man face when

In case you’re serious, Lemmy is the hot, exciting, punk, rebel version of reddit and Linux is the hot, exciting, punk, rebel version of using your computer. The motivation for using either are quite similar.

Anything.

Could be an unfortunate freak accident that disables the electricity grid.

Could be that all trees around your home all fall down and block the roads so you can’t get to the store.

Could be that you break your leg and can’t go to the store to get food or water for 10 days.

Could be flooding, could be drought, could be wildfires, could be a reversal of earths magnetic field or a solar storm that destroys all electronics and throws us back to the stone age.

3-10 days is the realm of “something could happen that meaningfully disrupts the general supply chain”. and also still reasonable to expect of people. Like, they’re not going to ask you to stock up 6 months worth of water and food in a 50m² apartment. That’s not going to happen. Too expensive, don’t have the room. And they’re also not going to ask you to stock one (1) cookie for an emergency in case you get hungry tomorrow afternoon.

And also, if the problem is so huge that the government, military and NGO people can’t fix it in 10 days, that’s a pretty damn big problem and it could be that stocking up from 1 month doesn’t help much more than 10 days, because they can only solve it in 5 years.

3-10 days also buys time to figure out evacuation without having to think about literally the next meal.

So. There are two issues here.

One is finding topics to talk about. This is what small talk is for. “The weather” is a dumb topic, but it leads to all sorts of things. “Nice weather, did you do anything cool outside on the weekend?” “Bad weather, how did you cope?”

Socializing is like throwing balls back and forth as a game. You try to do something with the “ball” they throw at you and throw a question or a comment or a little story back at them. But also, if you initiate and they don’t want to play the socializing game (because they’re tired or busy or something), that’s it, no socializing.

The voice and speaking thing is something else. Not sure how to advise on that. I don’t understand having “no confidence in your voice”. Do you mean you’re too quiet? Sounds like more of a therapy thing. Maybe a choir or theater hobby group could help you? It’s probably just practice, so you should seek a place where you get that practice and train your voice?