HealthyGamerGG - You are a 25 Year Old Loner

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

Today Dr. K talks about feeling like a loner: failing to launch, maintaining relationships, what you can do today, and more! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Or did they take care of everything? Or did you not even get invited? Or did you not even go? Or did you go with a gift but no card? Or did you go with a card or no gift? Okay. The 25-year-old loner. Always wonders how their life could have turned out differently.

Most people they like seem to just disappear eventually. People often ask why they are so quiet. Has friends but doesn't feel fully a part of the group. Constant mental health and self-esteem issues. No best friends. since primary school, never had a girlfriend, has finally given up their optimism. In this example, it's a man, but we've seen this in women as well, and homosexuals and bisexuals and stuff like that, right? So you can be a woman and never had a boyfriend. Can always sense most people don't really

want to be talking to them when they are. Always feels out of place. Hobby slash skill worked. They worked hard at, but just not good enough to be a professional. Doesn't really care where their life is going anymore, always feels out of place, seems normal to other people, but always feels alone inside, and secret lifelong pornography addiction, the 25-year-old loner. So when we look at this, unfortunately what we're seeing is that an increasing amount of our society identifies with this. We have 25-year-old loaners at a scale and pace that we've never had before. So we see this.

There are even like culturally specific terms for this and even very extreme versions, right? So like in China, there's a movement called laying flat, which is not exactly the same as this. In a lot of Latin America or Spain, they're called Nini's. So Nita Rajo and Nia Studiar. We call them NEETs also, not employment, education, or training. In Japan, they're probably the first ones that coined the term Hiko Komori, shut-ins, right? So we know that there's something going on. I recently read a paper from the field of economics about how young people entering the workforce, especially men, is at a historic all-time low.

And so even in psychiatry, we call this failure to launch. So that's like a term that we'll kind of use. So here's the pattern of someone who fails to launch. So what will happen is you'll have someone who grows up and does pretty good, like in primary school, middle school. They don't fail out. They have some friends. They get invited to birthday parties.

They pass their classes. You know, they kind of do okay. But then what happens is the later they go in life, the more the gap increases between them and other people. But there's not like a. traumatic event, right? Because in society, like, we're okay with that. We sort of are okay if, like, oh, if you, if you struggle in life and something bad happened to you, then it's not your fault. But what happens is there's an increasingly large proportion of people who don't have anything

to blame, really, except for themselves, right? It's not like I was horribly abused. It's not like I had some terrible accident. Just every year that goes by, I just kind of sluged. I just kind of slum. slip a little bit further and further behind. And you kind of fail to launch. You start out on the runway. You start getting some momentum. You're kind of speeding up. Your front landing gear starts to lift.

And then for some reason, your plane just never takes off. You had all the momentum just like everyone else. If you look at yourself when you were 16, you had so many possibilities. But you just don't get the plane off the ground. Maybe you even finished college. And so what starts to happen is all of those things

that you had as you were a child over time, they start to slough off. You had a best friend. They went to college. You went to a different college. You'll start to drift apart. They made new friends. For some reason, you didn't. And so as they made new friends and started to live their lives and started to date, they had less and less time for you. And you somehow weren't able to do that. And so they move off in one direction and they kind of leave you behind. But when people look at you, there's nothing like grossly disfiguring, right? It's not like you smell bad. It's not like you have bad hygiene. It's not like, you know, like you seem okay on the outside. But internally, you're lonely, you're isolated,

and every year that goes by, it gets a little bit worse. So you had all the momentum, you just didn't launch. And so what we tend to think about ourselves in this situation, and what we tend to, what other people will eventually start to think of us, and even what we start to suspect or see is that other people start to think of us this way, is this term loser. The loner gets replaced by a loser. I'm a loser. We've had that term for a long time.

And when someone kind of crosses into a loser, then it is their fault. Right? Because this guy's a loser. Like, they just don't do anything for themselves. And so if we want to get out of this situation, We're going to do what we normally do here. First of all, understand what on earth is going on. This is a systemic issue, right?

So I don't think it's fair to blame just the individual. If it was just you, there would be no term like a neat, a ni-ni-ni-hikokomori. We like literally have all over the world culturally specific terms. People are recognizing this phenomenon and assigning words in their own language to describe this. So it's not just you. It's a systemic issue. So first of all, we have to understand what the systemic issue is. Why is that?

It's because if we want to fix it, here's the crux of the problem. If you're a 25-year-old loner, you think it's your fault. So you accept responsibility not only for your own actions, but everything on the systemic side too, because you don't think that it's systemic, right? Because it's clearly you, because other people are out there and they're doing fine, so it can't be a systemic issue. then you start accepting responsibility for things that you have no control over. You have some control over your personal actions, but you don't control what society does.

But we don't even acknowledge that society is influencing this. So then you end up taking control responsibility for all of it. But you can't actually control it. So once I start taking responsibility for things that are out of my control, all I can do is lose. And so that feeds the cycle. So we first of all have to assign, understand what's going on from a societal. perspective. Once we understand what's going on from a societal perspective, then we'll understand what we're actually responsible for. Once we understand what we're responsible for, then we can

devote all of our energy to it. We'll talk a little bit about why that can be challenging or hard, and then ultimately we'll see a path forward. If I specialize in one thing, it's helping 25-year-old loners. So let's talk a little bit about that. So the first thing that I kind of noticed as I was training to become a psychiatrist, is I would gravitate sometimes towards these people or these people would gravitate towards me. Maybe it's because I, too, was a 25-year-old loser. When I was 25 years old, I had graduated from college after five years with like a 2.4 GPA, right? I rounded up to 2.5 because it was 2.47 or something like that. Didn't really have any money. Was applying to medical school for the second time, right? So I just failed to get in for one year and was applying

my second year, failed to get in that year as well. And so, like, who am I at that point? I've got nothing going for me. And so as I started working with these people in my office, I started to notice a couple of things. The first is when they came in, I thought, even in my head, I thought, wow, this guy's like a real loser, like me. We're both losers. But as I learned more about psychiatry, I started to realize, oh my God, this person is actually not a loser. What's actually, as I talked to them about their experience of life, I started to notice all kinds of subtle differences that we take for granted. So I'll give you all a simple example. And these are the kinds of questions that you should ask yourself. Because the 25-year-old loner sheds relationships, right? Like over time,

it's not like they drive people away. They don't rupture things. They don't cause problems. They're not drama kings or queens. Just over time, people start to slough off. And why is that? What's going on? And when I started to realize is there are all kinds of things which these people were never taught. So, for example, I want you able to think about this, okay? When you were growing up, when you were seven years old, how did you learn the rules of making friends? Did your parents make sure you got invited to birthday parties? When you had a birthday party, did your parents invite kids over? When you went to a birthday party, did your parents pick out a gift for the person that you were, did they do all the work? Did they pick out the gift and they wrote the card and just handed it to the other parent?

Or were you involved in that process? Were you taught, okay, let's go get a gift for someone. When we get a gift for someone, let's write a card. I'm going to hand you the present and the card, and you're going to go in, and I realize you're going to feel a little bit awkward, you're going to go to your friend and you're going to hand it to them. Or did they take care of everything? Or did you not even get invited? Or did you not even go? Or did you go with a gift? gift but no card or did you go with a card or no gift? Another wild thing when you had a birthday party and other kids showed up. Did you give them return gifts? Did you go up to each and every one of your guests at the party? Give them a little goody bag and say thank you for coming. Did your parents make you do that? Because this is how you form relationships. This is how you maintain relationships.

There are all kinds of things. Did your parents in real? roll you in particular things. When you had conflict, I remember when I was in the fifth grade, I got into a fight with a kid in my school. Because we were all part of a friend circle. And there were four of us. And we started getting into conflict because I wanted to hang out with two people. I didn't want to hang out with this fourth kid. The fourth kid wanted to hang out with the two people.

He didn't want to hang out with me. I got a phone call from his mom to my house. And she talked to me a little bit about how it's not good to fight over friends. And like, is it kind of cringe? Absolutely. Was the kid embarrassed? I imagine so. Did I kind of get reprimanded by some other kid's parents?

Sure. Were my parents even aware of what was going on? Absolutely not. But the next day at school, there was civility between the two of us. And we ended up doing fine for the rest of the year. A parent actually interceded on behalf of. their child. How did the parent even know that? It's because they must have talked to their kid. They must have said, hey, what's going on with you today? I'm having trouble making friends.

And the parent is like, oh, let me do what a parent is supposed to do. If my child is having trouble learning how to walk, I will teach them to walk. If they're having trouble making friends, let me teach them how to make friends. But what a lot of parents do, and we'll get to why this isn't really their fault in the second, is they don't teach their kids, right? They just sort of send their kids off and assume that the child will learn. Because this is not like, it's not like parenting 101, right? Like, not all parents do this. And the thing is that used to work. What's changed? One thing. The internet. The internet has changed. So it used to be that we did not have social alternatives or socially fracturing forces like we have today.

So there's an increase in globalization and you can work remotely and people will move from one place to another. A hundred years ago, I remember talking to my grandmother about like when she grew up in her village, what was it like for her? And it's hard to describe this, but like I can't really do it justice. But she was explaining to me that the world was a fictional concept. the idea of other nations were like theoretical. No one in her village of 200 people, not a single person in her village of 200 people,

or the generation above or the generation above or the generation above had ever visited another country. For the 300 years in that village and every person, not a single person had visited another country. I remember when I went to that village, one of my... my distant cousins came up to me and was like, did you come here in an airplane? And I was like, yeah, man. Of course.

I was like nine. And he's like, but how did you get here in an airplane? I was like, I don't know, dude. Like I sat in the seat. And he looked at me and was like, how do you not foul out? I was like, what the? And then it clicked.

The only motor transportation this kid has ever seen is a cart that is attached to an ox. How do you go so fast and not fall out? So the social system that our parents learned involved tight-knit communities. That's what human beings have evolved into. So what we teach our kids, we just kind of show up. Like in that village, you don't need to explicitly teach kids' social skills because they show up, they go to school, they see the same 30 kids.

Half of those kids are going to get married. They're going to have families. They're going to see each other every day in the town square. There's no fracturing. And so what's happened is as the internet has grown, people have been more fractured. And so what's happening is there's a need for parents to intervene in a way that they never have before because, like, society just didn't work like that. And the end result is we have a bunch of people who aren't taught how to maintain social

relationships. The reason the parents don't really teach it is because they really weren't taught it. But the thing is, for them, they didn't really need to learn. because society was structured in such a way where you sort of had persistent contacts, right? You went to work every day and you saw the same people and then you went to barbecues and all this kind of good stuff. But now we're working from home. Now we're freelancers. Now we're this. Now we're that. Now people are moving away to different, like moving is like not that wild. Right? It's not like people like, oh my God. If you moved, how did you take your house? I didn't

take my house. I rented a place over there. It's like, oh my God, that's so weird. So society has changing. And so once you start to realize this, what I realize as a psychiatrist is that when I work with these people and they don't maintain relationships, it's not because they're losers. It's because they were literally never taught. And I sort of almost like realized, I was like, oh, this is this person's karma. So when I was trying to make sense of this, right, there's a scientific angle. But when it comes down to it, I can't fix their parenting and I can't fix their societal, what society does or doesn't do. I can't fix or change. the fact that we're entering the digital age.

So how do I help this person? And what I did is I conceptualized it as their karma. And this is really important for a mindset shift, right? So I want you all to understand this. If you think you're a 25-year-old loner, I want you to think about all the confluence of events that have made you who you are today. Do you get to choose where you're born?

Do you get to choose when you're born? Do you get to choose who your parents are? Because if we're saying that excellent parenting is a differentiating factor here. And we're not saying that the parents are bad. It's just they just don't know that they need to teach this. If you were born 100 years ago, would you have this problem? Right?

There are all kinds of things that you don't control about your circumstances. This is your karma. Now, karma sometimes comes with all these weird, like, associations like, oh, you deserve this and reincarnation. But forget about that. What we know is that even scientifically, there's a conflict. of events, and this is what we learn as psychiatrists, is there's a confluence of events that makes a human being. They're parenting, their attachment style, whether traumatic experiences happen, like literally whether, like when you went to a birthday party, what were you taught?

What is the right way to maintain relationships? How many times a year did you call your cousins who live on the opposite side of the country? Just to talk. because I know that like my parents made me call random people in India who I had never met and say hi to them. But what they did in that moment is instill in me and teach me a particular social skill. I was like, I don't know who this person is. They're like, no, you have to talk to them for five minutes. I was like, this sucks, but I did it.

They made me do it. And now it's like I know how to maintain a relationship because they taught me. So so much, just think about what you were really taught about. about maintaining relationships. If you struggle to maintain a relationship, even at the age of 25, do your parents sit down with you and say, hey, you seem kind of lonely?

Like, what are you doing? Like, you know, did your parents even maintain relationships? And so once you start to realize, and what I discovered as a psychiatrist, is there's no such thing as a loser, does not exist. It's a judgment that we make out of ignorance

of what is this person's circumstances, what is their upbringing, what were they taught, What were they given? And what I started to see is there's no such thing as a loser. It's just their karma. Does that mean that they deserve it? That's not what karma is about. Karma is about understanding what are all the thousand different things that form together to create a human being in the year 2022 at the age of 25. And how much does that person control?

Very little. So now we get to something really important. And once I share that with that person, once we can get on the same page, hey, there's a lot of stuff that actually is not your fault. Once we remove loser from the equation, then something really. magical starts to happen. Because now you begin to realize, okay, it's not my fault that I'm here, but it's absolutely my responsibility to do something about it. Then the question becomes, what can I do?

So there are a couple of steps to this. The first, and we're going to kind of summarize this, because people say this, the first is don't blame yourself for all of it. Right? You can blame yourself for some of it. But this is what we're sort of talking about. Take a karmic perspective. what were you taught about maintaining relationships?

Once you don't blame yourself, next thing that you've got to figure out is what are you truly responsible for? So step one is get rid of all of the blame. Step two is, okay, what am I responsible for? Now, here's where the mind is going to do a really important trick. When you start to think about what you're responsible for, if you're not careful, you'll start thinking about shoulds. I should do this, I should do that, I should do this,

I should be able to do this. I should, should, should, should, should, should, should, should. Shooting yourself in the foot. The right question isn't what you should do. The right question is what can you do? So when I'm thinking about a goal, like let's say I'm here, I should be here. I have so much potential. I should be able to get an A.

I should be able to maintain relationships. The gap between here and here is wide. And as I take one step forward, I'm unsatisfied. Because look at what I should have accomplished all this. And so progress actually makes you feel worse. And if in the system of your mind, progress makes you feel worse because any time you take a step forward, all you focus on is the nine steps that you didn't take forward. You're never going to get there.

So I was once working with an East Asian kid, adolescent in high school and says, I came, like, was really, like, depressed, right? So his parents had brought me to my office with so much frustration at the end of their rope. They're like, my kid keeps on bringing up.

Basically what they were saying, tried to cover it up, is like, my kid keeps on bringing up this depression crap. So can you please fix him? Because he keeps on bringing up this excuse. And as I talked to the kid, I was like, you know, Why do you feel sad?

And he says, for once in my life, I got a 93 on a test, on a math, on a calculus test. I told my parents, my parents asked me, what grade did you get? I said, I got a 93. And for once in my life, all I want for my parents is instead of looking at the seven questions I got wrong, I wish they would look at the 93 questions I got right. Just once. I want them to look at the 93. questions I got right, but they never look at the 93. All they ever look at is the seven questions

I got wrong. And if you take one step forward in your life and you say to yourself, this isn't what I should do, I should be better, I should be able to accomplish more, you are doing the same damn thing is that kids' parents. You're just focusing on the stuff that you fail to do. And what is that going to do for your motivation? So be very careful when I start to ask you, okay, what are you responsible for in terms of social improvement and making friends and all this kind of stuff, your mind is going to populate, automatically catch it with all the thousand things you should do. That's not how you move forward.

And this is what we mean in like the yogic tradition. We say live in the present. Like you will see it on all of the blogs and Instagrams and whatnot. Live in the present. Present is good. What does that mean? That means what can you do, not what should you do? because you're here, this is the future.

This is the should. It's to look over here. Instead, look over here because this is where you are. And ask yourself, what can I do today? Forget about what you should do. Forget about your potential. Forget about all that kind of stuff. Today, if you are a 25-year-old loaner, what can you do today?

And do that thing. And you can say, I can't do anything. That's okay, too. So it's really asking yourself, what can you do? Because the answer isn't nothing. I can't go out. I should go to a bar and make friends, but I can't go out to a bar and make friends? Okay, fine.

Can you message someone on Discord? Can you send a text to an old friend of yours? Can you respond to your group, like your work groups WhatsApp group, whatever? Your work WhatsApp group or your work signal chat or whatever. What can you do? And start with those things. And something magical will happen. When you forget about the should and you forget about the future and you focus on what you can do,

your goal is to do something, whatever. And then as you really start with what you can do, not what you should do, you focus on that thing. And as you do that, at the end of the day, you will have a success behind you instead of a failure, even though the action is the same. Right?

Because I can send a message to a friend of mine and say, hey, what's up? You want to catch up sometime. But if my goal is to make a thousand friends, I'm going to look at that. I'm going to be like, this pathetic loser, all he can do is message someone online. And then the same action can be progress or success,

or it can be a sign of your overwhelming hopelessness as a human being. And so start with that thing. Just start with what you can do. And your mind will create all kinds of judgments. Let them come. It's okay. It'll judge, judge, judge, judge. And say, you know what?

I did what I can do today. And this is what's pretty neat about that. For people who are skeptical, but they're like, I'll never get there. So I was working on the stroke unit at the Massachusetts General Hospital. These are people who have strokes and can't walk anymore. How do you get someone who can't walk anymore to walk? One step at a time. What can you move?

Okay, let's figure out. Can you move your, can you wiggle your toes? All right, great. Can you lift your leg? All right, great. Can you take a step? Not really. Okay, we're just going to lift legs today.

Just wiggle your toes and lift your leg, curl, flex your ankle, extend your ankle, extend at the knee joint, flex at the knee joint, let's just start where we are. And this is literally the scientifically valid proven process that physical therapists will do with people who have lost a chunk of their brain. And these amazing human beings that are physical therapists can take a human being who has lost a chunk of, their brain and get them fucking walking again, that's the strategy that we need to implement for our mind. Start with where you are. Take one step forward. And as you do that day after day after day, after day, and this is where your mind is going to say, oh my God, that's so exhausting. It's going to take such a long time. We don't care about that because what are we focusing on today? Forget about it. We're not worried about tomorrow. Don't think about tomorrow. The

The more you start to think about tomorrow, we're moving towards the future. Oh my God, I have to do this 100 days, a thousand days, how many days will it take to catch up? All bad thoughts. Not going to be productive. It's the future thinking mind. Just going to do it today. Just going to do it today. Just going to do it today.

And if you learn to do that and then start to accumulate other things like resources and stuff like that, because what you can do today isn't always action. also be like learning, right? So even if I don't know how to go out to a bar, can I practice social skills somewhere else, right? That's why we have social sandbox on Discord. Can I learn a little bit about motivation? Okay, that's why we have Dr. Kay's guide. Can I learn a little bit more about anxiety and social anxiety? Okay, like that also, like you can maybe go see a therapist, you can watch Dr. Kay's guide. There's all kinds of stuff you can do. The key is do something today, whatever you can do. and accept that.

And hopefully if you keep doing that, you won't be a 25-year-old loner, or if you are a 25-year-old loner, you won't be a 25-year-old, 26-year-old loner. Questions. A.T. Field is saying, what the social sandbox?

How does it work? Great question. So, social sandbox is in Discord. So here's what we realized. Parents aren't teaching y'all how to socialize properly. And by properly, it's not their fault because the world has changed. As we start to use Discord,

and online things, we start to become more socially anxious. The parts of our brain, this is kind of a really interesting concept. So part of the reason that I think the subjective experience of social anxiety is increasing is because the parts of our brain that reassure us in social situations are actually starting to become vestigial or atrophy. So when I interact with human beings in person, there are parts of my brain that interpret body language. And they do it without our awareness. So when I sit around and like if I'm a seven year old and I spend every day playing with my friends outside, I learn to interpret body language, eight years old, nine years old, 10 years old, 12 years old. And then when I'm hanging out with people when I'm 16, that part of my brain works

really well. And it interprets all the body language and it tells me, hey, you're doing fine. Everyone here likes you. When we start communicating on, line, that part of the brain shuts off. Just like a language that we don't practice, our brain is like, hey, we don't need this thing anymore. So our ability to be reassured by body language and behavioral signals decreases. As that part of our brain decreases, when we enter social situations, we no longer have reassurance from that, which results in increased social anxiety. So the more that we use the internet as a communication tool, the more socially anxious we become. So we discovered this at HG.

And so we decided, hey, you know what? Let's just give people a chance, literally to practice talking. It's a sandbox where you can come in and just have a conversation. Intentionally, it's not just about socializing on Discord. It's intentionally to learn the skills of socializing, right? People are going to be there, are going to ask you, okay, let's talk. And then as you struggle to talk, a coach is going to be there. They're going to be like, okay, what are you feeling right now?

Let's figure out how to overcome those feelings. Let's try again. And what it is, I don't know how to say this, but like, you can jump into the water and teach yourself to swim eventually. Or you can go to a swimming class, and within the span of two weeks, you can learn how to swim with focused intention. And this is the thing, for people who feel behind in life, they're like, oh my God, it's so hard to learn. It's so hard to learn on your own. I completely agree. If you try to figure out yourself, it'll take you five years.

But with the help of someone who knows what they're doing, you can learn a language in one month. You can learn to swim in two weeks. You can learn to ride a bike in a day. You can learn how to talk to another human being in a couple of weeks. It just requires focused practice, right? Focused guidance. Jade Zero-6 is saying, I've been lonely for years and I feel stressed when socializing

and I can't tolerate any more making my feelings even worse. Should I just give up? No. You should do it differently. So I think that there's what's making you want to give up. The feelings have piled up. So what you've got to do is clean out the feelings. Right?

So anytime, so this is important to understand about how the mind works. We have a mind. When our mind has a negative experience, it comes with negative emotion. When we have a pile of negative emotion in our mind, we have two options. We can process it or we can numb it. As we turn to technology, which is so damn accessible, we numb it. right? So if I have a terrible... If I'm awkward at a party, I'll give you all an example.

Let's say I feel awkward at a party. What do I do? I flip out and I start scrolling on my phone. What happens to the awkwardness? It kind of gets pushed to the back. It's kind of still there. It doesn't really get fixed, but it becomes more tolerable. And then I leave the party because no one is talking to me for an hour. Why is no one talking to me for hour?

Because I'm on my fucking phone. And then you're like, man, I feel like such a loser. No one wants to talk to me. Like, and then you take those bundle of emotions with you. Some people may say the answer is just get off your phone, no, it's not the answer. Because if you could do it, you would have done it. Right? So then when you take those pile of emotions, now what happens is the next time you go to the party,

how do you feel going in? You carry those pile of emotions with you. Your brain has been wired to do this. Same mechanism of PTSD. As you enter and there's music playing and stuff like that, your brain is like, oh, by the way, we've been in this environment before. This environment sucks. Up comes the upsurging of negative emotions that you had from the last time that you went home.

You had a couple of drinks. You played some video games. You didn't process it at all. So all those emotions are waiting for you. They're like, hey, here we are. And so as those emotions come surging in, what do you do? Here's the phone. Start scrolling.

Cycle repeats itself. So if you're in this situation, it can feel like your only choice is to suffer. give up. But what you've really got to do is take all those emotions that have piled up and like process them or vent them in some way. Right. So therapy is a good option for sure. There are all kinds of things like meditation, journaling, going for long walks, just letting those emotions come out in a safe way, inventing them, unburdening yourself. Coaching can help with that too. But the goal in coaching, if you go to it in coaching, the coaching isn't just going to sit there and listen to your emotions. It's not a venting space. If that's what you're looking for, therapy is more appropriate. We're not saying

that you can't vent there, but the goal of coaching, and this is arguably also true of therapy, I've read some really interesting articles about what therapy is and isn't recently, really interesting. But the goal in coaching is really going to be to change your behavior and get you to be able to go to the party and, like, have fun there. So venting emotion and sort of working through that is like a necessary step to moving forward. Also, not a bad idea to just get a straight-up clinical evaluation for something like social anxiety. Great question, though. Dr. Kay, could you do a stream on good parenting on like mindful parenting and parenting styles?

I could do a stream. I think the challenge is that a stream won't cut it. So here's been our experience with parenting. The first is that we've got a whole course on good parenting. I mean, it's not really a course on good parenting. It's a course on communication and boundary setting, essentially. It's a course designed for parents whose kids are struggling with technology addiction. So we've got that.

And why is it in the course format? It's because it like builds, right? So this is the shortcoming of things like Twitch and YouTube is that they don't build. It's like a bite-sized thing. That's what the platform is designed for. Twitch streams and YouTube videos are designed to be wholly, like, isolated, independent things. So there are some formats that are. superior to these platforms. Like, it's just the platform. Like, if you think about a course at a

university, like the whole point of the course is that week two and week three and week four build on week one. And each builds on the next. And when it really comes to good parenting, that's how we approach it. We also have a couple of like add-ons, right? Like so almost DLCs of sort. So there's some stuff about parenting in our upcoming guide about how to parent a kid with ADHD, because that's what's really interesting, is we always think about, oh, my parents failed me because they didn't parent good enough. So the really interesting thing, if you have a diagnosis of ADHD, there is strong, strong evidence that it shapes your parents' parenting style increases their depression and increases their stress level. It's not your fault. I mean,

you didn't ask to be born with ADHD, but there are parent, their bi-directional effects when it comes to parenting in ADHD. So we go into that nuance, which is something that a lot of parents feel super guilty and kids blame them and it's like a really unhealthy kind of thing. Parents don't realize that it's not their fault that having a neuro-a-typical child makes like it hard to be a parent because the rules of parenting change. We've been taught particular rules about how to parent and when you have a child who's not neurotypical, you have to change the rules. You have to adapt to the rules. And the cool thing is that when you adapt the rules to the needs of the child, then everyone gets better. There's even been studies that show that if you have a

parent with anxiety and a child with anxiety, if you treat the parent's anxiety without touching the child, the child's anxiety improves. There's a lot to dive into, and I don't think a single stream will cut it. That being said, if you all have, I love the question, Peacock Lover, and if you all have more specific, like, can you do parenting about, like, if there's an isolated, independent thing that we can cover in an hour, I'm happy to do it. Alim Ha Ha is asking, is being a 25-year-old loner, okay? Yes. It's okay to be a 25-year-old loner, and you should do something about it. See, that's the thing. It's like, we start to live in a society where we think we should only do stuff. We should only act when things are wrong. Disagree. Ah.

Excellent question. X-B-X. What happens when you do your thing for the day and text an old friend, but they never end up responding? Completely irrelevant. Remember, we started this discussion with what are you responsible for and what is the rest of the world responsible for? In that question, we see something really, really tricky, which is you are starting to accept responsibility for the behavior of another person. If they don't respond, how do you feel about yourself? You feel like a loser. that's what screws you. Not your fault that they didn't respond.

Should have no impact on your self-worth or what you do tomorrow. Didn't work. No big deal. Let's move on. Tomorrow, what can I do today? Same thing. Same thing. Does not matter at all.

What you control is your actions, not the outcomes of your actions. If I failed a test, but I studied eight hours a day for the the 10 days before the test, not my fault. Now, is there something to be learned from that? Oh, yeah, by the way, I studied for the wrong test. Right, I'm not saying that there isn't corrective behavior on your part, but like, you can't control whether other people respond. All you can control is what you can do.

So then maybe there's a learning there, right? So tomorrow, what can you do? Maybe if you're reaching out to a different friend, take a look at your message and try to figure out, okay, what could I say? That could be a little bit different. Is there some way I can improve? And if you do that, you'll get there. 100%.

Or I guess 99%. I feel confident, I should say. Right? Because I don't know that the outcome isn't something that I can predict. So scary printer sounds is saying it just takes commitment. That is both correct and incorrect.

So it doesn't even, this is the scary thing. 99% of the time scary printer sounds is right. It just takes commitment. 1% though. There's no such thing as commitment. there's just what you do today. Commitment is hard.

There's just what you do. It doesn't take commitment. It just takes today. Just today. Just today. Just today. How do I improve my social skills when somebody who has social anxiety disorder and can barely handle, how do I improve my social skills with somebody? So, Desanya Kale is asking, how do I improve my social skills?

I'm going to assume as somebody who has social anxiety disorder. So if you have a clinical diagnosis, the first step is, treatment. Right? So there are certain treatments that you can use that will reduce the burden of that diagnosis. And then you go out and you rehabilitate. And this is where I think therapists have fallen short because we've become so overwhelmed by like the severity of mental illness that we don't really do like psychology rehab. But that's what a lot of these people need. So if you've grown up with social anxiety your whole life, you have to start with treatment. But the challenge is that treatment is that treatment is not a substitute for 10 years of atrophied social skills with living with social anxiety.

What we need is like psychological rehab. And we'll even have this in some parts of psychiatry or psychology, where you'll have some kinds of like professional rehab and things like that. So I trained at this place called McLean Hospital, and McLean Hospital has really good programs for people to like learn how to have a job. So they'll set you up with like an internship at a nonprofit, or something like that, where you learn how to show up every day on time. You get assigned some kind of tasks, and then you kind of go home.

And so you learn some of these core skills, which you can feel pathetic for not learning. But if you've lived with mental illness that has deprived you of normal developmental milestones, you've got to make up for it. Okay. So, Avery Rod is asking, what if I feel like I have nothing to say? This is what I want you to do. I want you to go back and watch any interview that we've done. And I want you to pay attention to what Dr. Kay says.

For the first half hour of any interview, does Dr. Kay have anything to say? Absolutely not. Maybe here or there. I'm sure you can prove that statement wrong. You don't have anything, have to have anything to say to have a conversation. All you have to do is be willing to listen. That's what it takes to have a conversation. Not, don't need anything to say.

If you've got nothing to say on the subject doesn't mean you can't talk. about it. Case in point. I have friends who talk about finance all the time. I got nothing to say about finance. So when I participate in those conversations, most of what it is is me learning. It's like, hey, can you explain what this means? Can you help me understand that? All you need. Right? Kind of interesting. At some point, you may have something to say. Then you can share it. Okay, I'm going to try to catch up with a couple of comments. Do you think it's late to socialize at 31? I feel too old for every social activity. I see 20 years for the most part.

It's never too late to socialize. I'm not saying that you're not going to feel old or out of place if you start hanging out with a bunch of 20-year-olds. But it's not too late. It's just, let's be clear. If you go, if you're a 31-year-old and you hang out with a bunch of like mid-20-somethings, you're going to feel out of place.

Does that mean it's too late to socialize? No. It just means that you feel out of place. That's it. It's just a feeling. It's not a truth. It's just a feeling. I realized this front and center.

Like, when I started residency, average age of people was like 25, 26, maybe 27, actually. And I was like 31, 32. Like, people are still, some of them are getting married, some of them are married, like, I'm having kids.

And so, like, you know, like, it's weird. I started med school at the age of 28. most people started at the age of like 22. I'm coming up on 30. I had my 30th birthday in med school. And they're like, yeah, 24, let's go party. And I'm like, I'm 30, dude. So it's totally okay to be older than like people.

You're just older. It means I can still study. I can still hang out with them. If you're hanging out with people who are 20 in their 20s and going to a concert, like even if you're 31 and they're 25, both y'all can listen to the music. So focus on what you're there for. I'm not saying it's easy,

but let's be precise about whether it's possible and what's truly getting in the way. What's getting in the way is here.