her as sexless is similarly reductive. A woman is, but is not only, a sexual being. She plays, she improvises. Sex is a conversation without end. To see her as a sexual being is to accept her creative drives, and to see her as a being practicing sexual play is to accept her entirely Men often fail in this regard, but women may also refuse to accept their fullness, instead becoming mannequins. Both are unnecessary tragedies.

RT @afrosypaella: I also want people to be honest about their neglect of their supposed “deep” friendships. You are not close to someone wh…

This was not true for most of modern history and our time period is exceedingly weird for treating it as normal

At the risk of sounding like a self-satisfied asshole, once I took the LSAT and realized “oh wait people score very low on this” it was like a skeleton key for realizing why Twitter is the way it

if you think polyamory and casual sex are wrong—in general, not just for you personally—I think you must, on some level, believe that sex is evil by default

bit of an epidemic of people who basically only work and exercise

It actually is this simple

The idiom of “dont shit where you eat” only passes the lips of people who are too ugly to use the restroom or be seated at a table.

As recently as 2005, dating a coworker was the #2 way to meet your spouse

The real tragedy of the opioid epidemic and moral panic is that being addicted to pharmaceutical opioid pills is physically pretty safe. Overdoses were rare because users knew the exact milligram dosage of every pill they swallowed. People only started dying en masse when the pharmaceutical supply got cut off and they had to resort to the black market.

once you turn 20 you have to fight everyday for the rest of your life to not lose your personality & spirit...bc what once came naturally to you will be exhausted into nothing if you don't actively Try. it's terrifyingly easy to become a lethargic, soulless adult