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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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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?
This plus "not wanting to be alive" (!) suggests some underlying tensions here?
Based on somebody else's assertion below, I'm going to respond as an assumed co-religionist, so disregard if that assumption is false. I also don't have as much life experience as you, so I want to apologize if it's presumptuous to say this, that's definitely not my intent. I've thought a lot about the fact that most people, married or not, parents or not, have a very good chance of ending up in effective solitude, so in a real sense I'm speaking to my future self here.
"Cool friends, fun hobbies and a cute pet" is a very urban-atomized, Enlightenment-via-Instagram model of the Good Life. I think you're fortunate to have the resources to push back against it. But you know there's also a clear tradition of writing, by far smarter folks than us who have also suffered far more, and whose experiences thus give them the right to opine, pointing out that pure indolent, avoidant solitude is also not how humans are meant to spend the life they are given. Like dogs, I think we are really better in service, even unpleasant service, than in leisure. Definitely not because, like, "volunteering makes you friends" or because human beings will ever reciprocate the painful care you give (luckily Christianity is very clear on this!), but because (at least as I understand it) unreciprocated love also appears to be what God does, possibly the nature of Creation itself, hence is just part of our basic design.
I don't want to get out over my skis here, so I'll quit with the dubious theology. But you are a clever woman, excellent with language, based on your posts at least a generous-natured person with some wisdom and capability. Is there no way that you're being called to put those talents to service? Nothing dumb and menial that needs doing in your parish, your neighborhood, your building? No way that you should be the one to help a plant, an animal, a child, some other person in your world, whom you are currently failing to assist? If apparently not, do you ask enough to be sure of hearing the call if it came? Do you at least pray hard for all the rest of us losers, like the anchoresses did? (Because if you don't, uh, I at least could sure use somebody to put in a good word for me.)
I guess what I'm saying is, are you quite sure you're not the one lazily shirking reciprocity for the gifts you've been given, and could the cognitive dissonance here be a bit of a guilty conscience? And that's coming with all sympathy from someone who knows this struggle to be real.
That is definitely part of it. I really don't like people, so I grumble hard about "God commands I love you (dammit)".
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