CT ... one of my quirky personal beliefs is that there are very few social activities. There are social people. Social people will socialize while engaged in whatever activity, while less social people won't. Same activity, same rewarding feeling for the participants, different amounts of 'social'.
The idea that there are no mentors out there or that you can't learn from someone because they not instructors or DM is being dismissive of one of the best parts of diving...
I'm pretty sure I didn't express any of that.
By analogy,You can talk about cars with someone that is not a certified mechanic, you can get advice from them. Ultimately, it is your responcibility to decide to work on the brakes of you car yourself. Some people do, some don't. you need to use your judgement to decide whether it is a good idea or not.
I'm going to be honest and admit I don't know how this connects to the topic, but it is interesting because I have never understood the bizarre hang-up people have with fixing brakes. Every time you drive you are literally one wheel-jerk away from killing people but that's fine, nobody has a hang up there. But the idea that, in your garage with all the time in the world to do a very simple job, you might screw something up and that screw up might get someone killed somehow - that hangs people up. In my language we call that very strange.
On the other hand, when as a child I asked my father why we had to do brake jobs ourselves instead of paying someone like we did to change tires, he told the story of taking his car to a shop to have the brakes done, and the car just not working right afterwards, and how he disassembled a brake and found that the shop had put the brake shoes on backwards. I did my first solo brake job at 9 and have never had a shop service the brakes on any car I've owned. So maybe my perspective is atypical.
Finding divers with experience who are interested in helping you learn and dive safe is in my experience the norm. Nasty boorish people exist and if they have trouble getting dive partners, they might want to reflect on their attitude.... most divers I know are out to have fun and do cool stuff and seldom are they not interested in sharing..
Sigh. In psychoblather circles they talk about extroversion where people are energized by social interaction/drained by time alone and introversion where people are drained by social interaction/energized by time alone. What that means in practical terms is that when a person wants to renew themselves by engaging in an activity, some will renew more by being social, and others will renew more by breaking away from the pack.
Now I think it's pretty cool to dismiss introverts as nasty boorish people and tell them they should reflect on their attitude. While we are at it we should tell left handed people to get over themselves and just use their right hands like, well, like right people do. I'm just not sure it's productive. Fun, sure, but I don't think they will take the advice. So yes, I agree, we should do that-it'll be tons of fun, like shooting fish in a barrel. However, if you go back to my post, it wasn't really what I was addressing.
My premise is that mentor relationships primarily exist within a broader relationship. Family, friendship, whatever. That doesn't mean there is no such thing as a mentor, or that mentors are worthless because they don't charge. It means the advice to seek a mentor is basically wrong. The advice instead should be to build a social circle that shares your interests. Within such a circle mentoring will happen. Outside that circle...it may happen too, but as I and others have pointed out, because the incentive to mentor is the reward of thinking you are helping instead of something like a genuine interest in the person and their safety/development, it can also horribly misfire and the mentored may not be able to recognize bad advice they are given.
There is a fantasy of finding a mentor who takes noobs under her wing and helps them for the joy of helping noobs, and does great good. It's just not the most likely scenario.