My engineery brain solved it for me by figuring out that inviting people to group events, preferably ones that represent mutual interests, is a good foot in the door.
Once your confidence increases a bit you can pursue deeper relationships with some of these people, as well as further amplify your results by actually organizing something you're interested in that has reach outside of you -- think of a meetup group or business/technical community.
Eventually you have hundreds of acquaintances, many will cheerfully meet you for the occasional coffee or beer, and you can start being selective about who you spend time with based on deeper shared connections. (Prior to that you'll probably have to put up with some colorful characters and learn to limit the damage they do to you.)
Not claiming to have made any of this up or that it is easy, it's hard, it takes years, it's been talked about it before. But I think I summarized it pretty well there (there are many more nuances to learn of course).
> When I was young, and my beard was not this gray, and someone at the orchestra was angry with me—could be personal, professional—I would ask myself "what's wrong with me, how do I fix myself?" But I have noticed that now that I am older, and my beard is very gray, when someone is angry with me, I wonder, "what's wrong with him?"—and I don't try to fix anyone.
(My sister in law is desperate that I'll never find a girlfriend, though ...)
I recently saw one about not wearing shorts after you're 20 years old... I just had to roll my eyes. Enjoy wearing pants all the time in the summer.
People online will make up rules like "men who wear this are children!" which are never based in reality. And to keep on topic, I'm sure they too stop caring by age 40 :-)
In my org, my reasonning for the many people wearing suits (usually not devs and management higher ups) is that their home has air conditionning, they come to work in their car with air conditionning and the building where we work has air conditionning.
That's how I think they survive. At least, that's what I hope for them.
(I assumed you were a longstanding reader referencing this, but with an account ~3 months old, maybe not...) - http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
NE is a different climate; that has its perks too: beautiful fall colors and wonderful snow storms (the milder ones I find fun to watch), and relatively speaking, no humidity.
As a Texan friend of mine once (jokingly) said "Weather is what you experience in a parking lot." (because everywhere else, on a day to day basis in a city — buildings/cars — is air conditioned; only that during that short trip from building to car do you endure the great outdoors) The few New Englander's I've tried this on didn't get it, whereas southerners seem to; YMMV, of course, there's no science here.
The other thing I've never seen, outside of the south, is the horizon turning green during a bad storm (caused by light refracting through hail). Also, I highly recommend the sight of a rainstorm moving across and towards you on the plains, and the sweet scented down-drafts that precede rain. And if you're sick of weather, Silicon Valley has none. (Unless you like fog, then see SF.)
I've been to the South too; we get like a week of weather like that most summers. Maybe you could quibble about the differences but it gets hot enough that I think the whole question about whether to wear shorts is equally valid.
As far as the parking lot thing... I mean, do you think we all spend a lot of time outside in the winter?
God, who are you?
Recently my girlfriend told me to pack some shorts for a trip to the Caribbean coast of a Latin American country and I bet her that there was no way the locals were going to be wearing shorts. I won.
Yah, i'm in my 40's.
Given that my 77 year old dad says the same, I may have hit the genetic lottery. I suspect he will just unexpectedly die one day while mowing the lawn, never having known what it is like to feel old.
Let 'em grow, man. Good enough for George Clooney, good enough for me.
(I started getting gray hairs at ~25)
1) I can't just eat shit and not get fat anymore. I made that mistake around 35, and it took a lot of hard work to reverse it.
2) Thining hair. Did you know that some people say that a "cure" for baldness might be worth more commercially than a cure for cancer? I don't feel that strongly about it, but it is kinda annoying.
Not much to complain about really.
So now I eat yoghurts instead of bagels, and stare miserably at my sugarless fat free white tea. For all the good it does...
But basically I had to eat less. Soup was my trick - warm chicken noodle soup was on 30 kcal, but the liquid filled up my stomach.
not being too hard on yourself is the key to winning this :).
About 2, I started balding in my teens and my hairline more or less stabilized in 30's. Full head of hair was never part of identity, 'me according me' has been bald for a while. 20's sucked being bald but became irrelevant in 30's :D.
[0] http://scontent.cdninstagram.com/t51.2885-15/e35/13269334_17...
Also talk to people. Talk to them all the time. Standing in line at the store. Passing by on the street. Just make an observation about something to start the conversation. Compliment someone. Over time you'll get two things from this. First, you'll realize that everyone is just a person like you (like, the subconscious part of your brain will get the message). Second, you'll get a bunch of little rejections (weird looks, things like that) over time in a scenario where you basically have no skin in the game. You'll no longer care about rejection and you'll realize that people rejecting you almost never has to do with you - it has to do with them.
I'm 33, haven't cared in a long time. Just do stupid shit and own it, with time, it is still stupid shit, but you won't feel embarrassed by it (I live in a posh area, my kid goes to a posh school, I wear 15 year old tshirts (that lost all their color due to washing), no shoes/socks, use shorts 90+% of the time)
edit: And interestingly enough, even though I'm married and with little interest in that, the amount of female attention I get over the ones that care is amazing (and no, I'm not good looking, 5'6, bald earlier in life, long beard and a few scars in my face)
For me it's in some ways similar to the part in the debugging or performance tuning cycle where you're just watching things happen, letting logs and metrics scroll by on your screen. Externally, you look like you're not really doing anything. But what you're doing is noticing relationships, reoccurances, rhythms. At some point you say, "That's odd. When X happens, Y follows. I wonder why that is?" And that's where the magic begins.
How's the saying go?
"In your twenties you worry what people think of you, in your thirties you stop caring, in your forties you realize no one spends any time thinking about you anyway."