Don't forget to be your own friend too. If you're feeling burnt out, your body is trying to tell you something. That doesn't make you less of a person for it!
This may get long, but it's good info. Please bear with the length.
Honestly OP, I feel like based on how you've worded things that this may be a result of anxiety (symptom or disorder, couldn't tell you). Important note: if this is an ongoing thing, you may have trained yourself to ignore it.
First, some background: Feeling stupid can happen because when you feel anxiety, your frontal lobe (where you think) turns off. Anxiety is a form of fight or flight, and when that kicks in, your amygdalas (base of brain) block off the thinking part of your brain.
To your points:
-Missing things in conversation and catching them later often happens when you're back to a safe place and you come out of fight or flight and your frontal lobe turns back on.
-Not making new friends, because social is new or "work" to meet new people. If you're feeling anxious you're not going to have the energy to want to do that. (You kinda mentioned this by not wanting to get out of your comfort zone).
-Passively, the steps are hard to give in a general sense. Usually I'd suggest you're pushing too hard in your life or (maybe accidentally) ignoring triggers. Actively, there are grounding exercises for anxiety, but they are only a bandaid of your life is constantly pushing you to high stress.
-You made a comment about making notes but not wanting to feel silly. Feeling like you're being watched or judged can also be a symptom of you're anxious.
I am not a therapist but I have an extensive amount of psychology research and years of therapy that I have gone through for several things including anxiety. Feel free to message me if you want to dig in more! If you don't, I would recommend a counselor to help dig into your situation either way. I can't express how helpful it can be.
Idk if this was in the movie as I didn't watch it. But if the thing they're attached to us hardened steel a hacksaw wouldn't have a chance of going through it. It would wear the teeth right off.
I work in a computer shop and we put Zorin on machines for some instances, like if it's a old/low performance machine or if the customer is trying to stick to a strict budget. We haven't had any come back, and people seem to like it.
If it's "unbearably slow" that is an indication of drive failure especially on old boot drives. Linux will not fix this.
After that, Cinnamon if they like windows. Gnome if they don't or don't care.
Pop os is a great "fire and forget" OS for normal users. I work in a computer shop and have seen tons of not-knowledgable people run it without issues.
I work in a PC repair shop (mostly Windows stuff) and I do the same with Ventoy and Mint. I especially like it for gParted but have a variety of things I use on it.
So that beam in the pic is not factory (dude is still a douche of course). But the point in the video is that the cybertruck is like that straight from Tesla, which is extra unacceptable.
That's the name of the program. You can search it and it'll pop right up. It is now owned by Cooler Master.
Once you download it, you can run either the CPU Srress test or the Linpack test (this is for Intel mostly as it is their proprietary test) and it'll run while looking for math or WHEA errors.
While you're doing science, I would also recommend doing a RAM test with memtest86+. You download the .iso and make a bootable drive, and boot into it. Both RAM and CPU can make similar weird failures so checking both is a decent idea.
Partially dead CPUs can absolutely still POST and boot. I work in a PC repair shop and see it all the time. Everything will work totally "fine" and you'll get weird errors here and there similarly to failing RAM. You have to run a dedicated CPU test like the ones in OCCT (Windows-based, don't lynch me) or similar to see if you're getting WHEA or other errors.
The reason for this is that a lot of CPUs have built in redundancy to get around having imperfect silicon, and sometimes that is enough to make the system still work, but not be quite "right".
The good news is, if you are producing such errors, you usually have a 3yr warranty on most CPUs and the OEM will RMA them for you.
Don't forget to be your own friend too. If you're feeling burnt out, your body is trying to tell you something. That doesn't make you less of a person for it!