Not necessarily direct social skill things, but stuff that could put you in slightly more comfortable circumstances to work on it:

-Karaoke. If you like singing, this is a no brainer. You then have easy introductory topics (song choices, music, telling people they did a good job, etc.). Where I am the demographics are pretty wide, it may skew older where you are.

-If you have interest in doing so, see if you can join a band, maybe with an eye to doing some low-tier gigs (or high-tier, that’d be up to you and your bandmates).

-It’s hard mode, but like singing and playing music in public? Get a busking permit! Interact with the strangers passing by, etc. Best case scenario, you make some pocket change. Worst case scenario, you do something you like that puts you in front of people in a non-bar setting.

Working in something you’re passionate about and at least sort of good at can put you a little more at ease, sometimes.

Rob a bank, stowaway on a container ship, free climb a mountain or skyscraper, take out a bunch of loans and spend it on whatever, scam a bunch of dangerous people, the sky’s the limit. I’d actually say think bigger.

I’m not going to pretend it’s a good answer because it cuts in many directions, but the following has been my thinking on this:

Because if you have nothing to live for, you have nothing holding you back from taking massive risks. Take the massive risk over your own life. Suicide can come later, once you’ve done something risky and cool first that requires a meatsuit. As far as we know you only get one of those, and there’s far more than you might think that only requires one of 'em and infinite risk tolerance.

Not comfortable with the risk? Why, if you have nothing to live for? Tease that out and you can work in the other direction.

So real talk, what exactly is the angle here? Are these rogue instances in the links? Truly just trying to bait in the lonely and gullible to eventually solicit payment down the line?

It just seems … weird for a romance bait scam. Average looking woman (though could be to lower guards), links to Fediverse service profiles rather than botted DM exchanges, etc.

I could just be being naive, but idk. There’s a very particular brand of fishy to this, beyond the obvious. The other probable scammer I dealt with at least came with a sob story that I could see being more effective (end of his rope humanitarian worker in an African country, children dying due to lack of $ for the program).

Imagine you work at a company that sells cookies. The company signs a contract offering a customer a set variety of cookies at various prices, with a clause stating that if the customer wants another type of cookie the company makes later on, it will be priced and added to their list. This should be in the form of regular contract amendments/addendums, but it isn’t.

Several years go by, and in the course of that several different varieties of cookies have been added by the customer. The price given to them at the time may not account for the cost of materials and labor today, or how many of those cookies not mentioned in the contract are being ordered v. how many were expected, the fact that you outsourced some of those cookies, or brought some of those cookies in-house, etc. The cookie executive asks you “When did we offer customer x cookie y at price point z?”

Now, the company has a perfectly good database of cookies and price points for customers, but it’s very old tech and requires certain access privileges, which are very hard to give people outside of the accounting department. Accounting is never able to help with this, and the cookie executives try poorly and fail to get people like you access. But you do have years and years of cookie addition request forms, which are kept in chronological order by customer and contain a list of all types of cookies requested up to that point in time.This is where binary search helps - you can pretty quickly find the one where the cookie y was added even though there are hundreds of these forms.

It’s not a situation that should exist - we have a god damn cookie database where you can just pop in customer x and cookie y to get price z, with an effective date - but in my crazy cookie factory it helps a ton.

There’s other examples but they’re all pretty much variants of this thinly veiled analogy.

Honestly, this was the comment that exposed me (regular office rube) to binary search as a concept and it is so. fucking. helpful.