Volunteer. Find something that's not technical but you could see yourself enjoying, and commit to doing it once a week for 6 months. Serving food at a homeles

Volunteer. Find something that's not technical but you could see yourself enjoying, and commit to doing it once a week for 6 months. Serving food at a homeless shelter, taking care of animals at the humane society, picking up trash in local parks, helping organize youth events. Don't do something technical, since you'll just feel like "I should be working on my company or consulting to make money." Anecdotally, when there are no dollars attached to the activity, you don't fall into the "it's a waste of my talent, I could be making money to live off" (I wash dishes as part of my volunteer gig, and actually find I really enjoy it - as one of my friends said, "you couldn't pay me to do this kind of work"). But there's a lot of literature that supports that volunteering can make you happier and help deal with social isolation. I live in a sleepy town in the SF Bay Area, and am exactly the same - there are days where I just don't talk to anybody. I don't feel anxious, but I feel kinda empty or lonely. I don't always want to go into the city because it's a hike, and I'm not sure what'd I'd do when I get there anyway. I found a volunteer organization that I go to two days per week, and have made friends and now occasionally hang out with them outside of the volunteer setting. The impersonal nature of HN and reddit made it a suboptimal replacement for actual face-to-face contact. Not to mention I find it more pleasant to spend some of my time not surrounded by startup and the tech world.