He liked people and being engaged with people. He was energized by his friends, leading a book club, traveling, meeting new people while traveling and seems to have been a likeable, caring person who connected well with people.
Clearly something happened that caused a major personality change with distorted thinking. Besides his physical illnesses, he seems to have also developed some type of mental illness. IMO
What I notice is that he was partaking in friendship via friend group/living arrangements. He was once in that Honolulu housing where there was a kind of collective living arrangement. IOW, he was in college in the same kind of collective living arrangement, then graduated, and became a kind of wanderer (Stanford; San Francisco; Honolulu - 2 different places; travel to Japan and other parts of Asia).
Initial connections with people can be the result of a charming personality that can mask, as one of his "pals" put it: "darkness."
Then, he appears to have ghosted all of those friend groups (and no word on whether he dated that Tinder yoga instructor more than once - or even at all, they simply matched on Tinder and it looks like maybe he started taking lessons? Paying for lessons?) Ghosts his family too.
So, while he "connects" well, he seems to be in constant motion, friend and family-wise. No longterm romantic relationships that we know of. No best friend from college coming forward with more than the most superficial accounts of who he was.
I say this because in work inside mental hospitals, it's quite common for most of the patients to "connect" well with a new person - this is something they've learned to do. This does not mean that the patients are in a normal state of mind. Indeed, moving from place to place or from friend group to friend group can be a way of remaining social while avoiding what I'd call more intimate relationships (I don't mean in the sexual sense).
He apparently talked quite a bit about his pain situation within some of these groups. So people were concerned about him. I just find it interesting that he basically chose a path that emphasized his medical fragility/pain and that lots of people knew about it and wanted to help/support him.
I'd like to see some evidence that he had regular, longterm friendships that were based on mutual interests and personalities, as opposed to his (perhaps) relying on his medical situation to connect to others. He had several different "issues" that he was using to connect to people on reddit (visual snow was one of them, which surprised me). Lyme's disease, spondy, visual snow, possible use of pain meds, surgery. That's a lot for a 26 year old. He obviously also had his good lucks and intelligence, but I'm surprised that he cut off his Honolulu friend group, traveled to meet up with various groups of friendly fellow-travelers or local inhabitants. Those are transient type relationships. Maybe his overall pain situation (and perception of his own sexual dysfunction) made it hard for him to maintain what I would call "best friends" or a significant other.
IMO. Maybe he didn't want to be a burden to people - we haven't heard about that, one way or another.
abcnews.go.com
