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The Lethality of Loneliness

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Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#71

Post by brnstz »

conroe64 wrote: post #43
navs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is my case. it's hard enough just greeting someone let alone forming a lasting bond that eventuates into some situation allowing for intimacy.

I'm in the same boat. I'm also have attracted a lot of, how to put this, people who use other people, since I'm not good at standing up for myself, so that, therefore, makes wary of people. My belief is being social is a skill and I have to learn to get better at that skill in order to attract more normal people. I've been trying the following recently, although I haven't had enough time with any of it to know how we…

Being social in the real world is a different skill than being social online. You might want to practice both (although, from experience, I'm going to say being social in real life is more important.)

Try a different psychologist, maybe you got the wrong one. But be a little more open to different philosophies of life and goofiness.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#72

Post by hosh »

Killah911 wrote: post #42
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…

Some of us should probably reach out to them. It does sound like a fairly straight forward app. Might even be a good hackathon project or fun size project which doesn't necessarily need to have monetary rewards.

Then reach out.

This is not solvable with technology.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#73

Post by hosh »

ElongatedTowel wrote: post #6
tokenizer wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. This makes sense from a layman's reasoning perspective as well. People who spend an extreme amount of time with others don't spend enough with themselves and probably lose their identity. I guess my question is, what constitutes interaction? Does the brief conversations with my coworkers count? What about a phone call to my mother? Does all of this interaction being analysed have to in person and in dept…

I wonder how romantic relationships fit in. I don't have that many friends, but I have someone to talk to every day and I can be around my family. But not having been in a relationship for many years, or rather, not ever having been in one that could be called serious has started to occupy a lot of my thinking time. It's something I'm reminded of everyday, like it was a disease. It is often said that one has to be ha…

> Why does it feel so worthless if I'm not able to share it with someone I love?

Oh man, the answer to that is mysterious and beautiful.

Let's separate two things: romance and love. We think we want romance but we really want love.

We think we need another person to love, but the truth is, Love Is. It's present wherever you are, whatever moment. It's just, we usually have our heads stuck up our asses and so we don't feel it. Then we wander blindly around the world looking for our lost love. Which then gets distorted by notions of romance.

Or put it in another way

    The minute I heard my first love story,
    I started looking for you, not knowing
    how blind that was.
    
    Lovers don't finally meet somewhere,
    they're in each other all along.
    -- Rumi

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#75

Post by hosh »

loceng wrote: post #12
btipling wrote: post #2

In a very good sociology course I took in college the professor drew an upside down bell curve on the board. The y axis was risk for suicide and the x axis was social interaction. The extremes of social interactions, very low or very high amounts, led to being at greater risk for suicide according to research quoted by the professor. Average amounts of social interactions had the lowest risk for suicide. I don't reme…

It could be people who seek out socializing are trying to distract themselves or are seeking for something external when they're needing are internal skills to manage life and the internal issues (emotions, etc) they create.

Exactly!

Generally speaking, the vast majority of people are actually insane. We're just insane in socially-acceptable, normalized ways.

Looking into yourself is hard. It is the hardest thing you will ever do.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#76

Post by hosh »

manmal wrote: post #55
navs wrote: post #16

So what do you folks do to combat loneliness? I've tried meetup.com but the groups I joined haven't quite worked out for me. Outside of work acquaintances and classmates, I don't socialize.

Loneliness is about not feeling connected to other people. Start with your neighbors, if you have any, or any people you meet. Talk to just anybody whom you meet around your place. If you can't talk to them, develop a sense of love for and connectedness with them. Your brain will then believe that you already are in the center of the "herd", and you will feel better, I'm certain. I've known loneliness most of the tim…

We need more comments like this :-)

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#77

Post by [deleted] »

brandall10 wrote: post #69
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…

The loneliest period of my life was during my clubbing days in my 20s. I was out doing something almost every night, had a few dozen people I called friends. Sometimes it was alot of fun, but it was ultimately draining... the connections were superficial at best. Moved away shortly after turning 26, stopped answering almost all calls and had little social interaction for about 6 mos. Then I got a dog and started meet…

[deleted]

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#78

Post by Killah911 »

gyepi wrote: post #56
Killah911 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, I'm assuming you're desi, in which case you may avail yourself of the aunti-network that always seems to be a matchmaking service on overdrive. I know quite a few geeks who, while having spent more time staring at a computer than bars, have had quite a bit of success with. Based on heuristic evidence, I've seen some happy families emerge for guys who may not otherwise have done so well if left to their own comm…

> Dude, I'm assuming you're desi... Now I'm curious as to how you arrived at that assumption.

[EDIT] on second thought, probably not a great idea to go into details about how I looked him but, but it wasn't terribly difficult.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#79

Post by jodrellblank »

navs wrote: post #16

So what do you folks do to combat loneliness? I've tried meetup.com but the groups I joined haven't quite worked out for me. Outside of work acquaintances and classmates, I don't socialize.

Sometimes, with Omegle and clones, you get a good, intimate, one to one connection with a basically-anonymous complete stranger. And it's great, a real mood lifter.

It just doesn't happen at all often. Perhaps there's a way to adjust that kind of site design to make them more successful at that kind of connection?

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#80

Post by hosh »

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 core of the loneliness. To be intimate, to be connected, is to realize that how we are already connected.

When you know this, it does not matter whether you are physically isolated or not.

This isn't something that special people called monks or nuns can do. This is a capacity in each of us. That capacity is something we call love. Not "romance". Love. Love that a child has for his parent, love that a mother and father have for their child. Love among lovers and friends. Love for the people in your community. Love for the strangers you don't know.

So of course, "living alone in the world goes against the grain." The grain is to be connected. Anyone, lay or not, who separates themselves find themselves alone.

Separation comes in many forms. It isn't just physical. Being proud or ashamed is separation. Being proud makes you "above" or "better" than someone. That's separation. Being ashamed makes you want to hide away. That's separation. Being so angry and hateful of someone that you want to destroy their standing, status, credibility, resources, life -- yeah, that's a form of separation.

Being disgusted and averting your eyes from the homeless in the street is separation. Being disturbed and fearful of the mentally ill -- that too is separation. Being repulsed by the ugly and deformed, by the lepers and unclean, yeah, that is separation.

Being special: heh, yeah, that's the very essence of separation.

We're not "alone together". In wanting to be special, to be unique, to have our brand of personality, we want to carve out this little corner of "me". And in the very doing so, we create distance.

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

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