Actually Schizoid

Eh, sorry, those guys on Schizoid Sanctuary asked me to remove the invite link. Seems like they wanna keep that community private, and I don’t really mind either way as I don’t interact there much at all last year or so, I only ensure it stays in one piece. 

If you guys wanna new schizoid Discord, I can just make another one, but it’ll need couple mods at least. Or just make one yourself and I’ll post new link. 

Sure, there’s an easy lifehack for dirty dishes: just trash all extra dishes, cups, spoons etc you own :D Leave just one of each item. And buy a pack of plastic disposable ones that can be used in case of emergency like sudden guests (bleh). 

There’s no need to clean your cup if it’s the only cup you own. It will auto-clean itself the next time you fill it with tea, coffee or soup. Maybe just rinse it with hot water in between the uses if you feel like it’s not clean enough.

Eventually the layer of tea on the inside of cup might start to fall off - well, just scrub it off with your nails or something if it bothers you too much. But my tea/soup mug somehow stays clean on itself, i dunno, maybe it has some anti-whatever surface.

Eh, nothing in particular, as of last few years. I just flow with the flow, tag along with any interest that gets even a fraction of my attention, and when it no longer does, I stick to something new. I don’t set my expectations high, just not as boing as doing nothing = good enough. And when doing nothing is actually less boring... well, I do nothing then :) Until I get bored of that enough to get my interest swap elsewhere on its own.

I might have a bit of a weird sense of humor, but apparently, I have some sort of it, at least :) I rarely make jokes of general kind, but I can (and do) ironize on certain things, I can understand satire and various kinds of “intellectual humor”. Often it’s rather narrowly targeted and hard to understand without knowing the subject enough though. 

I can appreciate comedy, but I rarely watch them intentionally. Like, early seasons of TBBT were ok to my taste, but later on this show was boring 90% of its time. I also like when drama and humor go along, like in recent “Kidding” tv-show with Jim Carrey. It has interesting contrasts on occasion, and humor is rather a plot tool than the whole point of this show. Heck, I could even somewhat understand “English humor” things like “Monty Python”, “Bit of Fry & Laurie” and “Jeeves and Wooster” back in the days, despite I wasn’t yet fluent enough in the language to understand some jokes (I got better thanks to it, though). 

All in all, humor is more of another field of knowledge to me. A puzzle that I can play with, pinpoint some correlations and mechanics, etc. I don’t really do humor for the sake of it being funny. Unless it serves some other purpose, like making a point or highlighting a thought in a way to make it easier to understand to others.

But I suspect it’s heavily individual and depends on personal characteristics, age, experience, social circle (or lack of thereof), background, etc. Some schizoids just don’t care enough. Some of them might have those issues due to depression that may be fixed in time. Some are just natively immune to humor, I suppose. And that’s fine :)

It depends on your definition of successful, I suppose. There are people with schizoid traits among rich people. Plenty of our qualities go well along with business - as long as one can approach it from sides where things like motivation is irrelevant. 

Also it’s possible to tap into some substitutes of motivation. Like, to suck it off from someone who’s close to you irregardless of you preference. Like, parents or whatever family members you can’t get rid of as easily as taking a divorce. If they’re motivated instead of you and you’re already forced to deal with it somehow, it doesn’t matter if you don’t care to success yourself. They’ll make you do it anyway lol. And the best you can do in that case is stop resisting and get a proper antidepressant because most likely you’re gonna need it sooner or later with that lifestyle.

What I personally prefer though, is finding a business that takes little motivation to sustain, requires little day-to-day effort, requires limited interaction with people and leaves you little choice by itself.

So far best I could find myself is short-term rent. Think Air-B&B or Booking.com I have a couple extra properties for it, but if you don’t, it’s possible to just rent it yourself for long-term and then benefit from the net difference. 

If you don’t have ambitions set too high, just one property might sustain your living (assuming you’re not too picky about quality of life). If you really feel like doing it properly, it’s possible to arrange things in a way you’ll be able to handle 3-5 properties just by yourself, without spending more than 3 hours a day. 

Like, I have just one (might add another one soon). And all I really need to do is make myself wake up around noon when there are guests leaving/incoming, clean the place after they’re gone (optionally can be outsourced to neighbors or professional cleaners, tho that’ll cut off from the profits). And that’s it.

I don’t interact in any way with 90% of our guests. They get their key from a lockbox right next to the door. They put it back there when they’re leaving. I email them a passcode. They get a full manual too, so I don’t have to explain shit to them. 

Everything - and I mean *everything* - in the room has labels and instructions on it. Like, literally… this is a microwave. Don’t put metal in it. This is a water boiler. Turn this thing to the max and then back down before you leave. It won’t be enough water for more than 2 ppl at once, etc etc. Everything on how to get there, written in a way an utter idiot will understand. This way I don’t really have to do much talking at all. And in rare cases I need, I just point them to look up their mailbox. 

Is there a business better for a schizoid? Well, maybe there is. I’m yet to find one though. I’m also about as content with this way to get my living as it realistically possible atm. I’d prefer to get rid of cleaning part, but tbh I have no issue with it. When it’s mostly automated and guests are politely asked to help out with cleaning before they leave (most do), it’s a matter of 15-30 min a day. And I get more than most local people’s salary per day for that alone (ofc, that only means people are generally poor around here).

You might also consider things like financial trading, but motivation is a massive issue there. You might be good at it if you try hard… but you won’t. Maybe you’ll last long enough to learn, to get some first taste of actual money on your account, made from thin air… But then you’ll just get bored and tired and find some better use of your time. 

Because without motivation all the result is just numbers. Some pixels on your screen. Most of the money, aside from the part you’ll use on mandatory bills, most likely will just stockpile on your account with no good use, no goal to farm it towards, no plans to use it on something you really want - because you probably don’t really want anything. Or don’t want it hard enough at least. 

And that’s your main problem. The one that won’t really get away. Best you can do is learn to bypass it, the sooner the better. You don’t have motivation to complete your degree now - well, guess what? You’ll complete it, probably, but there won’t be any more motivation after you do so. 

Just… stop relying on motivation whatsoever. Try to arrange your life in a way that it matters little if you want something or not. Like, in case of my renting stuff, I don’t have to think about motivation when I go to prepare the place for next guests. 

There’s just no option to not go. They’ll arrive no matter what, it’s already set and there’s no tool to cancel their arrival. The place has to be ready no matter what, and I only get a choice as to how to make it happen. I have an option to ask my parents to help out in case I get sick, or even I can order a cleaning service (which would eat all the profit and will likely cost me in addition). But so far I had no need to use that. 

That inevitable factor supplements the lack of motivation better than anything I’ve found so far. My advice is try to find something like that. Maybe that’ll work for you too.

Well, being schizophrenic pretty much makes you a schizoid by default. It’s more of a schizoid+, if anything :) Schizoid PD is not often diagnosed along with schizophrenia, afaik, but only because it’s more or less included in the pack. 

I.e. schizoid PD is negative symptoms alone, and at some point in history of psychiatry it used to be diagnosed as a form of schizophrenia (latent or whatever it was called on English). 

Since genetically it’s heavily related, the difference comes down to having some positive symptoms along with negative (and sometimes not all of the negatives, but usually at least some of them).

Well, SzPD has genetic predisposition, as it seems from the research that I’ve seen. Like schizophrenia and most of (all?) the rest of the spectrum, there are several genetic markers that in various combinations can cause the shit that may or may not turn into Schizoid PD or some other spectrum stuff. Or, in some cases, one might have genetic predisposition, but it never turns into actual PD or more severe conditions. Because reasons. 

And sure, if by 18 y.o. you already have some solid szpd-related symptoms, that might be a good idea to check how far down the road you are and if that already looks like proper szpd or something else. At very least, that’s better than if you do the same thing 5 years later - by then there won’t be a chance to do anything about whatever you end up with.

But there’s a good reason why they rarely diagnose PDs, including schizoid, in people aged under 25. Because whatever it is, it still might (and probably will) evolve along with you getting closer to psychological maturity stage - which is the shit stage where you get rigid enough to make things very hard to change, for good or for worse alike. 

What I’m saying is… In your age I had no idea wtf is wrong with me. Not a single clue. I only knew there was a lot of things about me that weren’t the same for most people around me. But I did nothing about it due to being clueless. So in your place, knowing what the heck’s going on or what it might be at least, I’d probably try to use those ~5 years to make the rest of my life a bit less of a disordered mess. 

Yeah, that’s pretty close to how I experience it. I remember the face somewhat, but things like new haircut would confuse the fuck out of me, I’ll probably think that’s someone else. And generally I think there’s a bunch of people I only remember by face, and I know there was some data assigned to that face, but I really don’t store that data anywhere. So it’s just “familiar face #0397, name and personality data missing”. 

One thing I got to learn is that it is a skill. We might have less “talent” (and/or innate practice) than most people, but we’re still able to get better at it to some extent. If that bothers you and lowers quality of life, it might be worth to intentionally learn it. 

Being a schizoid, it’s likely you weren’t looking at people as much as it’s intended by human design to be able to rely on this skill. Just because you didn’t care enough to get better at this. But you still can catch up. I know I got better at it than I was back in college, let alone in school. 

Yep, about the same for me. 

Names, birthdays, ages — tbh, I don’t even try to remember it anymore. I don’t bother to remember by own birthday even. When I’m asked by whatever that’s not officials that might matter I just input random date in realistic range. 

I don’t remember birthdays of my own parents, I just open their diet app where it’s listed when I need to know it, and then I’ll forget it few min later. All I know atm is that it’s late winter lol.

But maybe that’s just my thing, coz it goes to a bit more than just personal/social data. I suck at memorizing history dates, all kinds of numbers (my phone number that I have for like 15 years? ye, let me open my contacts to read it to you). 

Then somehow at random I just remember numbers I absolutely don’t need. For eternity. Like, when I was like 8 y.o. my mom was reading a book and had nothing to bookmark the page with so she said something like “page 137, pls remind me tomorrow what page it was”. Sure, mom. How about I’ll remind you which page it was 25 years later? Don’t remember which book, tho. 

Anyway, if your selective memory is so selective it only sucks at dates connected to information related to people and everything else works fine, then perhaps it has some psychological layer to it. Which means you might be able to recover that ability with some psychotherapy or whatnot, should you ever need it. 

But tbh, I don’t think it’s all that much of a problem. In the age of smartphones, you can just write down any info that’s actually needed and never bother to rely on your own memory. I’d say, it’s for the best to be able to keep your memory free of all unnecessary garbage like birthdays of people you meet once a year at best. Or, well, even if you meet them daily, but that date only needed once a year - the heck you’d waste a memory slot for that? Even if it’s just a single byte of brain cells, I’m sure there are better use for it.

Oh, and as for faces — yeah, I’m not too good at face recognition either. Though later it turned out I’m not too bad at it, but at a different angle. Like, I’m actually capable to recreate face pretty accurately from photo, using 3D software like DAZ Studio. I’m also able to create unique faces plausible enough with it (like for character illustrations I’m sometimes asked to make). I can somewhat recreate face from memory same way, maybe a bit less accurately. 

But then when it comes to practical usage?.. “Eh, that girl looks kinda familiar… Oh hey, neighbor next door I know for years, I never expected to see you 1 km from home and wearing a hat, that’s probably why I didn’t say hi and not because I thought I probably have seen you on tv or something”. 

Well, being a loner doesn’t really contradicts with that :) Some strategic usage of local recourses is absolutely fine. For a schizoid, being a loner generally means avoiding emotional intimacy or any long-lasting intrusion in their inner world. Occasional meaningless social contacts have nothing to do with it.

Even those schizoids who are absolutely committed to remaining a loner often can afford things like help from society — they just have to provide something in return, being not really the kind of person whom people would be willing to help for free. Like, well, actual money.