21 Ways To Avoid People (Or Make Them Avoid You)

1. Leave early. Wake up early, workout early. Catch the earlier bus and discover the love of selecting your own row. Learn to enjoy sunrises.

2. Wear headphones. Listen to NPR or podcasts to fill your head with the secure illusion of being social.

3. Pursue a career working from home. Enjoy the majesty of clicking “Send” and merely waiting.

4. Ignore social media. Facebook is a gateway drug to actually hanging out.

5. Read. No one likes a reader.

6. Become obsessive about topics that do not relate with real life. Your knowledge on a topic is often inversely related to how much people want to hear you talk about it.

7. Be an egotistical asshole. Act like a character in an Aaron Sorkin movie and go through your day with the utmost approval of your own actions.

8. Have a terrible memory. When acquaintances approach you in the “Baking Needs” aisle because there’s so much to talk about since they’ve seen you and didn’t get the hint of never receiving a phone call from you, directly ask who they are. Don’t smile and say the extended “HiiiiiiIIIIiiiii” to give yourself time to remember. Look them right in the eye and say, without apology, “Who are you?”

9. Shop online. Forgo the need to even be in that aisle. Amazon has muffin tins, I promise.

10. Take walks in your neighborhood. It’s astonishing how few people are just walking around anymore.

11. Don’t smoke. Smokers have a camaraderie with their addiction that could necessitate conversation.

12. Be unlikeably neurotic. Be paranoid and second-guess everything and don’t make jokes about it. Take your neuroses very seriously.

13. Join Reddit.

14. Don’t watch reality TV. Reality TV is to adults what imaginary friends are to children: a practice dummy for being social.

15. Move away from your family. Being annoyed by your family is less a personal problem than a geographical one.

16. Stop caring about how you dress. I do not mean dressing like you don’t care; literally stop caring. Wear Crocs because they’re comfortable and not because they’re ironic.

17. If you’re going to college, speak up a lot in class. This works counter-intuitively; the last thing people in a college class want to do is be associated with someone who wants to learn.

18. Don’t own a car. You’d think it would give you more independence, but between giving people rides and being expected to show up places, a car can officially entrap you in the social world.

19. Drink tea. People don’t like tea drinkers. I don’t know why.

20. Pick up an odd hobby, like birding or editing Wikipedia.

21. Resent any and all attempts by people to be nice to you. Find an inherent disgust in taking a compliment. Simply level your self-esteem like a ravaging army, leaving you scampered and bleeding for attention as you howl at the blank walls and the filled pages that tell you exactly how unlikeable you are.. Dig out those spiral-bound notebooks from high school and remember what dejection felt like when it wasn’t self-imposed. Relax. Breathe. Distract yourself until you need to be somewhere. Repeat.