4 ms·
Around here the main culprits of spreading loneliness, esp. among men and women in their late 20s and later, are marriage and kids and the victims are those who
by crossroadsguy 2y ago
Around here the main culprits of spreading loneliness, esp. among men and women in their late 20s and later, are marriage and kids and the victims are those who didn't go for it, or didn't happen for them. Now, we can get into the deep debates of "you can be lonely in a family or among people" but let's keep that aside for some other day.
It must be a different geography/culture thing but if I want to deal with loneliness a bar or a pub is probably the last place I'd go looking for people to spend time with drunk. Hobbies, workshops, sports are the venues that work. For me letter writing seems to work - but very little. Met some friends and if they are from nearby cities or my own city then we kind of make time to meet et cetera. But it's not sustainable.
What this article lists is more like - there is already a group of friends who meet at a reserved table regularly. How does it even begin to work against loneliness? Loneliness IMHO is when you have no one to spend time with or they can't make time or you can't make time.
It comes down to this - you might want to figure out what kind of person you are early in life (as in mid 20s early) and what do you need in life in terms of company and possibly work on possible loneliness later in life - or plan against it - but that doesn't happen, does it? Also, at least in our generation's case, the social scene changed faster than one could cope and the COVID was almost like pulling the rug. Before and after were so different that felt unrecognisable. I have friends who loved the closed world of COVID and couldn't care less about the lack of people who give them their time and want their time, on the other hand there are people like me who are getting more miserable everyday for the lack of it and now wonder whether going for marriage probably would have been a better decision practically and realistically. Then you wonder maybe not.
My fight against it is by keeping very fit, resuming running, resuming reading (as in active reading otherwise it never stopped), get into cinema (again actively - join some film clubs/forums etc), multiple weekly sports (and one daily), and starting gym (which is part of keeping fit of course) et cetera. And the most important - I am still dealing with it - is fighting procrastination. The keeping fit part really helps, it might not seem so. But it does. It helps both physically and mentally.
- ANewFormation 2y agoKids and marriage also make it practically impossible to not meet other people. If someone did a study on loneliness vs fertility rates, it'd probably be a near perfect correlation. The modern era of Tinder, normalised deviancy, and so on is really setting people up for a very uncomfortable later life. And I say 'later' but it's really the overwhelming majority of your life, especially if you discount your earlier years where we're all just basically retarded.
- em-bee 2y agoKids and marriage also make it practically impossible to not meet other people. yes and no. the problem is that most of those other people are parents of my kids classmates, and i can't choose them. unfortunately many of these are the type that i don't want to associate with.
- em-bee 2y agoyou might want to figure out what kind of person you are early in life (as in mid 20s early) and what do you need in life in terms of company it took me 30 years to really understand what i need in life in terms of company. going by my feelings in my 20s i would have missed the things that actually matter. when i got married i had a long checklist of things that i thought would matter, but later i realized that many of those things didn't matter and some things that did matter were missing. today i can say that what matters to me first and foremost is absolute support and loyalty and an extreme gentleness. because those are in my character and it works better if it goes both ways. in my 20s i was completely unaware of these traits, so i would not have been able to look for them. it should be noted that i believe that loyalty and support belong in every marriage, and the issue here is that we are not teaching our children how to be good partners or friends. and we really should be doing that more