Do I Have To Choose Between Success and Having A Social Life?

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

Dear Dr. NerdLove,

I’m a 17-year-old male who is a freshman at a pretty high-ranking university, enrolled in EE-CS. Throughout high school, I took every AP class I could, grinded constantly, and somehow made it here. I thought I’d feel accomplished, but honestly, I just feel exhausted and more lost than ever.

My entire life revolves around academics and “career prep.” Beyond my regular coursework, I’m constantly doing side projects, grinding LeetCode problems for hours, contributing to open-source repos, anything that might look good on a resume. I tell myself it’s all for landing that dream job at Meta, Netflix, or some other big tech company.

But I’m starting to realise what I’ve given up. I have basically zero social life – I’ve made maybe one or two acquaintances since starting college, but no real friends. My social skills feel completely underdeveloped because I spent all of high school with my head buried in textbooks instead of learning how to actually connect with people. I’m lonely as hell.

My sleep schedule is a disaster. I’m lucky if I get 5-6 hours a night because I’m always working on something. I haven’t exercised regularly in years. I eat like crap because I’m always rushing between assignments and projects. I can’t remember the last time I did something purely for fun.

The worst part? With everything happening with automation and all the layoffs in tech, those dream jobs I’ve been sacrificing everything for feel more and more out of reach. The market is brutal right now, and even people with way more experience than me are struggling to find work.

I’m starting to wonder if I’m completely delusional. Is it actually worth destroying my mental health, my social development, my physical wellbeing – basically my entire teenage years and early twenties – chasing after something that might not even happen?

What if I graduate with great grades and a strong resume but by that time my job has been automated or even if I do manage to land a job and I’m a socially awkward mess who doesn’t know how to maintain relationships or take care of myself?

My social skills have atrophied to such a dangerous degree that I don’t know if I can still connect with people as people and not as though they’re a LinkedIn connection.

I feel like I’m trapped in this cycle where I can’t stop because I’ve already invested so much, but continuing feels like it’s slowly killing me.

I am reaching out because I am genuinely at a loss for what to do. I feel hopeless, lonely and I genuinely cannot continue doing this.

Rise And Grind

RaG, before I answer your question, have you ever seen the movie Whiplash, with Miles Teller and JK Simmons? This is the story of a man who has decided he needs to be the best jazz drummer ever, his relationship with an incredibly demanding teacher who promises to cultivate the talented into being the best, and what it takes to be the best.

Do yourself a favor and watch it and then ask yourself: does any of that seem worth it to you?

Anyway, that digression aside, just between you and me: are you asking me for advice, or are you asking me for permission? Because it sounds to me like you’ve actually made up your mind and you’re hoping someone will tell you that it’s ok to do the thing you want to do.

Well here you go: you have my permission to dial everything the hell back and discover the magic of work/life balance. And honestly, I think you’re making the right decision here; while college is about learning and study, it’s also about learning who you are, exploring different sides of yourself, gathering experiences and, ideally, making friends and exposing yourself to lifestyles and perspectives that are different from yours.

Now I will be the first to admit that I am not a grindset guy. By the second semester of my sophomore year, I figured out how to ensure that I took enough courses to be considered a full-time student, while also ensuring that I was done with classes by 1:30 PM on Thursday. This required some finagling, including taking some summer classes to make sure I hit all my requirements… but that also meant that I had the opportunities for adventures with my friends that summer. And while there’re a couple of things that I wish I’d done differently in college – most of them revolving around an incredibly toxic relationship and not passing on a study abroad opportunity – I think my life has been much richer for that.

(Admittedly, I was also an art and then an English major, so it’s not like my requirements were that steep. But still, my point remains.)

However, let’s put the whole “college is a time for adventure” aside and instead focus on something a little more concrete and immediate. Right now, you’re falling into a pattern that a lot of influencers, business bros, startup swamis and grindset gurus say you should be in: work as hard as humanly possible when you’re young and vital! Your body can take it! You will never have the energy and resilience that you do now, so you can recover from all of this much more easily and then when you’re rich in your 30s, you can dial it all back and enjoy yourself!

Which is a lovely idea… except for all the damage it does. Yeah, you’re young, with a teenager’s metabolism… but the effects of what you’re doing doesn’t get erased the next day like you just took a long rest in Dungeons and Dragons. It’s cumulative; your youthful vitality isn’t undoing all the damage overnight, it’s just kicking everything down the road. The bill will still come due, and all the stress, bad diet, no exercise and complete absence of a support network will all pile up like compound interest. And that’s not counting the mental and emotional strain, the lack of social experience or even life experience.

While I was never a grindset kind of guy, I’ve worked with folks who were. I’ve had jobs where my coworkers were former gaming devs, and I saw first-hand exactly what crunch had done to them. The insane hours they were volun-told for, inhuman pace of work and all the sacrifices they were expected to make destroyed their health, their happiness and, in a couple cases, their families. They were fed into a meat grinder by companies in order to make games that, in several cases, didn’t even ship.

And these were industry veterans. You are doing this to get yourself into an industry that doesn’t value you or even regard you as a person; you are, at best, a cog in a machine and just as replaceable. Moreso, considering the way that companies are rushing to replace employees with plagiarism machines that can’t even do the job correctly in the first place.

Frankly, I think it’s a mistake to invest so much of yourself to enter an industry that will never invest an equal amount back into you and then blame you when you collapse under all the damage you’ve taken along the way.

And to add insult to injury: this doesn’t even make you happy. It just encourages a mindset that thinks that all the things that make life worth living are less important than being an anonymous worker in a hive, whose greatest ambition is to eventually create something that will be taken over by a different hive.

If you want my opinion, I think you should dial everything way the hell back and take this as an opportunity to explore life by actually having a life. If you go through my archives, you’ll see so many letters from people who wish they’d done college differently – taken the opportunity to try new things, meet people and have experiences. You’re at the start of your college career; now is the perfect opportunity to pivot your attention and change how you’re doing things.

But maybe you need a little extra push, so let’s talk practical benefits from not breaking yourself to pieces for a future that may never exist by the time you get there: taking time to establish healthy eating and exercise habits means that you’ll have a healthier and more fit body, which will allow you to do more and recover faster. Focusing on meeting people, making friends, even getting out and talking to some girls will build your social skills – skills which will make things like networking, finding mentors and navigating company politics far easier and more intuitive for you. Having a broader base of skills may mean that you’re not the bestest coder in a particular field, but it does mean that you’ll not only be able to fill more roles, but be the person who can take a wider view and see beyond the narrow confines of your particular silo. Projects need managers, after all, and managers work best when it’s someone who has a broader understanding of what’s needed and can actually interface with people as people.

You may even realize that the career path you thought you wanted was a mistake and blaze a completely new and different trail – one that could bring you a lot more than being another Meta burnout would.

On the more selfish side: you’ll have more fun. You’ll make more friends. You’ll have incredible memories of the adventures you went on, instead of hoping that someday you’ll be able to have time, if your body holds up and your mind isn’t broken and you’re not in a permanent state of sleep debt.

I know you’re worried about how much you’ve already invested. This is what’s known as the “sunk-cost fallacy”, where you’re so focused on not losing what you’ve already invested, that you continue to throw more time, energy and money into the hole in the hopes that maybe you could at least break even. But all this means is that you’re sacrificing more money, more of your time, more of your health, than you would if you cut your losses now and tried something different.

And here’s the good news: all the worries you have that it’s too late and you’ve doomed yourself to permanently stunted social skills and poor mental health are just worries. Remember what I said about being young and vital? Well, that means that you’re in the perfect position to do things differently.

The changes you want to make and the ways you want to grow and develop are going to feel so much easier now. College is an environment that’s almost designed for meeting people and growing as a person. You are surrounded by people from all walks of life, from different cultures and social classes, but you’re all around the same age and in the same place in life. This is the time when making friends is like playing on easy mode. It’s an environment where almost everything is designed in such a way to give you as many opportunities you could want… if you choose to take advantage of them.

You will never be in a place and time when it will be easier to socialize and make friends, to branch out and explore these other sides of yourself and cultivate these skills.

So give yourself a gift, RnG. Dial back your schedule to something human. Treat your health, both mental and physical, like it’s a priority. Take a random class just because it seems interesting. Go out of your way to find an outlet for your creativity. Talk to some girls, make friends, take some poorly-thought out road trips, make memories. Find out who you are, who you could be and who you want to be and see how these line up.

Your future self will thank you.

You’ll be ok. I promise.

Good luck.

---

Dr. NerdLove,

This is my first time writing here. I found you thanks to Twitter.

My question is: what do you do when your beliefs come into conflict?

You see, I’m just a regular guy who loves computer science and programming. At work, I gave a small presentation about the cyclomatic complexity of a process and how reducing it would save costs across different areas. I’m very passionate about my work, so during that presentation it didn’t feel like “me” — it was like I became another person, moving with an incredible amount of confidence.

After the meeting, a woman from HR — who oversees one of the programs I had suggested optimizing (a payroll system) — came up to me and asked if I wanted to grab a coffee and talk. My immediate response was simply, “Talk about what?” She then said, “It’s okay if you don’t want to.”

It wasn’t until later that I realized what had actually happened. And aside from being a little slow on the uptake, my beliefs came into conflict. I’m not Henry Cavill, nor am I someone conventionally attractive that things like this would just happen to. This left me in a state of dissonance that still makes me feel uneasy.

It’s A Trap?

If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re asking what do you do when your self-limiting beliefs – specifically, that you’re not someone that women approach and ask to get coffee – conflict with, say, a woman approaching you and asking you to get coffee, correct?

Well, it’s a little like what you do if someone asks if you’re a god: YOU. SAY! YES!!

Let me tell you precisely what happened here: you were in the zone. You let this side of yourself – the side that’s excited to talk about this seemingly boring and technical process – shine through. Your passion was given free reign and over the course of this presentation, you encouraged people to see this topic the way you do. That enthusiasm and that passion carried people along and for a moment, they understood. They may not know the technical ins and outs of it the way you do but goddamn, they could see how this could be incredibly useful and also interesting.

So, small wonder that someone who would benefit from your suggestions wanted to talk to you afterwards. Maybe she just wanted to talk about implementing the topic, maybe she would’ve been open to talking about more than just reducing cyclomatic complexity… but you won’t know if you don’t say “Sure, how about we meet up at the Lucky Bean at 5?”

If you ever want to see what this looks like from the outside, check out Tom Cruise talking about traffic patterns in Mission Impossible 3; it’s a topic that isn’t interesting in and of itself but the way that Cruise lets his enthusiasm fill him is what locks people in.

(And, incidentally, that focused enthusiasm and attention is also part of his charm as a person; making someone feel like the most interesting man or woman in the room is a quick and easy way to get people to like you.)

Here’s the thing: there’s a reason why I call these self-limiting beliefs. They’re just that: artificial limits you’ve put on yourself that hinder you. They’re not real. They’re true, only to the extent that you make them true; you filter everything you experience through those beliefs and miss out on opportunities like the one you just had. Why? Because you don’t believe they could actually be happening. You dismiss it as a misunderstanding or the assumption that it’s a trick or that you’re missing something. And that’s if you see them at all in the first place.

Nobody’s saying that being conventionally attractive doesn’t have its benefits; it does. But it’s a bonus to your charisma roll, not a guaranteed success, nor is it the only way you get an advantage on your roll… as you’ve seen. Confidence, passion and just being interesting gets you further than looks, and people who are good looking can still biff it hard. Even if you’re rolling with advantage, you can still have a critical fail, just as you can still roll double nat-20s when you’re rolling with disadvantage.

But it’s hard to see that when you’re convinced that you’re permanently rolling at disadvantage… especially when you’re not.

You believe these things because other shitty people from Trust Me Bro University – and don’t think I don’t know where the Henry Cavill thing comes from – told you that guys like you don’t have these experiences. That only certain people do, guys who are nothing like you. The best of the best, the top of the top, the crème de la crème do; everyone else is shit out of luck. And because you believe it, you make it true, by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and watching all of life through the piss-colored filters of those limiting beliefs.

But as it turns out: life doesn’t work the way that slap-dick grievance peddlers tell you that it does. They need you to believe it does because it means you’ll never leave the bucket with the rest of the crabs, and you’ll be ready to buy their next round of snake-oil that won’t work and leave you even more frustrated and lonely and resentful… and you’ll keep listening to them.

Just as importantly though, giving up those beliefs costs you nothing but gain you everything.

I mean, if we take your experience as an example, in the worst-case scenario, you have coffee and some conversation and maybe you’re a little embarrassed if it turns out that it’s just a work thing instead of a date. That’s still pretty good, especially since you can laugh about the misunderstanding (if there is one) and move on. Because, sure, she wasn’t being flirty… but you’ve just displayed not just confidence but emotional maturity and a willingness to laugh off a mistake instead of losing your shit. That’s a quality that not only would your new friend in HR notice, but other people would notice as well.

You just had a fundamental belief of yours challenged; it’s time to accept that maybe this is a place where you’re wrong. It costs you nothing to assume that you are and to behave as though you are someone that these things happen to. Hell, if you adopt that more positive, more empowering belief, you’ll actually see more occasions like this… because you’ll actually be looking for them. After all, if confirmation bias means that you’re going to see evidence for what you believe, you may as well believe in something that helps you.

You’ve just had a taste of what’s possible for you, when you let this side of you shine through. If you can carry that energy with you into your other interactions… well, you’re going to discover that a lot of folks are going to sit up and notice when you walk by.

Good luck.