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Being friendly, polite, and positive are easy. If you're kind and not demanding, people won't mind you and will probably find you fairly likeable.

But that's not enough for people to actually want to spend time with you; you have to bring more to the table, e.g. insightful cultural commentary, to make people laugh, or some sort of common ground. Navigating conversations to find common ground is much easier said than done. Doubly so for telling engaging and relatable stories to convey a sense of shared experience.

So I don't mean a preference for professional competence, but a preference for "social competence", acknowledging of course that it's also highly dependent on the culture.

To get more personal, I've been called "boring", "transparent", "predictable", "two dimensional". I think I'm probably more engaging than a script programmed to regurgitate platitudes, but some of my critics have suggested not by much!

The least likely of places is in my apartment during a pandemic, but I'll move to a larger city after it ends where there will be more opportunities in general, and with others with similar interests in particular.

I'm in my late twenties. I've never had many friends, but I can count the number of times I've done something social in the past year on one hand. I spent my birthday and all the holidays by myself, and will be spending the upcoming ones along as well.

Most of my human "contact" comes in the form of things like GitHub/slack/etc, or discussion forums related to programming.

I've had extremely few close friends in my life, and always been single. I've tried to date, but making connections with other humans is oh so incredibly difficult. I think I'm rather likeable, I get along fairly well with most people I meet. I'm friendly, agreeable, and try my best to positive. But that's analogous to me being a good sport: that's great and all, but when it comes time to choose who bats on your team, you want someone good at sports. You want friends who are fun, make you laugh, who are good matches. You get good at sports with a lot of practice. You get good at being a companion, someone other's enjoy being around by...

I had a very close friend once, about 6 years ago. It's embarrassing just how motivating desires to return to those feelings of acceptance and support are. I'm very intrinsically motivated, but 5 year plans of spartan existence to try and make something of my interests, to become someone respectable, someone another would want to forgive for their flaws and awful dorkishness, is something that keeps me going. I know in reality that this would only make me less interesting, more distant. But if I am to make something of my life before I die and am forgotten, I need dedication.