241–250 of 266 posts
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Q: Would you like to become a member? A: No thank you. I'm an atheist who is just here for the social interaction and community. How does this end well?
Unitarian-Universalist churches have a lot of atheists.
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I wonder about the exercise thing. For the past few years, I've exercised fairly frequently. And, yet, I still struggle with feelings of loneliness and depression. I think exercise helps a little but maybe less than people like to imagine. As you imply with your other points, you probably have to address loneliness on multiple fronts in order to have a lasting impact on it.
There are a slew of research papers on the benefits of exercise for the clinically depressed, anxious, etc [1]. Most of the research boils down to the fact that, with enough rigor in the exercise regime (typically linked to one's heart rate passing a specific threshold), endorphins are released in the brain, providing a similar positive feeling as would morphine. Of course, exercise will not cure depression, or remov…
I think it's a behavior of people who are struggling with depression to constantly seek out a single answer to their problems. In that sense, I believe anything, no matter how beneficial on paper, can eventually be used as a fixation which feeds the depressive cycle. This has been my experience as I've struggled with depression in my life. Exercise is no exception to this pattern.
I've been going to a lot of meetups (from meetup.com) in the past year, and sadly I've come away pretty disappointed, for a number of reasons: 1 - I'm just not in the least bit interested in the overwhelming majority of meetups out there. So there really aren't a lot of interesting meetups for me to choose from. 2 - Way too many of the meetups are actually businesses in disguise. They're looking to sell you a class o…
This has unfortunately been my experience with not just meetups, but other things where common wisdom says you can make friends, like volunteering. I volunteer every few weeks at a soup kitchen, but despite having done it for a couple of years, none of my fellow volunteers have become more than casual acquaintances.
I'm not saying that you're _not_ doing it or that this is easy (socially, financially, temporally, etc.), but I do think it _is_ easy to just pass through life as a bit of an outside observer, be it at work, volunteering, or basically any other social engagement. (I guess this is what the main article is all about...)
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I actually don't see why it shouldn't. As mentioned above, most churchgoers are nice people, and I can't conceive of anyone throwing the atheist out on grounds of “convert or leave”.
That's pretty wishful (or perhaps naïve) thinking. A family member of mine literary hasn't spoken to me in over two decades because I told her I didn't believe in god when I was 12. She asked me out of nowhere, I said no, that was it, I was no longer to be in her life in any capacity. She also tries to meddle in my business telling other people I am not to be trusted because "you can only trust someone who fears god.…
If I wanted to be social I wouldn't even know where to start. There's nowhere to go to hang out and meet people. Folks work and then go home and stay in their houses (UK commuter town). The previous generation might have gone to the pub (bar) but those have been turned into restaurants so even that doesn't work anymore. I even start thinking about going online as the best available option to be RL social. horror I th…
Socialising there was a lot like the place your'e describing. There were a lot of solo travelers who knew literally nobody in the city. You'd end up making friends without even trying, you'd sit down for dinner at the table with a stranger and you'd make a friend by the time you finished tea. If you wanted to go out to town, you'd just join in with the group drinking. There was always people playing cards or board games, or watching a movie.
It was an amazing social experience. The only (large) downside is that it's all temporary. Everybody is only staying for a few months, before they move on to the next place. I met some lifelong friends there (or I assume they will be), but they're scattered all over the world now. Great for when I travel, not so great for socialising on a Saturday afternoon.
I guess university was similar. I made a lot of friends through university events, parties, and just being in the same lab studying. We make most of our friends at school and university, and keep them for life usually. Once we become professionals and join the full time workforce, there's diminishing opportunities to meet new people.
I recently moved countries and it has been extraordinarily hard to meet new people.
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So, I'm not going to get too much into semantics because it's not interesting, and we could grind on it forever. But the essence of social interaction and group dynamics has hundreds of thousands of years of permutation behind it, and I'm pretty confident that human beings aren't going to come up with a new way of reducing friction at the interfaces of its tribalism without changing the definition of human being. The…
I'm pretty confident that human beings aren't going to come up with a new way of reducing friction at the interfaces of its tribalism without changing the definition of human being. This is manifestly false. We went from murdering all out-group, to cultures of hospitality to strangers. We went from killing all members of defeated groups to enslaving them, then eventually went on to abolish slavery. We went from unfet…
What you think is an illusion. Add a layer of abstraction to get rid of implementation details, and we're the same animals the Romans were.
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I'm really sorry to hear you're struggling with loneliness. Out of interest, how are you stuck? (Obviously, feel free not to indulge me if you'd rather not discuss your situation with a well-wishing but uninformed stranger.)
My life was destroyed by medical errors and my present situation is the culmination of things collapsing and not being able to shrink anymore. Been saying for ages I am gonna lay the story out here and hope for some miracle plan. Intend to post tomorrow morning. Was going to today (keep stalling out of fear of negative or null results, and things keep happening) but this morning my amazing 1mpbs spotty rural internet…
While I doubt anyone is going to summon some kind of miracle plan, I think there are lots of people here who'd be eager to read your story and try to help. So yeah... if you're up for sharing, please say when you're ready.
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This is going to sound stupid, but if you can't do hobbies you previously enjoyed are you just never going to find new hobbies? If you have no in-person interaction that you know you need, are you just never going to go find it? Where do other people get it in your area? Church, probably, since you're rural. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you aren't interested in religion, absolutely hate where you're a…
The point that you highlight going to church as a non-religious person as the best way to deal with isolation emphasizes the real issue at play here: that civil society is increasingly non-existent to the point that non-religious social outlets outside of work don't exist for the majority of people
If anything the opposite is true: severe lack of alone-time. I'm surrounded by humans all the time, even in your time alone you can't get away from people due to IM, social media, etc. I try to minimise the amount of social activity as much as possible, but I'm still getting overloaded and am slowly going crazy.
You could try using a productivity app like StayFocusd[1] to set it up so you can only access the website once or twice a day. If it's truly an emergency people will call you. You can also try logging out of Facebook/Email and only checking it once a day. Or just plain making time to turn off your phone for a few hours on the weekend. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...
Regardless, I am forced to interact with people in a social setting way too much. For example, my brother had his birthday 2 weeks ago and I have to go there for a couple of hours. Next week is my mothers birthday and she wants to take us to a restaurant, I really don't want to be in a restaurant surrounded by humans, it's just too much. I've been dreading it for weeks and can't wait for it to be over. Unfortunately, every time one of those events is finally over, another one presents itself.
If I ever won the lottery, I would buy a cabin somewhere in the middle of nowhere and that would be the last any human would have seen of me.
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I'm pretty confident that human beings aren't going to come up with a new way of reducing friction at the interfaces of its tribalism without changing the definition of human being. This is manifestly false. We went from murdering all out-group, to cultures of hospitality to strangers. We went from killing all members of defeated groups to enslaving them, then eventually went on to abolish slavery. We went from unfet…
Oh, you're one of those people that thinks we're exceptional from our historical counterparts. Or exceptional as Americans from the rest of the world. You would do well to read some of that history you're supposed to be pulling clear examples from. And you should really take a look at what our "much more sophisticated notion of humanity and the self" does every day in unfortunate shithole countries around the world.…