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Lots of video games.
…Does it have to be a healthy coping mechanism?
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It’s an easy well to fall into.
I endure, painfully.
🫂
Whatever that is it just shows up as a square on my end.
It’s a [hug] emote.
Poorly.
I picked up a sport this year. People are surprisingly friendly.
Which sport?
Ignoring people!
I laughed 🤣
Skydiving!
I pretend to have imaginary friends in my head until it seems like real enough and the day passes.
There is a singular niche community that I involve myself with where I pop in and make highly desired items to give away for free.
It makes me feel like people care about me for a while. For now, that’s good enough for me.
I don’t know if you’ve seen this before, but I recommend the Kurzgesagt video on loneliness.
It hit me quite deep, first time I saw it.I focus on spending time with friends and family when I can. And video games when I can’t. I stopped pushing myself to do things I didn’t want to do also, that helped a lot with being disappointed in what I achieve. BG3 is nice therapy these days for me.
Though my lizard brain demands me to be around other people, most of the things that bring me genuine life satisfaction are just easier to do solo. When I’m at purely social events I also get this sense of dread that I could be making better use of my time.
The voice in my head is making contradictory demands, so I’ve learned to not feel bad for circumventing it. I have my own goals in life, instincts be damned.
I find that listening to people casually talking is usually enough to satisfy the lizard brain, so I listen to a lot of stuff in the background: YouTube video essays, Twitch Just Chatting streamers, etc. When it gets particularly demanding I’ll try engaging with the people, but usually I just let my subconscious listen while I’m focusing on more important stuff.
Sit through it
Distract
Watching others having fun together oddly helps me a bit. I might binge a youtube channel like Corridor Crew, for example. Sometimes I even prefer being “a fly on the wall” because I don’t have to participate and be drained of energy. I also don’t have to worry about feeling rejected or offending anyone (and thus no “social hangover”).
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/channel/UCSpFnDQr88xCZ80N-X7t0nQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
For me, my loneliness was really rooted in my self-loathing. When I was able to deal with that, I was able to deal with my feelings of loneliness.