The Master List Of Schemes
Why I've Gathered You All Here Today
Here I’m organizing my various series into one place for easier navigation. At this point it’s kind of a lot.
Social Anxiety
I’m deeply interested in social anxiety as a field of study. This is both for personal reasons— I was afflicted with it for quite a long time— and also because as I’ve gotten further into reading about it the more it seems to share important mechanistic elements with traditionally OCD-spectrum disorders such as contamination OCD. I suspect it is not treated as well as it could be.
In descending order of importance:
The canonical social anxiety treatment protocol, which is somewhat the culmination of all the other stuff I’ve written about on the blog. It was built by taking the hypothesis that “social anxiety is an OCD-spectrum disorder” and attempting to extrapolate that into all its treatment-related implications.
In which I had the very strange experience that led me down my amateur social anxiety research program:
A theoretical accounting of how exposure therapy actually works and how this contrasts with pop-cultural understandings of what it involves:
A discussion of why it is that post-event rumination— obsessing for hours over social missteps— occurs in socially-anxious people:
In which I notice that my framework sketched out in Maybe Social Anxiety Is Just You Failing At Mind Control actually maps pretty well onto a niche therapeutic model:
In which I attempt to test out my theories on social anxiety treatment on
helpless victimsguinea pigsentirely willing volunteers, and then discuss the results:
Two posts on the self-loathing that frequently accompanies social anxiety and what I suspect is happening:
A discussion on what exposure therapy would have to look like in order to be reconceptualized as a lifestyle change instead of temporary course of treatment:
A catalogue of the internal structure of social anxiety safety behaviors, and a contrast with more-traditional accounts plus an attempted explanation of same:
in which I note that social anxiety and other forms of anxiety appear to be subclasses of the stress caused by “attempting to do a thing that you suspect you are failing at, but being unwilling to give up on the attempt”
Reconceptualizing social success as a process-focused instead of outcome-focused enterprise:
And others:
Dance
I count the best piece of lifestyle advice that I received from my old dating coach as this: get really into some form of partner dance. She specified Bachata, but I’m nowadays convinced that any partner dance style gets you pretty similar social-romantic benefits. For the cost of hundreds to low thousands of dollars plus hundreds of hours, “getting good at a form of partner dance” buys you:
the ability to craft pleasant, flirty experiences for arbitrary women you encounter
a sense of escalating mastery in a complex and satisfying skill
embeddedness in a large mixed-gender community that has an, I’ll be real, extremely high rate of romantic entanglements
Dance is also really fucking hard to get into from zero. My goal is to give guidance in how leads can get through beginner hell as quickly as possible and into the parts of dance that are dramatically life-enhancing.
In which I make my initial pitch for partner dance:
A discussion of what actually matters in selecting a dance style
A discussion of how to navigate the extremely opaque market for 1:1 dance instruction
A discussion of how to create, develop and maintain partnerships with other dancers so that you can improve together.
A discussion aimed at someone who’s not sure if they should even start, aiming to get that person an answer with as little investment as possible.
In which I discuss my very cursed adventures in using Suno to create salsa music in English using old poetry for lyrics:
Dating, Relationships and Male Attractiveness
I spent most of my adult life being terrified of attractive women and have mostly resolved this. Along the way, I’ve gotten to sample a very large swath of the male-behavioral-attractiveness landscape, and I’ve come to conclude that while this is quite important, most non-app dating success is downstream of how you organize your social life.
Read what I learned!
Male Behavioral Attractiveness
Dating
Community
Relationships
Menswear
It’s fun to look good.
