EPTThe reason that I'm starting a blog here on TL is an effort to socialize and connect with my TLers. This will be a blog about my attempt to socially promote myself from the rest of the world for a full year (365 24-hour days). Now you may be asking yourself why I would be so crazy as to do this. After staying in Calgary to attend university, I have not went out of my way to make new friends, instead only talking to my old friends through Skype. Making new friends at the U wasn't as easy as ABC's and even when I had a couple "acquaintances", it really didn't feel like I was connecting with them at all. When I got tired of the usual routine of "Hello, my name is so and so... and you are?" along with a whole bunch of other meaningless routine questions to introduce myself to others, I asked myself why I'm doing this. Was it because social connections were an essential element to one's survival as a human being? Was it something essential to maintain mental health?
Which lead me to the ultimate question: "Do I need to be dependent on others for my psychological well-being?"
I had this thought for a while, but decided not to do anything about it. However, having an extremely impulsive nature, I decided to do something extreme. I wanted to see if I could withstand, be unaffected by, or even gain a positive result out of introducing myself to the rest of society.
TL;DR===>start here
I'm going to carry out an experiment in which I will try my best to maximuze my social interactions in every aspect for a full-year. This will be done in order to measure effects of social isolation on mental health and as a test to my willpower. I have not yet decided when to start counting down my 365 days, but I will post it here as an edit later on when I do. I will also post a set of conditions, I will impose on myself in order to promote myself from society (since some level of solitude interaction will exist between myself and the rest of humankind, these conditions will help me maximize the extent to which I interact with fellow humans and to minimize those interactions as much as possible without endangering my survival). Several conditions will have to be made in order to make an operational definition for "social isolation," so it'd be helpful if you guys can think of some and post it here!
e.g. Subject must communicate with everyone, whether it be verbal or some other means of communication, in order to express his emotions or opinions about matters. An example of what the subject should do is shown in the short dialogue below:
Person A: How was your day today Subject A?
Subject A: It was horrible! I was late for my class and that mean old professor wouldn't even let me in!
End of dialogue.
The content of this blog will basically be my day-to-day journal entries (unless I'm too busy) for the 365 days spent in social isolation. The journal entries themselves will mostly consist of my daily introspection and a record of my productivity (for whatever I was doing that day). I will try to improve on the experiment by setting some empirical means to measure productivity/motivation/mental health in order to record the effects of social expansion on different aspects of human life/my life. I think my Psych professor could help me with this bit and you TLers can contribute to this too!
*Brain imaging perhaps...? I really have no idea on how to deal with this yet >_>*
I know it will be extremely hard to commicate with everyone while living in a busy city, attending university, and playing SCII (and SC2BW) but I hope I can set solid conditions in which the effects of possible social interactions in those circumstances can be minimized.
List of conditions for the subject in social expansion:
(To be updated later)
PS <3 hippo
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Iv4hv.png)
