This is a picture of a man who is alone.
Lonely is completely absolutely totally stupendously not at all related.
This is bad depiction of loneliness and push the blame on people who are alone or prefer to be alone. Lonely is actually worst. You can see a group photo and you couldn’t tell if anyone in there feels lonely at all.
I wouldn’t say it’s bad so much as it’s simplified and incomplete. Some of us cough develop defense mechanisms designed to keep other people away, and at one point it may have been for good reasons. Down the road, though, you find yourself keeping those defences when they no longer serve you, which isolates you from others.
For these folks, acknowledging that they’re doing this, finding ways to safely lower their guard, and slowly exposing themselves to more people and experiences can help with that loneliness.
This is the kind of thing I get from this image. But this situation does not address all causes or types of loneliness, just one possible factor.
Sadly relatable
Me
Has anyone managed to break out of this habit? I want to be more social, communal, but it seems to go against my natural proclivities
It’s because people are being conditioned to be hostile to each other. You’re suffering because of this attack of connectedness, not because of anything you’re doing wrong.
Could be both
Is very likely both
This is probably a strange suggestion, but have you tried using Fear? I’ve noticed it’s somewhat easier to be social after consuming any kind of scary content.
Oh that is a great and altogether unique suggestion, thanks!
Might be challenging to scare myself before going to the morning market, but maybe for evening hangouts
Sometimes it can be easier to make peace with yourself for who you are than struggle to be someone others would want to be around. Just do things that bring joy in your life and you may end up with others who share your same values.
Just do things that bring joy to your life
I’m already doing nothing all day.
Dude is wearing a jock strap on the outside of his pants and wonders why no one will talk with him.
I’m a problem solver. I love solving problems, so trust me when I say that for some people, loneliness is an unsolvable problem.
The first step to finding a solution to any problem is defining it, because once you defined the problem state, you can also define the resolved state.
(i.e. coffee machine doesn’t turn on -> coffee machine works normally).
But loneliness is a very subjective matter. What does loneliness mean for you?
Some people feel lonely outside a relationship, some people might feel lonely if they have nobody around that shares their interests, some might feel lonely because they’re separated by age to their peers, etc. For some the most honest answer is “I don’t know.” This is not a matter of being too dumb to know, but rather the fact that some people have never experienced the contrast of not being lonely. Or more precisely they didn’t or couldn’t make memories of it when they did experienced it due to being preoccupied by traumatic events.
This makes this whole approach almost impossible, because while you can see the problem, you can’t define it and therefore can’t define a solution.One of my teachers once said “The body builds upon stress”. That’s how we train our muscles, make our bones more dense or form new synapses. The thing here is that “loneliness” and “belonging” aren’t abstract concepts, they are literally part of you physiology. Loneliness is a stress factor for your brain, and somebody who experiences it for prolonged and unregulated amounts of time will naturally build up a mental defense. But just as you can lose muscle mass, you can also lose you mental defenses. The issue is while you can train your body and mind mostly on you own, you can’t do the same thing for finding belonging. By definition you can’t belong on you own, which turns this from a simple problem to a complex one.
Another part of it is - things don’t like being in limbo. To everything there’s almost always a positive or a negative feedback loop. Depending on where on the spiral you started you either go upwards or downwards. In terms of loneliness this is often expressed as introvertism and extrovertism. While extrovertism doesn’t make you immune to loneliness just as much as introvertism doesn’t guarantee it, the former gives you a clear advantage of having more experiences that can break a negative downward cycle.
So if the stars align and a person has enough traumatic experiences at key points in their life, is introverted by nature and their life circumstances prevent them from breaking from a downward spiral the problem of loneliness becomes essentially impossible to solve. But this isn’t a rare case, those stars align very often. The worst part of it is, that even if this problem is recognized on a broader scale as an “loneliness epidemic” the people on the far end of the bell curve of loneliness will most likely still not profit from any proposed solution. Because the solutions presented will be general solutions to subjective problems.
In short: loneliness sucks, and I wouldn’t wish it upon my greatest enemies.
