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[Biowraith]

I'm up to 41 years and the loneliness isn't showing any signs of lessening, so maybe?  Probably it depends on the source and form of your loneliness and how well equipped you are to successfully remedy it.  I mean if you google it you'll find people telling stories about how lonely they were but they've made some changes / got help / whatever and now it's a distant memory... but there's definitely people who battle it their entire lives.

[scriver]

I blame the computer

[Reelya]

I blame the computer

Yeah, nah, it's probably not that. That's the scapegoat. People want the simple answer. Boomer spear-headed the loneliness epidemic, and they barely know how to turn a computer on.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2019/05/03/millennials-and-the-loneliness-epidemic/#3a967f507676

Loneliness is tough to gauge directly, but measures of social isolation—for example, living alone or single marital status—can be a good proxy. When we look at the trend in living alone, we see a sweeping upward curve. Worldwide, up until the 1960s, single-person households were exceedingly rare. But over the past 50 years, the share of U.S. households consisting of one person has more than doubled. It’s now the second most common household type, well ahead of married couples with minor children. Living alone is most prevalent in large cities, where around 40% of households have single occupants. In some neighborhoods in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., the share is as high as two-thirds­.

Those are actually good measures of whether people are lonely. Single parents, solo households, unmarried people. Whereas "social media use" basically doesn't show any statistical correlation whatsoever with the loneliness epidemic. And it's kind of a hard call to say that smartphones caused people to stop renting share houses, moving in with the girlfriend / getting married.

What this is, is probably a disease of "affluenza". People can afford to get their own place now, whether they're single or not, often whether they working or not, whether they have a kid or not. There once used to be economic incentives built-in that encourags multi-generational households, extended family. That gave way to the nuclear family. We're now well into the "sub nuclear family" era, where having a "family" (i.e. people you live with) is seen as redundant. Mobile phones and the internet can compensate for that, but they're not the cause of it.

[dragdeler]

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[MrRoboto75]

What this is, is probably a disease of "affluenza". People can afford to get their own place now, whether they're single or not, often whether they working or not, whether they have a kid or not. There once used to be economic incentives built-in that encourags multi-generational households, extended family. That gave way to the nuclear family. We're now well into the "sub nuclear family" era, where having a "family" (i.e. people you live with) is seen as redundant. Mobile phones and the internet can compensate for that, but they're not the cause of it.

Its the opposite.  Young people cannot afford homes, much less rent these days.  They're shackled down by massive student loan debt, wages basically never growing at any point in their lives, and a shitty labor market that underemploys, never promotes, and is increasingly 'gig economy'.  Its a fact that financial fuckery has stunted their entire lives, including home ownership and marriage.  And they aren't having kids because that's just going to be massive medical debt noone can afford.

Social media certainly has increased depression and loneliness.  It encourages people to compete with literal highlight reels of other people's lives.  Online dating's another issue, turning people into commodities in a buyer's market most men simply cannot compete in at all, and has eroded all other forms of meeting people.

[scriver]

I blame the computer

Yeah, nah, it's probably not that. That's the scapegoat. People want the simple answer. Boomer spear-headed the loneliness epidemic, and they barely know how to turn a computer on.

I blame the computer, and also the liberalism

[Iduno]

I don't seem to ever reset from anxiety these days, unless I take meds for it; and even then, it only helps a little. For bonus points, it's become bad enough that if I'm not stressed, it stresses me; because the natural state now is that I should be anxious, so if I'm not something must be wrong.

When I relax for the first time in a long time, all of the stuff I didn't have energy to deal with previously comes back. That sounds a bit like what you described.

Also, it's a short-term solution, but relaxants can help. I know I need relatively low-strength stuff to prevent my anxiety from being set off, but getting yourself some breathing room once in a while helps. I get some flak for being a lightweight, but I can also de-stress enough to make good better decisions. Yoga or other relaxation may or may not also work for you. Or go see great clown Pagliacci.

What I can't deal with is the self loathing. Which I think may actually be inducing the anxiety and depression that I then have to drag myself out of. Whenever something goes wrong I can't help but kick myself over it for months. There's stuff that happened last November that I'm still gnawing on. If someone asked me what I thought was good about myself, I'd be stumped because I don't think there's anything good about myself. I hate my appearance, I hate my personality, I hate my social skills, and I hate that I hate myself. I need a fucking therapist but I can either pay out of my arse for a private one (Not gonna fucking happen, I'm a jobless student) or I can wait months for a therapist on the NHS, all the while the people I'm talking to in order to try and get a therapist are going to try to convince me to go with some other method that won't work like online CBT.

Yeah, the whole being in the present and mindfulness thing isn't a good thing to do with anxiety. If the problem is over-focusing on things, you don't want to train yourself to focus even harder.

I'd recommend drugs, yoga, and/or humor for you as well.


And the thing that makes me sad right now is the Taco Bell conversation in the well-named WTF thread. Not because people are exaggerating how good/bad it is there as a joke, but because there are people who would actually defend a corporation, even ones that make money by slightly undercutting everyone else with hugely inferior products.

[scourge728]

Human civilization is on the verge of collapse

[hector13]

Human civilization is on the verge of collapse

Tell me when it isn’t?

[Reelya]

Last Tuesday.

[Yoink]

Pointing out that a restaurant chain's food counts as food =/= defending the company in question.

[wierd]

This is true- It is still technically food. Just not "Mexican food".  Sorta like how "american cheese" really isn't cheese.  (It's still food, just not cheese.)

[Jopax]

So apparently, according to this one story, Jeremy Soule is a rapist. So there's that :I

[TD1]

I'm not saying it didn't happen. I'm saying she obviously blames her financial difficulties and losing her job on him, that the post documents with an impressive level of detail everything that happened after (did she not send Jeremy an accusatory email? A text? Anything? From her later emails, it seems like her modus operandi...) and that she chooses to reveal this in a blog post (ensuring maximum views) rather than reporting it to the police.

There are reasonable explanations for all of these things, of course, but that blog post alone does not convince me, personally, at all.

[Jopax]

It does not need to convice, just cast enough of a doubt to taint pretty much everything he's made (atleast for me). This is why situations like these are so goddamn nasty, it's really hard (or impossible) to know for sure in most cases but outright dismissing them is even worse because it sends a message to real rape victims that they shouldn't bother ousting their attackers because nobody will believe them anyways.