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This thread is depressing. I mean, I know how obvious that sounds, but it is.

I could almost see myself becoming a hikikomori type about a year ago, but then I got to college. At which point I discovered that I like people! It seemed so obvious in retrospect: that was why, instead of coming back to some solitary hobby, my time-wasting guilty pleasure was always the internet, which is, you know, basically an elaborate way to contact people.

So, to whichever shut-ins this message applies to (not all of them, it must be noted): you are probably just as interesting as most people with "lives," and you'd probably enjoy a "life" if you had one. It's kind of like the internet, but it happens a lot faster, and has a lot more flesh in it, and sometimes is conducted while eating food or drinking alcohol, both of which are fun. Of course, lots of people utterly suck, but try hard enough and you can avoid them, just as you check your favored RSS feeds and avoid XTREEM WACKY GAMERLOLZ COMIK X.

Sorry if this is patronizing. It's roughly what I'd say to my younger self, though I'm not sure if it matters in my case because it'd only lead to high school socializing if anything, and that tends to be closer to the XTREEM WACKY stuff in our analogy. (Which is how I got these I-don't-like-people attitudes in the first place, come to think of it.)
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While we're at it, I just finished my freshman year here. While it's a bit more traditional than St. John's or Hampshire at least academically, it's a great place to go if you want to study a variety of things out of interest, as people tend to be enthusiastic about academics and will understand when you say "OMG I want to take every class in the catalog" rather than responding "BUT I ONLY LIKE THE 12TH CENTURY/JAVASCRIPT/WHATEVER" or "what? ...school?"
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