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dthunt comments on Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Hey, does anyone else struggle with feelings of loneliness?
What strategies have you found for either dealing with the negative feelings, or addressing the cause of loneliness, and have they worked?
Do you feel lonely because you spent your time alone or because you will you don't connect with the people with whom you spend your time?
Two separate problems.
Not feeling connected with people, or, increasingly feeling less connection with people.
I actively socialize myself, and this helps, but the other thing maybe suggests to me I'm doing something wrong.
(Edit: to clarify, my empathy thingy works as well (maybe better) than it ever has, I just feel like the things I crave from social interactions are getting harder to acquire. Like, people "getting" you, or having enough things in common that you can effectively talk about the stuff that interests you. So, like, obviously, one of the solutions there is to hang out with more bright-and-happy CFAR-ish/LW-ish/EA-ish people.)
www.meetup.com can be a good place to find groups of likeminded people.
I found the Nonviolent Communication method extremely helpful for feeling more connected to my friends.
In my experience, "dealing with the negative feelings" is useless, because if you deal with them today and you're still lonely tomorrow, the feelings will just come back. It's better to find people who are interested in the same things as you, and hang out with them.
Joining clubs is good - especially if you're willing to put in enough work for it to be implicitly joining a social scene (unfortuanately, this bit has plenty of caveats, but trial and error sometimes works fine). Do you make music? There are scenes for that. Dance, ditto. Playing card games, ditto.
LW is almost big enough to work for this, actually - certainly if one lives in a big city.
Sometimes negative emotions are just bad weather -- you have to get stuff done anyways. I also agree with and second sensible advice below on dealing with causes.
On one side, a feeling of loneliness is a signal that in my life I should socialize and connect more.
Other times though, decisions and actions taken under that emotion turned up to be pretty bad: it would have been better to just be and feel alone.
I have thus filled up my week but have left slots of time to be alone, and I know that any feeling of loneliness that I get is just a withdrawal symptom.
I've filled my social life with dancing classes, founding a local go club, joined a teaching class and time to go out with my generic friends. On the other side, when I still feel alone I just take some minutes to sit quietly and imagine being in a pleasant social or sexual situation, trying to focusing on every detail. This is usually more than enough to clean me from any negative state of mind.