Were you a NEET throughout your 20s? What was that like? I was thinking you didn't have a computer, but I guess that would have been during the 90s. Did you LDAR on the 90s web with a dialup connection? 2000s web was way better than the 2010s IMO and I fit in more and felt a part of some communities, I'm sure it was even better in the 90s.
I was semi-NEET in my 20's. I didn't follow the traditional path of college and career that my peers did. Instead, I went to a (non-accredited) local art academy on and off for a few years to master drawing and painting in the classical realist style.
I held many low-paying, part-time menial jobs to barely sustain myself throughout my 20's. I rarely made over minimum wage. I also lived in my parents' run down basement (literally!) rent-free. I was even on welfare for a time. I did all this with the hope of hitting it big as an artist one day. But, I was too aspie and anxiety-ridden to approach galleries and advance my career as a painter. That required schmoozing and social skills, which I definitely didn't have. Shit, I couldn't even hold down a decent-paying normie job, let alone become a charismatic socialite.
So, the years went by and I slowly began to rot. Most of the guys in my generation had had multiple girlfriends and gotten married by the time I finished art school in 1995, yet I was still a kissless virgin living like a 13 year-old.
It wasn't until I was 31 (2001) that I went online for the first time at an internet cafe`. It was like discovering a new world, a world where I wasn't the only incel outcast. There were literally
millions of guys like me! I would have never known this throughout the 80's and 90's, because every guy back then was either with a girl he was fucking, or was
bragging about a girl he was fucking. I felt like a lonely outlier that was born with different chromosomes than everyone else. It really felt like living in the Dark Ages.
