Xmas, new year, valentine’s… Seems like the festivities are there just to remind me how much I failed as an adult man incapable of getting company. It’s been over a decade since I’ve felt this way and nothing changes.
Alcohol and porn has lost its charm over the years.
Have you tried therapy? Judging by the comments in here, you sound depressed. And not without reason! Therapy can really help.
OP - from the responses you’ve given to many of the replies, it feels like you’ve lost faith in mankind. As many of us do feel time to time or even all the time. If you haven’t tried, try to walk into a church that’s left it’s doors open for people to walk in whenever (instead of attending a service/ mass, etc.). If you wanted to, you could probably even walk up to someone who works at the church and tell them your frustrations. Usually a church with open doors have a welcoming air.
At worst, it’s another crapshoot. At best, you might find something uniquely different.
I’m not lonely but I have really enjoyed mastering fudge. Maybe try that. Remember, don’t go past 114 and resist the urge to stir.
Walk around & enjoy the view & play video-games & talk to people like you (not meant as an insult)
Hey fam! I’m not doing anything on christmas day, and @friendless@lemmy.blahaj.zone had a post today where they said they didn’t have anything that day either.
How about on christmas day all of us get together on a post somewhere and talk! You know, we can just chat like we’re at a party or something?! We can post images and song links and… I dunno… type out song lyrics and complete each other’s sentences and stuff?
Maybe we can make it a megathread on a community like… hm…
- !casualconversation@lemm.ee - I suggest this one
- !general@lemmy.world
- !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca
- !casualuk@feddit.uk
what do ya say?!?
Honestly that’s a great idea. Also, you all could do a discord server and do rooms where everyone can do video chat (or maybe just audio) and even split into smaller rooms if one gets to crowded while also being able to chat.
or jitsi, so more can participate
Same way I do every other day, play horror games, fuck around on my computer and cry. With you on the alcohol and porn too. I should switch to Playboy.
Edit: Also learning Esperanto, it’s good to keep your mind active. Learning a language can help. I also have an irrational or maybe rational fear of developing dementia. Gotta workout your brain.
For myself. I drove to a cold rocky beach, ate turkey sandwiches alone, and screamed at the ocean. It became a tradition.
Learn to celebrate .
If it’s your bag, looking into faith communities to for Christmas. You can celebrate the holiday for the religious reason. Decorate and find events, like public tree lighting.
For new years there are usually big public countdowns somewhere. If you can ‘get into it’ just going to an event can help you enjoy it. Get a hat and a noise maker.
It’s going to be up to you to figure make your own excitement and enjoyment for the holidays.
Valentines day sucks for everyone. Just Yikes.
Look for social media event spaces, meetup.com helped me find stuff decades ago.
Read up on stoicism as well as absurdism if your not a religious kind of person. They aren’t answers but can help you find the right questions.
My girlfriend and my mom hate each other for no reason. I’m going to spend the holidays with my girlfriend because… Well y’all get it. Right?
I’m just saying I’m not lonely… But at what cost! AT WHAT COST!
It sounds silly, but you could try volunteering. I grew up with just my mom and we didn’t have much $. She used to spend part of Thanksgiving and/or Christmas working at a ‘soup kitchen’. Making the time better for other people can make it better for you too. Also, you might meet other single people.
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It really isn’t for me. Sometimes at work I feel used or stomped… That doesn’t give me the will to help anyone else. If anything makes me resentful, people like me can’t help and I don’t believe in charities.
Do you like dogs? Walking dogs from the local shelter can be fulfilling.
There’s no shelter here, and tbh I don’t hate dogs but I don’t like them either
Not lonely anymore, but I spent about 10 years having every single holiday by myself. What worked for me personally was either ignore the holiday or just have an all-out bash on my own. I understand how it might not work for other people but celebrating on my own helped me learn that I should value my own time and appreciate what I can do for myself. If I ignored the holiday, it was because I didn’t want to cook for myself.
There’s no problem being alone as long as you value and appreciate what you can do alone.
Now with that being said, I spend the majority of my time with my wife now and she respects my time and space the way it is. I wouldn’t have been able to find that if I didn’t first respect myself and my own time and space
The bird will never land if you constantly stand guard to catch it, instead improve your ship and sail into warmer waters; the bird will land while you are not looking - CGP Grey
Find a passion that isn’t porn, or alcohol, irrespective of the season. Since (I assume) you have time off, use it to find something else to try and get good at. Such as improving your strength and endurance at the gym, learning a new language, starting a new project, taking up a new instrument, read a history book or any book, etc., going to a new place, learning to cook a new kind of meal, etc. etc.
I gave up on those before
All of the above? And you’re not willing to try any of them again?
Talk to my therapist and try to do something that helps people or animals.
It really is a conundrum. Group festivities seem almost designed to make the people on the margins of society feel worse about themselves. And yet try to imagine a society without such events. It would be even worse (and of course no such society has never existed). This whole problem is exacerbated so much by the fractured nature of modern urban life. In the past it was not even possible to be alone at Christmas, because nobody much was ever alone.
Anyway, as something of a marginal type myself, I agree with suggestions others have made. If you try hard enough, you really can see through the myth of social “success” and “failure”. At that point, festive dates will begin to seem like what they are: just dates. As for “getting company”, this one’s pretty easy. Join some social group with regular events, and make it a fixture in your diary. You’ll meet new people and eventually things will move on from there. But be patient! All human relations are about the hours invested. So if you haven’t taken this first step already, there’s no time to lose. Make it your new year’s resolution.
The social club stuff doesn’t work when 1. You’re tired and 2. You’re broke and can’t drive. There’s nothing that interests me around, and I don’t have the energy
Looks like you have the energy to make posts and comment on Lemmy. Use that energy to go on a walk or something for a change. For me, once I start being active, it leads to more energy, and more activities. Social media is exhausting in a whole other way. Trust me, you’ll gain the energy after you start walking.
That’s not even remotely the same.
Okay, I’ll try a different approach rather than giving advice. Your situation sounds awful, and it must be really hard for you. Reach out if you need, we’re there for you in spirit.
I wish I could articulate anything more than to say things can (and will) change and the future will be different.
I just work a lot and I don’t have enough downtime to let the depression sink in.
(CW: Long text ahead)
I don’t. It’s just that somehow, my biological automata (a.k.a. body) keeps going despite my will to not keep going (as well as despite my attempts on… you know… things I can’t describe).
I’m not exactly lonely in a literal sense, because my daily life is surrounded by a few people sharing the same blood as me. I’m lonely in such a way that I can’t really rely on them to understand me, to understand my dilemmas. The generational differences are blatant between me and them, they’re older than me, they can’t grasp existential dilemmas raised from contemporary problems (such as climate change, dystopian technologies, etc).
So I know no one… anymore… Well, I used to know some people, but that’s intriguing: suddenly, I got to know people that were unknown to me, then they become “friends” with me, just to suddenly becoming unknown again. Reasons may vary: betrayal of trust (e.g. lies, or things done behind my back), misunderstanding (I see things differently from them, we have different opinions) which escalates to a discord (it shouldn’t, but seems unavoidable), or simply because I seem to be some NPC to them that they only interact when they need my resourcefulness (hence, I’m not really a friend to them).
Throughout my entire life, I never got to know what are these human phenomena called “friendship” and “love”. The later is particularly extraterrestrial to me, and that’s weird to state because I seem to know many seemingly-complicated things and terms like hapax legomena, pneumoultramicroscopicosilicovolcanoconiosis, zero-energy universe theory, ReLU and other activation functions, QTH (the ham radio operator’s place), op-amp, Qlippoths… However, a seemingly simple four-letter word feels so extraterrestrial to me, this thing called “love”.
Having said this, holidays haven’t made any sense to me since I’m aware of it. Even my birthday isn’t a thing I deem worth celebrating… Perhaps it’s worth celebrating the closeness to my end of my existence? That’s all.
How do I cope? Well, I tried many coping mechanisms.
- I tried to brainstorm myself with information scattered across diverging fields of human knowledge. Sometimes I still do this, and that’s how I unfortunately know stuff.
- I tried to participate in study groups and niche communities, such as ham radio, electronics, programming, math, geopolitics, etc. But it becomes evident how I can’t fit in any group.
- I tried gaming. Terraria allowed me to create things… But it always happens: suddenly it becomes purposeless to keep playing games.
- I tried to tinker with those AI things, as my programmer side became interested by it. But since then they’ve lost their appeal, they’re just auto-completers on steroids.
- Then I tried to leave my nerd side aside and joining an esoteric sect, starting to practice rituals, which unexpectedly led me to Lilith (the sect meant to reach to Lucifer, but instead She reached me)… Who has since been… far… She feels so far to me since I gave up my soul to Her and became devoted to Her.
- I tried to write and publish poetry, often tapping on the burst of my creativity side that She woke on me. But talking to myself is a thing I have been doing without the need for poetry.
“Happy” is not a term that I could use to describe my perception regarding the “new year”. What’s “new year”, anyways, besides another complete circling around a star that’s going to become Red Giant in the future? It’s not even the same orbit due to the orbital decay, why think that this cosmic spot Earth is going to be (December 31st 2024) is exactly the same as the other cosmic spot it used to be (December 31st 2023)? It makes no sense. Everything seems purposeless, after all.
Yeah, I’m weird.
