Tentickles said:
So, I detest being around people for more than an hour at a time. This has led me to never holding a stable 'normal' job.
I used to have similar sentiments. Not so much that I hated people, but I thought I really shouldn't need other people, that I was hot shit and could go as far as I wanted in life on my own. In the interest of helping you avoid wasting your young adulthood like I did, I am going to offer the following advice:
Your inability to hold a stable job is society's way of telling you "Life: you're doing it wrong." Unfortunately, rather than taking the hint, you've deluded yourself into thinking that it's society that's at fault and not you. This is a self-deception that you are going to have to break yourself of if you have any intention of enjoying your life or having a long enough life to have time to enjoy it.
Humans are social creatures. We are programmed to work together. In fact, it's a very well documented fact that a complete lack of social contact
will lead to insanity after a long enough time (and I can tell you from first-hand experience that "a long enough time" is surprisingly short, as in a matter of months or even weeks depending on how thorough your isolation is). This is why solitary confinement in prison is a punishment (ever wonder why, in a place where gang-rape, shankings, and coerced gang membership is so prevalent, no one actually
wants to be in solitary, where none of that shit is a problem?). There's also evidence that isolation will shorten your life by deteriorating your health and weakening your immune system.
Your problem is not that you hate people. Your problem is that you haven't learned how to work with people, and you don't feel like putting in the effort to catch up. Your life will be dark and lonely and miserable and short for as long as you continue to convince yourself that you don't need or shouldn't need to work with others.
In a well-designed role-playing game, assuming that the rules are being followed, it's impossible to have your character be good at everything. You can be mediocre at lots of things, good at a handful of things, or really good at one specific thing. This mechanic exists because that's what life is like; no person, whether they be Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Teddy Roosevelt, or whoever, is capable of great success on their own. No matter how proficient they seem to be, they are deficient in some other area. The successful are successful because they focus on what they are good at, and network with other people who can handle the things they are not good at.
Penny Arcade, for example, originally consisted of two guys that were great at making comics, but were, by their own admission, disastrously incompetent at running a business. They struggled and narrowly avoided going down completely until a man with good business sense, but who probably wouldn't be as great at making a comic, joined them. With the addition of a few other people to cover aspects of the company that those three couldn't handle, the comic has become a successful company that took Mike and Jerry from living on Ramen to buying cars with cash, runs a multimillion dollar charity, hosts one of the biggest gaming conventions in the world twice a year, and has an internet reality show every year.
None of the people at PA could have accomplished that themselves, and it's entirely possible that had any one of those people decided to isolate themselves as much as possible, like you intend to, no one outside their home towns would have ever heard of them, and they'd have died early after meaningless, depressing lives. The ability to form mutually beneficial relationships with others is, by far, a greater predictor of success than any other skill. It also makes life much more fun, all by itself, independent of whatever other benefits result.
Even geniuses need the help of others. Bill Gates didn't build Microsoft alone. Isaac Newton didn't reinvent science alone, Mark Zuckerberg didn't make Facebook a worldwide phenomenon alone, and on and on.
You are going to need people. If you act like you don't, your own mind and body will take you out of the equation, and society is built in such a way that it will passively punish you for it until you're gone. If you don't think you are equipped to deal with this fact, then you need to learn how to deal with it, and you need to do so quickly. The alternative is very unpleasant.
