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Comment by CharlesDodgson | Hacker News Reader

Kind of reminds me when I lived on my own for a while, I really started liking my own company and reading, watching stuff, staying up late and generally doing what I felt I liked best. It wasn't negative really I'd just go to the gym, bake a cake, watch a few documentaries, attempt to learn some code, it was overall a nice experience.

Then I realised that I was liking my own company too much and people weren't all they were cracked up to be. I thought for my own mental health it was best to break this deadlock and start integrating myself more with friends.

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Your experience seems related to my issue ever since I left college.

I really enjoy my personal time and relish the idea of coming home on a Friday with no social plans or obligations, so that I can do my own thing, read, or program some personal projects. I highly value learning, and it is hard for me to be disciplined if I'm being social during the week. So sometimes I just keep to myself all week. I exercise after work, come home and make a nice dinner, program and read about the things I love, and I love doing this.

My problem is that after doing this for extended periods of time, I actually start to get sad and feel like I'm constantly optimizing my life for nothing, because what's the point of life if you don't share it with others? So then I switch gears and try to be as social as possible, and start enjoying life as I meet new people and come home late at night after an epic outing with my friends, laying down in my bed feeling happy and satisfied with my decisions (a significant part of this feeling is being drunk for sure). And slowly but surely, the feeling comes creeping up: I've lost touch with who I am, everything I learned weeks ago was for nothing because now I'm forgetting it, and I'm wasting my time and hurting my future by being too social.

I guess it's just hard for me to strike a balance. I think I like to go all in on things and so I feel like this chronic teeter-totter is going to be my life for a while.

You are overthinking it - a balance is not hard to achieve. Go out a few days a week, learn the rest. You are most likely to get invited to go out Friday and Saturday nights, so spend weekday nights or Sunday studying. No need to go all out in one or the other.

> I've lost touch with who I am, everything I learned weeks ago was for nothing because now I'm forgetting it, and I'm wasting my time and hurting my future by being too social.

In my experience, not only does the former happen even when I am full time learning (I "wasted" a lot of nights in college learning programming stuff I never used nor can remember), but it rarely hurts my career. I mean, career goals are personal and differ, but I doubt you are hurting your career by going out every now and then.

Word. Humans are inherently social beings. Even from birth, physical touch changes rate of brain development for the better. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201310...

Really good book on relationships and humans as fundamentally social is Attached. Leaving ya with the final memo from Chris McCandless, independent adventurer from 'Into the Wild': "Happiness only real when shared"

I actually read Into the Wild when I was younger and that was the quote I was channeling. That quote has resonated with me ever since and reshaped the way I think about relationships and what it means to be happy.

>because what's the point of life if you don't share it with others?

That seems like an assumption created by social pressure. There are plenty of aspects that make life worthwhile that don't need to be shared.

It's an interesting question. Certainly, received wisdom in my own family is that shared experience is what creates meaning in our life and memories. However, one can find many successful figures in history (Nikola Tesla, etc.) who were certainly 'successful', nominally happy, and relative or declared hermits. I've met real world hermits who seem content. One of the big European self-help authors got his start as an antisocial homeless person meditating on Buddhism. Discipline and a lifelong love of learning and intellectual exploration are not automatic traits... perhaps those without these types of developed habits find it harder to obtain fulfillment in relative solitude?

You don't need many friends, you need a wife that would listen to your stories, and to focus on your hobbies.

God help anyone who has to listen to my stories! I wonder how my partner does it!

At the time I as single and not really looking for anyone else in an emotion or physical way, 8 years later and I'm still not married. bu that's fine. As a sidebar, I'm not really that hot on the concept of marriage, not that I don't believe in monogamy, I just don't think I need to get the State involved in the validation of my love for and monogamous commitment to another person. Although to keep family sweet and social norms I'll probably get the piece of paper.

Not only are you assuming their gender/spousal preferences, but I feel this grossly simplifies the issue.

Not everybody needs a "wife" (maybe you should have said partner) and I'm not sure why you are assuming that would help the poster.

OP said 'wife' and we all understood what op meant. There is nothing negative to his comment, why are you implying there was?

It’s ok to sometimes make some assumptions in order to make your point more digestible and keep the conversation flowing.

As to why he thinks getting a wife would help the poster: I’d bet visarga had the experience of getting a wife or some kind of partner, and found that it helped him through a similar problem the poster is having.

It’s ok to share your anecdotal experiences. This is an Internet forum, not somebody’s peer reviewed dissertation.

Fixed for opposite gender: You don't need many friends, you need a husband that would listen to your stories, and to focus on your hobbies.

Thanks for sharing, I think we had a very similar experience, I'm actually not a drinker, never took to it, so I guess I never experience that side of it.

This mirrors my own feelings about this. I often rely on my friends bothering me to hangout ("It's been two weeks!") as a signal it's been too long.

Incomplete story? Not sure you make a strong case for "for my own mental health its best", cause it sounded like things were quite good.

Personally, I'm a micro-social-er. I joke with my son (and now, girlfriend) that we have an empty restaurant habit. I see and interact with people in my (admittedly) pretty regimented lifestyle (gym 1 or gym 2, daily trips to grocery stores 'cause i cook most of my foods, etc), movies alone, etc.

I find socializing to be kind of like carbs... they're free and plentiful in the world. You can usually find someone to do something sometime in the next two weeks.

Where people seem to fall apart on this is when they get a sense, on a Thursday, that they NEED to socialize the next day and can't lock in a participant. But that seems like poor planning more than, "I've been abandoned".

I've been around the block with this issue myself. I've always needed less social interaction than most people I know, but recently I've taken a turn towards even more time alone than usual (a medical condition has me both cooking at home very frequently and doing anything I can to avoid stress, and a few key friends have become busy with marriage and kids).

More time alone has definitely reduced my stress load, but I've noticed it seems to amplify tendencies towards depression and anxiety.

This touches on a topic I often struggle with -- the advice to push yourself out of your comfort zone. At least with social anxiety and social ineptitude, my results seem to indicate that pushing myself results in a huge spike in stress, with maybe a tiny uptick in social savvy, whereas isolation drastically reduces that stress, but with no headway on becoming less socially awkward. The tradeoff seems very lop-sided (if becoming a social butterfly requires swallowing that much stress, I'm not sure it is worth it).

I'm starting to think the "push yourself" is a piece of advice which seems universally applicable at first glance, but upon closer inspection you find it doesn't always fit.

My worry is maintaining relationships. I'd happily be the guy who only socializes on Saturday, but I worry about the effects of not meeting with my group of friends as often as they meet with each other.

Same experience here.

And I am repeating the experience : I have just moved to another continent. I am not the most social person ever but once I will be settled in (there are a ton of formalities in order to get an SSN, open a bank account, rent a place, etc), I will make sure to subscribe to yoga, cooking classes or whatever else I find interesting in order to ease myself into this new place and try to meet new people.

BTW advice on meeting new people in the US/Cali is welcome.

I can function with very minimal social interactions, but on the long run I find it a very boring and unsatisfactory life.

So I have been pushing myself more and more to go out and meet new people.

Meetup.com is a pretty effective way to meet with people who also want to form social circles. As are sports meets, such as cycling groups. And maybe the best of all is volunteerism. Sign up to volunteer for something you think is worthwhile and you'll make new friends lightning fast.

Thanks for the advice, definitely appreciated !

I was in the same boat as you (moved from Canada to LA by myself). You have the right idea with yoga and cooking classes. I highly recommend a social dance class too. I've been doing salsa dancing for about 6 months now and it's a great way to meet new friends, especially those of the opposite gender. It's also nice to surround yourself with non-engineers too. Since you dance with everyone in the class you end up talking to everyone, unlike yoga (which I also love doing) where people tend to just get up and leave.

I was a hopeless dancer to start but after you go for about a month you get a hang of it. The only thing I regret was not joining sooner.

Thanks !

I am at the hopeless dancer step too, so it might be hard at first but it could be a fun (if embarassing) challenge !

I am fond of telling people that I have danced on six continents and that I'm actually a horrible dancer. That doesn't stop me from dancing, however. I will get out on the floor, in the middle of a circle in the desert, around a fire in a field, etc... I just get out there and wiggle with the music.

I don't even care if I can't dance. I care that I try and I care that I enjoy it. So, I've poorly danced on your continent, quite probably. Life is short, so I dance with passion and not with skill.

Which continent are you missing? I went to a dance party in Antarctica (Freezing Man, 2016). It was strange, but a lot of fun. There were a lot of balloons, and due to the dryness, they clung to my beard very well. Unless I moved my head too much.

haha

As long as you enjoy doing it, it does not matter what your skill level is :)

I don't really enjoy the experience so far but it might come with a bit more skill.

One of my favorites was dancing wildly around a fire in Somalia. We didn't even share much of a language and the alcoholic beverages where some horrific concoction whose only saving grace was that it was efficiently effective.

Ah, but we danced. People even put aside their firearms to dance. I don't know what we were celebrating, but celebrating is what we did.

As near as I can tell, there were no specific dance moves and, every once in a while, you'd be pushed into the center of a circle of dancers. Once in the center, it was your chance to shine. Just let go of your inhibitions and move as the music moves you.

Somewhere, there is video of this episode. I've shown it to the missus, we weren't together at the time. She's concluded that my dance reminds her of the mating ritual of the blue-footed booby but sped up by a factor of ten.

I'm reluctant to tell people what they should do, so I will say that dancing like nobody is watching (even if they are) is a great release.

I've found that most of the time I'm good with my own company, but after about 3 days I need some substantive social interaction for best mental health. Exercise can sometimes be an effective substitute, though.

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