25 Ways To Pretend You Have A Social Life

1. Every time you leave the house (and even if you stay in the house, yet do something interesting, such as cook food or light a candle) take a picture of it and post it online. Bonus points if it is at an odd angle, one obscure enough to seem like there might be other people just out of frame (there aren’t).

2. Keep a blog, and tell people casually, “Yeah, I have a blog.”

3. Answer “maybe” to various social events, even though you’re totally going to show up. Keep them on their toes.

4. Talk about when “we” were in bed, conveniently leaving out the part where “we” is comprised of you, your laptop, and possibly a slice of pizza.

5. Make sure that there are at least two dirty wine glasses in the sink for when people come over and there are empty bottles of wine next to your trash can.

6. Have a calendar displayed with things marked on it, such as “dinner” and “meeting.”

7. Make a big fuss about deleting people on Facebook when you do it — feel free to go so far as to post a status update essentially congratulating the people who can still see you on their news feed.

8. When your roommates hear you cackling like a hyena alone in your room, instead of telling them that it was just something funny you saw on the internet (or something funny you remembered you saw on the internet), tell them you were on the phone/Skype with one of your many ~real life friends~.

9. Lie blatantly on your OKCupid profile.

10. “Check in” places online when you go there, even if it’s just to sit by yourself in the coffee shop and dick around on Tumblr.

11. Talk about the party you went to last weekend, even though you literally just sat in the corner the entire time and played with/talked to the house pet.

12. Make sure to order two forks/chopsticks with your delivery/takeout dinner for one, so as to prevent the restaurant from calling a suicide prevention hotline on your behalf.

13. Don’t tell people that, on many Saturday nights, you just enjoy getting high and listening to Lykke Li by yourself.

14. Talk about all of the invites you have for this weekend, no matter how many of them are just mass-spammed by club promoters on Facebook.

15. Avoid talking about how many aspects of your richly emotional inner-life are fulfilled by your cat.

16. Leave parties/bars early, as though you had “better places to be,” even though those “places” mostly consist of your bed.

17. Never reveal how often you use Netflix.

18. Don’t immediately return text messages, thus giving the impression that you’re the aloof, in-demand kind of person who might not notice that they got a text for an extended period of time.

19. Instagram-filter everything. Even a solo glass of wine at home looks classy in sepia.

20. Pretend to understand people when they talk about wanting things like a large group of friends, or even party acquaintances with whom to get a lighthearted brunch.

21. Never mention how many of your closest friends you’ve actually never met IRL.

22. Minimize the amount of times you openly reference Tumblr in day-to-day conversation, or reveal how much of your humor stems from one website.

23. Get a Twitter account, on which you discuss various social phenomena and activities that you may or may not have actually participated in. If you stagnate at less than 100 followers (especially if you have an egregious amount of tweets), abandon.

24. Discreetly delete Facebook posts which don’t get a lot of likes.

25. Keep in touch with people just enough so that you’ll have a ton of turnout on the few occasions where you actually do organize something. Your social life can’t be entirely pretend, otherwise you’ll end up with a really popular novelty blog and literally zero people at your wedding.

You should follow Thought Catalog on Twitter here.