An Epidemic of Loneliness in America?

Haha, ain't nothing like the sound of a belt-driven supercharger. I didn't stick one in the dodge because:

1. it would stick up through the hood, messing up my all-go-no-show plan

2. it would wind up the body of the car into a pretzel if I didn't add a ton of stiffening

3. without one it dyno'd at 400hp which turned out to be enough to scare the crap out of me

We talked about what we have been doing while feeling lonely and we each had different stories of why we were not able to spend time around people we wanted to be around. He couldn’t afford to live in the city anymore and had to move to the Midwest where now he makes a wage that will probably never allow him to move back. I, on the other hand, can never leave the city because there are no jobs for me elsewhere and I would not be able to come back. Neither of us are comfortable investing in homes because we both feel unhappy where we are.

Job wise, we both have problems with our companies we work for, but like our coworkers. We feel very distant from what we are doing and recognize that the inability to change careers or better our situations gives us a lack of hope. His situation is slightly different because he is in a higher management position, but neither of us feel we can talk to anybody nearby about these things or we will be outed as not being this imaginary committed perfectly obsessed careerist type.

Basically, everything we have depends on our entire stories, everything we have ever done. We don’t have the privacy to have a multifaceted life without feeling like some fraud. He relates this to our society being so obsessed with individuals instead of letting us just be ourselves, separate from our jobs and our income and wellbeing. We don’t have the option of dreaming because the risk is just too great. We have seen our friends lose everything by taking risks.

Ultimately, I have to agree. We have let this obsession of making our personalities our lives get the best of both. It’s the core idea behind individualism, which we are taught is a great thing and I always believed it. I still do in most cases, but now i feel stuck inside my individual self, lonely like alll the other individuals.

We are so obsessed with ourselves as individuals, we lose sight of ourselves as parts of greater wholes, like families and neighborhoods.

I am not sure I can separate this from politics.

Thinking back, I recall feeling uncomfortable commenting on or diverting the conversation towards anything that was unrelated to the prescribed topic of the meetup. It felt rude to divert time away from the topic that everyone there had specifically chosen to allocate their time to, otherwise they wouldn't be there in the first place.

With places like school, even college, there's still a general feeling that you have to be there, and so diversions from the topic at hand are more welcome.

To put it another way, interest-based groups seem to be about the interest first and the people second. The people there are compartmentalized away as being related to the specific topic, and not generalized friends. In this way the group lacks that crucial idleness factor that others here have mentioned, since everyone is there with a purpose to fulfill that they don't want to distract others from.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Loneliness%20points%3E10&sort=...