Well, you say you are 18, so in a sense you are supposed to be at an age where you slowly figure that out.

It's not about guilting people into being nice to you. Pity love is poison anyway, though some people don't know.

All people act out of self-interest. There's people out there that feel good about giving pity love. That's why they do it, even when they ought to know it's not healthy.

Maybe her advice is quite specific to me. I admit, I want to radiate outward that I am a superhuman, extremely tough, skilled in everything, knows everything, has no difficulties, feels nothing, is always happy. That's the person I want to be, but not who I am. I may benefit from showing that I am not what I may subconsciously project.

It's more about showing stuff other people can relate with. Say, being unsure about your future. If you tell someone that you are, they won't feel buried by your problems, and they might feel similar themselves.

Ignoring that this may be a phase for you, and your age, if you truly are a person that permanently has no passions and no goals, no hobbies, and believes has no skills, that willl not be very attractive. Why invest time in such a person? How does such a person enrich someone else's life?

In the end, we are all given this strange experience called 'being alive', and we all struggle to figure out what to do with it. My view is that you want to live as intensely as possible with as little regrets as possible. That's probably the opposite of what I practice, but that's my philosophical view.

It seems you aren't considering further education. Maybe try a job you fear you might be employed at for the rest of your career. If you don't love it, then you know for sure you need an education. Sometimes, you need both the stick and the carrot to get motivation.

Let's face it. We live in a very hard competitive society, we in the west. We have these things called 'freedoms', but we also have to compete very very hard, all against each other. There are winners and losers. No one tells a child that. Now, you want to try to be both a winner the career sphere, the social sphere and the romantic sphere.

For a long time I thought I could just ignore all this, be all Buddhist about it. If you don't want something, it doesn't hurt not having it. Right? Well, in the end you do want it. That's my experience. And I gave it a true shot; to have all desires fulfilled just by not having any desires.

When I was 18, my friends from school just drifted away from me. We used to hang out at school, but also meet as friends. But when we went to different schools, I saw them again once or twice, and then never. It didn't bother me at all. But it stuch out to me that they also made zero effort to maintain some type of relationship. And I knew they were keeping in touch with others.
I don't know what to say about that.