It's important to straighten the rest of your life out first before dating. Exercising everyday will help you feel calmer, more confident, and have more energy.

It's important to straighten the rest of your life out first before dating. Exercising everyday will help you feel calmer, more confident, and have more energy. Once you exercise for about a month (5+ days per week), you will start feeling stable again and even extroverted. At that point, find a core group of really good friends (probably at work but online works too -- Discord is great). If all else fails, I can tell you that leaving the Bay Area really helped me re-gain my perspective. I recommend Singapore. Just transfer offices, and don't look back. People here know how to work but not how to live. They also view every social interaction as one that might opportunistically build their own network, almost pathologically transactional in essence. Meanwhile, the resource contention here has everyone stressed out about money (even if they don't outwardly act like it), and long-standing communities don't exist because everyone here has been transplanted elsewhere, so nobody has any firm standing with where they live, nobody has each other's back. I disagree that gaming is necessarily a form of escapism per se unless it is one of the sole uses of your time. If you use gaming as a social outlet, it is actually great (play games with your IRL friends online, get some friends together, organize/participate in gaming events in real life, etc.).