"According to Reddit” - so many lives have been ruined listening to what gremlins on social media have to say.
It’s simple. If you want, approach. It’s not dangerous, you won’t get cancer. If they don’t want to talk, you will stop talking with them and talk with someone else.
"I am deeply afraid of irritating someone or being in awkward situations." - anyone who thinks like this is suffering from abused dog syndrome and unironically has lost at life.
Also, why is he talking about “friends” and “strangers”? We all know he means “women". And there is LITERALLY no problem politely engaging conversation with a strange woman at the gym even if she has earpods on. It’s not a crime, just be normal. You are forgetting that other people are shy too and often want someone to take initiative since in 2026 nobody does.
My life quality increased immensely when I realized most of Reddit is bots and the parts written by real humans are usually written by the type of person that you really shouldn’t take any advice from
What kind of reddit do you browse? The /r/funny one or the /r/composting one?
Not even a big "browser". This realization hit me after missing some uni events after reading negative comments on town subreddit, then discovering that I actually know one of the commenters in real life and he is just a plain idiot and it was an obvious mistake to not go. When there is no objective criteria, relying on personal judgement or plain chance is just a better way to go instead of overthinking based on stranger advice.
Meeting a few redditors in real life shows you who you're interacting with. It's a very mixed bag.
> Also, why is he talking about “friends” and “strangers”? We all know he means “women".
Does he? It seems like he socialised mainly with men in the documented interactions. Perhaps he really was just lonely in the general sense.
You can find contrary advice for any given topic, all upvoted highly, if you look for it.