Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Lethality of Loneliness

newrepublic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 166 posts

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#121

Post by greenlander »

breakupapp wrote: post #90
alashley wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you mean. A friend of mine was saying he was heavily into the party scene in the years before he met his now fiancée. He said meeting her earlier would have saved him years of going out to clubs for the sake of not feeling lonely. And of course a lot of use feel like it is easier to meet someone when we don't have our walls up. But most connections made at a club are superficial at best like you said.

So what's a good solution to shortening the time it takes to meet one's fiancée?

99% of mainstream dating advice is hogwash.

Learn the truth about women. Start reading:

http://dalrock.wordpress.com/ http://heartiste.wordpress.com/

The best dating advice is concentrated on men who are players or aspire to be. But the skills to seduce a fling and a future wife are very similar.

If you want to catch a great woman, you must have the skills to catch any woman.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#122

Post by Mz »

greenlander wrote: post #121
breakupapp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's a good solution to shortening the time it takes to meet one's fiancée?

99% of mainstream dating advice is hogwash. Learn the truth about women. Start reading: http://dalrock.wordpress.com/ http://heartiste.wordpress.com/ The best dating advice is concentrated on men who are players or aspire to be. But the skills to seduce a fling and a future wife are very similar. If you want to catch a great woman, you must have the skills to catch any woman.

That second site looks like manipulative bullshit to me.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#123

Post by waster »

leoh wrote: post #28

I thought the most profound thing mentioned in this article was that loneliness was about intimacy. Not necessarily physical intimacy, but social intimacy. This is exceedingly important subtlety. Too often we say things like "go be social, go hang out." You can "be social", but non-intimate relationships (relationships with people you don't trust, people who are cruel, people who aren't authentic) do not have good th…

This strikes a chord and speaks something about cultural interactions.

Ages ago, when I was at university, I spent a semester in a Soviet bloc country. There were no clubs other than the Party-run ones; few movies to go see, little to buy in stores, no TVs, no Internet, no cell phones. The isolation could have been profound. But for many people, what this meant was that human relationships became very, very intense and valuable. Friendships with my fellow students became so, as did friendships with other locals I met and got to know.

Upon returning to my home university in the US, I was very happy to see my friends, and quickly joined them on my first day back at one of our usual hangouts, a bar. I was appalled to realize that all the conversations I had had with them for all the nights we'd been going out were utterly superficial and meaningless compared with the relationships and conversations I'd experienced overseas. I gradually withdrew from my friends, trying to stick more to non-party/bar settings so we could have what I considered to be more real, deeper conversations; but I had changed, and they had not. It was very isolating.

I gradually discovered that a few of these friends also were craving deeper interaction (cue jokes, okay, okay) and those friends became not only the people I hung out with more, but the ones whose friendships with me lasted decades until today. But there was a seriously lonely stretch until I discovered that, and it was all about social intimacy -- not physical, not being among people, but sharing our true selves in conversation and companionship.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#124

Post by hosh »

guylhem wrote: post #98
hosh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does have more to do with feeling alone. Hermits, monks, nuns, sages, sadhus, ascetics, cultivators, shamans, mind travellers from all around the world of different wisdom traditions typically have essentially the same practice. Each is looking into themselves to gain insights about the world. This insight is at the core of everything: We live in an *illusion* that we are separate from each other. This is at the c…

Best comment of this article IMHO. Posting this just to catch the reader eye and maybe encourage 1 more person to read it.

:-)

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#125

Post by rikthevik »

Mz wrote: post #122
greenlander wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of mainstream dating advice is hogwash. Learn the truth about women. Start reading: http://dalrock.wordpress.com/ http://heartiste.wordpress.com/ The best dating advice is concentrated on men who are players or aspire to be. But the skills to seduce a fling and a future wife are very similar. If you want to catch a great woman, you must have the skills to catch any woman.

That second site looks like manipulative bullshit to me.

That's because it _is_ manipulative bullshit! Heartiste is famous for spouting misogynistic garbage. Pretty terrible stuff.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#126

Post by kayoone »

breakupapp wrote: post #90
alashley wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you mean. A friend of mine was saying he was heavily into the party scene in the years before he met his now fiancée. He said meeting her earlier would have saved him years of going out to clubs for the sake of not feeling lonely. And of course a lot of use feel like it is easier to meet someone when we don't have our walls up. But most connections made at a club are superficial at best like you said.

So what's a good solution to shortening the time it takes to meet one's fiancée?

Dont try too hard.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#127

Post by jjuliano »

breakupapp wrote: post #90
alashley wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you mean. A friend of mine was saying he was heavily into the party scene in the years before he met his now fiancée. He said meeting her earlier would have saved him years of going out to clubs for the sake of not feeling lonely. And of course a lot of use feel like it is easier to meet someone when we don't have our walls up. But most connections made at a club are superficial at best like you said.

So what's a good solution to shortening the time it takes to meet one's fiancée?

I guess to be sincere, be kind, be supportive and always be prepared to listen, treat love given to you as rare, so don't spoil and throw it away. Be there for her.

That's just my solution though I haven't met mine.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#128

Post by virtualwhys »

hosh wrote: post #80
virtualwhys wrote: post #20

and then there are the twinkle eyed ones that spend huge amounts of time alone (hermits, monks/nuns on long term solo retreat). It probably has less to do with being alone than feeling alone. For lay people, however, living alone in the world goes against the grain; hard not to feel like an odd ball. Something the article does not touch on is accepting the reality of alone-ness: we're all alone together (quote from a…

It does have more to do with feeling alone. Hermits, monks, nuns, sages, sadhus, ascetics, cultivators, shamans, mind travellers from all around the world of different wisdom traditions typically have essentially the same practice. Each is looking into themselves to gain insights about the world. This insight is at the core of everything: We live in an *illusion* that we are separate from each other. This is at the c…

"So get in touch with yourself; get in touch with your family and friends. Start with some affection, that's pretty easy :-)"

That's an interesting assumption. Perhaps there's another form of separation: playing the role of teacher ;-)

The all alone together expression is a koan, presumably you "get" it.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#129

Post by taurath »

greenlander wrote: post #121
breakupapp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's a good solution to shortening the time it takes to meet one's fiancée?

99% of mainstream dating advice is hogwash. Learn the truth about women. Start reading: http://dalrock.wordpress.com/ http://heartiste.wordpress.com/ The best dating advice is concentrated on men who are players or aspire to be. But the skills to seduce a fling and a future wife are very similar. If you want to catch a great woman, you must have the skills to catch any woman.

The above advice is probably really good if you think of women as objects.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#130

Post by taurath »

vijayr wrote: post #53
zupatol wrote: post #36

> At one point, the psychologists thought of designing a mobile app, a sort of electronic nagging mother, to help people break bad social habits. (You’d check an item off the list, say, if you remembered to talk to anyone that day—a store clerk or a librarian.) But they didn’t get funding for the software, so now they’re focusing on a simpler and more low-tech fix. This mobile app sounds like something that would be…

This will only help so much - it'll soon become a chore/annoyance, as it would become more of "checking the box" than actually "connecting with people". This is a problem that can't solved by tech, mobile app etc (tech can only help a bit). I'm not sure simply "talking with store clerk" will help loneliness. If that is the case, talking to our bosses and other colleagues (who really don't care too much about anyone o…

What an app like that needs is /significance/ - it needs to be thought of as a big thing, and not just another annoying little app. Get some names behind it, some studies, something to give it a broader significance. Hell, maybe even make the application by prescription. That way you're not just being annoyed by another app, you're checking in on a prescribed therapy like replacing a band-aid on a wound.
Post reply on HN