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Ask HN: How do you cope with loneliness?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you cope with loneliness?

#51

Post by sizzla »

I've met brilliant 30+ year olds who were still on the 8 year old level you describe.

You need to adjust your value system until you don't feel like you've been wasting time by working on yourself rather than your software project.

Be prepared for horrible failures in the same fashion that you expect segfaults the first few hundred times you code in assembly. Segfaults wouldn't shake your confidence, neither should a girl who is either not interested or openly annoyed by you.

Take a lot more risk and be prepared to fail hard and make a total moron out of yourself. You will still feel better than just cocooning yourself.

Listen. Don't judge the cool, preppy, jock, whatever guys, observe what they do and how they talk, dress, etc. You're not trying to be like them, but you're just learning like you are when you are reading source code or reference manuals.

Do not intellectually dominate. You will draw attention to yourself and lose all the opportunity to learn. Observe other people's sense of humor. Is yours too confined to stuff only the reddit crowd would laugh at?

Read bullshit magazines like Maxim. There is so much crap in there, but there's some truth too and they are very direct about it.

Ideally, try to get a good friend who is a girl and not a geek. Forget about ever hooking up with this girl, she is there just to give you feedback on how you look like when you say or do some things and how your appearance/dress affects others. If you have a sister/cousin, even better, ask for feedback.

Re: Ask HN: How do you cope with loneliness?

#52

Post by sizzla »

berntb wrote: post #12

I cope badly. I've had to work from home since a few months, because of a strange allergy reaction at work. It is depressing. This seems to be the only major city on the planet where there aren't lots of nice cafes to work from. Otherwise, that is what I would do. I've noted the same effect in others and also hopes for good answers to your question. For the record: I like people but have limits, since I'm really quit…

The comfort of being alone and not interacting awkwardly currently outweighs your resolve to solve this problem.

It's hard to self-diagnose with introversion, you might just be seriously depressed and not willing to admit it to yourself, but I don't know you at all so all this is maybe BS.

Re: Ask HN: How do you cope with loneliness?

#56

Post by berntb »

sizzla wrote: post #52
berntb wrote: post #12

I cope badly. I've had to work from home since a few months, because of a strange allergy reaction at work. It is depressing. This seems to be the only major city on the planet where there aren't lots of nice cafes to work from. Otherwise, that is what I would do. I've noted the same effect in others and also hopes for good answers to your question. For the record: I like people but have limits, since I'm really quit…

The comfort of being alone and not interacting awkwardly currently outweighs your resolve to solve this problem. It's hard to self-diagnose with introversion, you might just be seriously depressed and not willing to admit it to yourself, but I don't know you at all so all this is maybe BS.

Good thinking; you are often wrong when generating hypotheses about yourself and they are hard to test.

But I've seen it in myself at other times over the last decades, too.

(I didn't know introspection was harder for introverted? Reference?)

Re: Ask HN: How do you cope with loneliness?

#58

Post by wallflower »

I can't tell you the number of times that Hacker News has helped lift my day. Also, going to a coffee shop with a book works short-term wonders. There are times where I question my short-term goals (finish client work) when they prevent me from hanging out with friends (deadline).

Get a cat or a dog. Sitting alone in my house with my crazy cat is better than being alone.

Re: Ask HN: How do you cope with loneliness?

#59

Post by sizzla »

berntb wrote: post #56
sizzla wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comfort of being alone and not interacting awkwardly currently outweighs your resolve to solve this problem. It's hard to self-diagnose with introversion, you might just be seriously depressed and not willing to admit it to yourself, but I don't know you at all so all this is maybe BS.

Good thinking; you are often wrong when generating hypotheses about yourself and they are hard to test. But I've seen it in myself at other times over the last decades, too. (I didn't know introspection was harder for introverted? Reference?)

I wouldn't say introspection was harder for introverted and I definitely would have no reference for that.

It's just that introversion is a personality trait whose meaning was overloaded by pop-culture and pop-psychology. Stuff by Freud, Jung, Eyesenck, Myers-Briggs, etc. is useful to know as much as it is useful to know about the work done at Xerox in the 70s and 80s. Informative and a foundation for later work, but by no means current.

This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Rel...

will tell you about just how inaccurate it is to take a classic test like MBTI. While there is something to be said about personality traits and nature vs nurture, Psychological Types are so 1923.

There was a lot more concrete research done in the last 20 years on depression and related mood disorders as it is somewhat of a modern-day plague (OK plague is too harsh, can someone help me with a disease analogy here?).

Re: Ask HN: How do you cope with loneliness?

#60

Post by lief79 »

davidw wrote: post #13

Here's something that worked for me: salsa dancing. It's fun, and good music, and it's a great way to meet lots of women in a brief span of time, if you go to the right sort of places (avoid the ones where it's all about seasoned couples showing off their repertoire of crazy moves). Also, you learn to shrug off the 'no thanks' that you'll of course receive. I should also add that it's an acquired skill, and very much…

I've done salsa, but always preferred swing. At least in Philly, the salsa crowd takes it self far more seriously, and the swing dancing crowd seems to attract more of an intellectual crowd.

On the same note, the salsa events tend to be at nightclubs/bars, while the swing events are at dance floors. I suspect I just prefer the environment.

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