41–50 of 113 posts
My advice is this: Become a different person. Take your life and incinerate it. Not literally of course. I mean completely change what and who you are. You’re an accomplished software engineer at 30? Great. You’re done doing that. Go buy a $15k trailer, get a truck, and hit the road. Stop looking at screens, only read books. Stop working a job behind a desk, find something else, or if you can afford it don’t work at…
I prayed at a party while sleeping on a friend's sofa in the 80s and said, "if you are out there Jesus, will you come into my life?" This was the beginning of a new life for me. My understanding of life has been shaped over the decades by biblical teaching and personal encounters with the Holy Spirit. Rather than hoping that life is good to me, I try to do good. I also have an eternal view on my actions. What the bib…
And given how often we find out that even religious leaders such as priests, yet alone general believers, are terrible people - whether white nationalists or sex offenders or terrorists or... well, pretty much any crime that humans sometimes commit, I'm not convinced that joining a group of religious people has a higher chance of success than joining any community group. If the Christians in your life are all lovely people then that's awesome, but there's plenty of awesome atheists / people who believe in other religions, and, as with religious people, plenty of nasty atheists too - I'm not suggesting religious people should be avoided or are more likely to be evil, just that I don't think religion is ever a good indicator for whether or not a local community is one you do or don't want to be a part of.
But sure, community groups in general do seem to be a positive thing for a huge number of people, religious or not, and if you do believe (or have a religious group that doesn't mind if you don't really believe and are happy with people who just want to be a good member of their community) then great.
I don't believe personally, but having read the bible and gone to a huge number of religious services (albeit always as a non-believer), I thing the world would be a better place if more people followed the guidance of Jesus in the bible. But I haven't seen evidence that people who believe in Jesus actually do follow his teachings more (nor less) than the average atheist.
My advice is this: Become a different person. Take your life and incinerate it. Not literally of course. I mean completely change what and who you are. You’re an accomplished software engineer at 30? Great. You’re done doing that. Go buy a $15k trailer, get a truck, and hit the road. Stop looking at screens, only read books. Stop working a job behind a desk, find something else, or if you can afford it don’t work at…
For your health, obviously, this is good. But it's also a gateway to meeting new friends. Your weight lifting buddy suddenly invites you out to grab a beer or go to a ballgame, and suddenly his/her friends are your friends and then that longing for Monday starts to dissipate a bit. It can be a real gateway.
Are you really lost if you can point out you're lost? Read some Ecclesiastes or "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. Or maybe "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" for some perspective. At certain times in life the watering hole dries up, when external and/or internal motives have been squeezed to their last drop it sometimes feels like a desert. Those moments present the opportunity to head down a pa…
Probably yes? If you're lost in the middle of a desert with no idea where to go to find the nearest people, knowing that you don't know doesn't somehow mean you're not lost. And I'm not sure how metaphorically lost in life is different?
Here are different things that have helped me or some of my friends (none with exactly the same situation, but with similarities...). Many things have a small effect short term that compound over the time...
- Finding a good counselor you click with (they had to change to find the good one) had been very important and very impactful for 2 of my friends with dire situations... This had been a gradual, over several years, but "spectacular". I think everybody could be better/happier if could do that at some point. (On the top of that, some of my friends got diagnosed "gifted", hypersensitive or on the autism spectrum, and that helped them to understand past things and to navigate present. And I think there is an over-representation of those situation among HN readers...)
- Volunteering, if possible in a group, and helping people you are in contact with, and doing something else than what you do for a living. This is not game changing, but you do help some people, meet new people (that you don't choose), test something different
- Going to work regularly on a small coworking space you kinda click with (me was a self-managed community one). Short term I enjoyed having lunch or coffee with people different than me or my colleagues (and be less alone all day), learning things, giving them a hand at the occasion. Longer term I made some acquaintances and even friends.
- Trying one/some extracurricular activities with the same group of people, some commitment, and fixed time in the week. Those constraints lower the motivation required to keep attending it, which is very important to be able to keep doing it, and then secondly, being in position to benefits from it. It is much harder to keep doing things in you own (ex. running alone, or learning guitar on youtube)
- Trying to live abroad for couple of years (and doing some of the things listed above at the same time). Abroad it is often easier to connect with people. Because people does not know you (yet) and you are in a very new place, you can sometimes feel more free from many (unconscious) "constraints" or burden you were carrying. Being in a very new environment can be stimulating. It helps to get a different insights on you. Depending were you are from and what you like, the place can be very different, with very different experience (personally I met people who really got something from moving from Europe to (busy) Saigon, Chiang Mai or (relatively quiet) Vientiane, or American people moving to Saigon, Vientiane or France)
My advice is this: Become a different person. Take your life and incinerate it. Not literally of course. I mean completely change what and who you are. You’re an accomplished software engineer at 30? Great. You’re done doing that. Go buy a $15k trailer, get a truck, and hit the road. Stop looking at screens, only read books. Stop working a job behind a desk, find something else, or if you can afford it don’t work at…
Change is a good thing but removing all of the stability from your life and spending all of your time doing things that you don't want to do seems like a really bad idea.
My advice is this: Become a different person. Take your life and incinerate it. Not literally of course. I mean completely change what and who you are. You’re an accomplished software engineer at 30? Great. You’re done doing that. Go buy a $15k trailer, get a truck, and hit the road. Stop looking at screens, only read books. Stop working a job behind a desk, find something else, or if you can afford it don’t work at…
Incinerating your life, trying all these new things, only to find that the emptiness returns shortly, and now it is no longer paired with a dependable income.