60% Introvert. At least, I used to think of myself as an introvert, but recently I’ve come to wonder if that really is what I am. My hometown is Adelaide, Australia, but I’m currently in Hangzhou, China. I’m 24.
For the first 23 years of my life I lived with my family. I used to think that I loved being by myself, because I never really felt the need to make any special effort to see friends. Also, I loved the times I was ‘home alone’. However, I think that I may actually have been mistaken—I think I just took the company of my parents for granted, and for most of that time I was also at school and then university, which meant that I had no choice but to have a fair amount of social contact anyway.
Within the last year I have moved out of home. I now live alone, and I don’t like it—I’m basically permanently lonely when at home. I’ve noticed a very strong correlation between my long term wellbeing and the frequency of unavoidable contact with a few people who I like and trust. The happiest times of my life have been when I have had very frequent contact (many hoursalmost every day) with a few close friends. As a side note, this situation seems only ever to arise with those you live or work with. There are entire years when I have been very happy where I can trace that wellbeing to those close friends, and a few years where I was quite unhappy almost entirely because of loneliness. It seems to be the strongest determinant of my long term wellbeing.
So… the secret seems to be (and I hope it is obvious that I’m thinking while I write, and I have no certainty of what I’m saying) to have many interactions of the kind “it’s a given”. If you are already in love, then that interaction is a given. If you work at adjacent desks, that is a given. Most importantly for the topic, if you live in the same house, it is a given. There is no social tension, no need to consult your mental model of hierarchies. You are interacting with that person because you live together which is completely legit. You don’t need to be proving yourself and testing them all the time.
I agree with this.
As an additional note, I have found that incidental contact with acquaintances and strangers does basically nothing to alleviate loneliness. I teach at a university now, so I have interactions with hundreds of students a week, but this doesn’t make me feel any less lonely after I leave the classroom.
Finally, I have always wondered why it is that everyone fears so much to tell other people that they are lonely (I fear breaking this taboo as well). I think that it is probably because they sense that the person they tell will feel burdened as the one who has to ‘fix’ their loneliness, but personally that wouldn’t be how I would feel if someone told me that they were lonely. Does anyone have thoughts about this?
It all sounds pretty similar to my experience. Living with my family (parents, siblings, cousins) has grown increasingly stressful over the past decade or so, though, so I find that things are usually (not always; sometimes we get along just fine and it’s fun times) worse when I’m there.
I recently did a quick-and-dirty quantifying of different aspects of my life during different time periods, and found exactly what you said about “given” social interaction to be true. My first two years of college were horribly unpleasant and unproductive, and were also the two years that I was most alone (I didn’t recognize this and was stubbornly clinging to individualism at the time); the same is true of the two years I spent at home after college (except by then I’d realized my folly; it was just absurdly difficult to do anything about it by then).
I also find myself with an irrationally negative emotional reaction whenever I so much as think the word “lonely”. “Lonesome” is slightly better, and “alone” is significantly better, but I still feel strong resistance to breaking the taboo on talking about it. (I was actually considering posting to see if there was any interest in an LW meetup anywhere I can reach. I’ll probably just wind up trying to make the St Louis meetups if I can level up my ability to travel independently.)
60% Introvert. At least, I used to think of myself as an introvert, but recently I’ve come to wonder if that really is what I am. My hometown is Adelaide, Australia, but I’m currently in Hangzhou, China. I’m 24.
For the first 23 years of my life I lived with my family. I used to think that I loved being by myself, because I never really felt the need to make any special effort to see friends. Also, I loved the times I was ‘home alone’. However, I think that I may actually have been mistaken—I think I just took the company of my parents for granted, and for most of that time I was also at school and then university, which meant that I had no choice but to have a fair amount of social contact anyway.
Within the last year I have moved out of home. I now live alone, and I don’t like it—I’m basically permanently lonely when at home. I’ve noticed a very strong correlation between my long term wellbeing and the frequency of unavoidable contact with a few people who I like and trust. The happiest times of my life have been when I have had very frequent contact (many hours almost every day) with a few close friends. As a side note, this situation seems only ever to arise with those you live or work with. There are entire years when I have been very happy where I can trace that wellbeing to those close friends, and a few years where I was quite unhappy almost entirely because of loneliness. It seems to be the strongest determinant of my long term wellbeing.
I agree with this.
As an additional note, I have found that incidental contact with acquaintances and strangers does basically nothing to alleviate loneliness. I teach at a university now, so I have interactions with hundreds of students a week, but this doesn’t make me feel any less lonely after I leave the classroom.
Finally, I have always wondered why it is that everyone fears so much to tell other people that they are lonely (I fear breaking this taboo as well). I think that it is probably because they sense that the person they tell will feel burdened as the one who has to ‘fix’ their loneliness, but personally that wouldn’t be how I would feel if someone told me that they were lonely. Does anyone have thoughts about this?
It all sounds pretty similar to my experience. Living with my family (parents, siblings, cousins) has grown increasingly stressful over the past decade or so, though, so I find that things are usually (not always; sometimes we get along just fine and it’s fun times) worse when I’m there.
I recently did a quick-and-dirty quantifying of different aspects of my life during different time periods, and found exactly what you said about “given” social interaction to be true. My first two years of college were horribly unpleasant and unproductive, and were also the two years that I was most alone (I didn’t recognize this and was stubbornly clinging to individualism at the time); the same is true of the two years I spent at home after college (except by then I’d realized my folly; it was just absurdly difficult to do anything about it by then).
I also find myself with an irrationally negative emotional reaction whenever I so much as think the word “lonely”. “Lonesome” is slightly better, and “alone” is significantly better, but I still feel strong resistance to breaking the taboo on talking about it. (I was actually considering posting to see if there was any interest in an LW meetup anywhere I can reach. I’ll probably just wind up trying to make the St Louis meetups if I can level up my ability to travel independently.)