[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It has become easier to get by reasonably happily without being a social person at all.

[/ QUOTE ]
Do you see this as a strictly bad thing, or are there some positives?

(I'm sorry for the short un-Lounge-like responses, but I'm trying to extract untainted information. I am one of these lazy anti-social kids, you see, and am trying to get across some discussion without injecting my own biases.)

[/ QUOTE ]

Seems like it could be both good and bad, but that in most situations it would be hard to tell if you were missing out on much until it was too late. At which point, you would have missed out on so many important aspects of growing up and gaining social skills, not to mention maybe having a lot of fun and becoming so much broader of a person. For me, in some places where I was growing up, there was so much racial tension that going outdoors and meeting people was pointless, as none of them wanted to talk to you anyway. Though they might want to kick your ass on sight. But that was a very odd situation that most people don't face. For the average person, I think getting out and meeting people makes much more sense and is a lot healthier.

That's another thing too -- there's physical as well as mental health. Being indoors all the time is the easiest road to being unhealthy. And without people around to be judgmental, or to want to get interested in you sexually, there's less drive to make yourself worthy of being judged positively.

If we were still a book culture, a kid growing up in the perfect coccoon would be far healthier. But since you can spend your whole day watching cable t.v. and playing video games now, and there's little social disapproval for doing so, I still think it's on the whole pretty bad for a kid and redounds to the discredit of the parents.