The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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This is a weird question, but my dears, if I can't find weirdoes here to help answer it, where will I find them?
So... what do you do if you're not lonely?
By which I mean, all the pop psychology and media opinion pieces and chatty helpful (annoying) little mental health wellness driblets tell you you should be lonely if (check off list of things).
Apparently there's a loneliness epidemic. Or maybe there isn't, opinions differ. But there is agreement: lack of connection is bad for you, including bad for your physical health. Some are optimistic that AI can be your friend instead.
Yeah, but... I'm alone, but I'm not lonely. I can check off that list:
Lack of human connection? Yes
Social isolation? Yes
No friends? Yes
No close family members? Yes
No romantic partners (this seems to be the big one, the cri de coeur of the incels and I do not mock them with this)? Yes
No kids/fulfilment? Yes
Not even furbabies? Oh hell yeah no pets
But you socialise? You travel? You do things? You have hobbies? No
I should be curled up in a ball crying and weeping and wringing my hands about wanting all that, and I'm not.
Now, am I depressed? I think I might be (can't get a diagnosis, the one and only time I mentioned suicidal ideation to my doctor I got asked was I self-harming or tried suicide? no? nothing to see there, then), but while the big light-bulb "aha!" moment there should be "and that's because you're so isolated", I don't think so. I've wanted to be dead (not the same as wanted to commit suicide, I've never tried that) since I was about eleven, but here it is decades and decades later and I'm still here.
The cynical view is "but you need friends because friendships are transactional and can be monetised; if you do things for them they have to do things for you". That's never worked for me, because the few times back when I was young and dumb enough to ask, in return for 'do this for me get that for me of course we'll do the same for you', "okay so now can you do this for me?" suddenly and miraculously it was always the wrong time, inconvenient, impossible for some reason.
So I never grew to regard friendship as transactional because I could never get those transactions going (sorry, Rorschach, I disagree with you there even though I would be sympathetic to a lot of your thinking and if that makes me an authoritarian, Alan Moore, then too bad).
But I'm not lonely. I'm on my own, and I'm happy that way (if you accept that this, for me, constitutes "happy"). Mostly I don't like people. I can fake it, I can get along for short bursts of interaction at work and elsewhere, remember things other person said and bring them up or talk about some topic in the news, but about five minutes is my maximum tolerance and ability to pretend normality. After that, I have to consciously remind myself "do not say out loud 'I wish this person would shut up and go away and stop bothering me', keep the expression of mild interest and pleasant smile on until they do feck off, don't look at something else like paperwork or computer screen or whatever".
So what do I do, when I'm supposed to be lonely and wanting all that human connection, but I don't. I really, honestly, don't.
What do you do when you're supposed to be lonely but you're not?
I've been mulling over this comment since I read it shortly after you posted yesterday. Like others, I have the impression that within your comment is a need, a plaintive statement of dissatisfaction, though most of what you write here suggests the opposite (that you're happy, though you immediately qualify the term.) Yet you do now wish and long have wished to not exist:
Why? Not why are you still here but why would you wish to not be?
I didn't answer immediately because I'm certainly not a trained counselor or psychiatrist but I felt like I wanted to probe deeper into your motivations in posting this comment. I'm probably just as weird (to use your term) as anyone on here but with a more normie veneer. I too have little problem being alone most of the time. I've spent vast swaths of my life alone, and not in the "we're all really alone" sense but in the no one else anywhere near me sense. I'm not a stranger to it. But it can be a great weight. It's like anything, fine for as long as it's fine, but too much of it and you're asking for trouble. You sense this, though you're not giving voice to it.
Generally it was "hey guys, am I a sociopath?" and the response so far seems to be "yeah of course, you weirdo" "okay, thanks for the clarification!" 😁
Because as I say, I'm reading and hearing all this "loneliness epidemic" stuff, even to the extent of participating in a work webinar about social isolation and suicide (cheerful topic) and while the speaker was going on about "and this and this and this means people are isolated and that means increased risk of that bad outcome and that bad outcome and that", I was internally going "but I don't feel like that, I don't have this and this and this but I don't miss it or want it?"
Very interesting. You're not quite what I would have predicted or imagined, and I'm not terrible at predicting/imagining, though of course I'm not Kreskin. You don't seem insane or sociopathic to me, except when you do, but then that's just Woman TM. Vive la difference. You got Sloot in here derailing the conversation so that's a point on the board for you. I'm sorry if my interest seemed untoward, but I am forever trying to print faces on the masks/usernames here.
Oh no problem, I am absolutely terrible at name remembering (I can remember faces, you should hear me go "oh! that's so-and-so, you know, that person from back when we did the thing! is her name Margaret? Jane? something like that?" about people I worked with for eight years but have not seen for a whole six months) so I can't match up usernames to people on here. I just go "hey isn't this that same numbskull who said that dumb thing about peppercorns?" and launch into the fray even if it's not, in fact, the same person.
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