How I've Dealt With Extreme Loneliness

As a guy who is isolated, I can tell you it is tough, but it gets easier.

After my divorce, I moved back to my hometown.

There was hardly anybody there I knew anymore.

I did make some friends, but I ended up moving again in less than a year.

So I came to a brand new town, and started over.

I came here in Sept. 2018, and I did not know a single person.

But what I've discovered is that most adults around my age

who are single, seem to be largely isolated.

Sometimes I've made random friends by meetup groups,

playing in bands, or by being a regular at certain businesses.

But nothing really has changed it to be honest.

I came to the point where I had to accept that either there weren't

people available or that I didn't have the social skills anymore

to make friends.

What was I to do?

At first the loneliness was bitter.

Over time I came to the conclusion that most adults do not spend social time

with people who do not advance their career or help them make money.

That is an unfortunate reality about America.

When I have met people, they are always probing about money,

in indirect ways.

But I knew that if I started a friendship or relationship like that,

it would never revert to the place where there is something

OUTSIDE of money.

After this discovery, I decided not to make friends or relationships

with people who are after money through me.

I didn't have many friends at that point, and it was scary to go to zero.

But I felt like I actually was AT ZERO anyway.

Being back at zero, I kept looking on and off, but started to curtail that much.

I just couldn't get motivated to hang around with people who only wanted money.

I began to work on my own more.

I upped my music, writing more, recording more, practicing more.

Then I got to the point where it didn't bother me to be alone.

All I could see were how important the benefits were:

1. The biggest one is probably having TOTAL control of my time.

It's one thing when I waste time on something, I can accept

that because I can change it.

But when someone else is getting me to do stuff for them,

and there is little to no benefit, I can't deal with that.

2. There's no loneliness anymore.

If I go and hang around with people, but then later,

seek them, and they aren't there, that's when the loneliness hurts.

But if I don't have that expectation, and I just live my life,

that is a whole layer of pain that i do not have to feel,

and that is a healthy place to be.

A person can focus on their life plans a lot better that way.

3. I used to think that if I was lonely, there was something wrong with me.

Well, there is something wrong with me if I can't be alone.

The fact is, loneliness happens all the time.

When am I alone?

En route to work, on an airplane for hours,

AT work, in a mall, running errands, at home, and more.

Being alone is just part of modern life.

The only time someone gets lonely is if they have an expectation

that someone should be at X place at X time for me.

Is that a fair demand to place on someone else?

It's like playing Russian roulette.

The loneliness, if I build up ideas around what other people should do

FOR ME, is inevitable, and when they fail, and they will sooner or later,

then it only gets worse.

But there isn't anything wrong with someone who is alone.

There just isn't.

Being alone means that you are not with someone else at a given time.

That's it.

Maybe you tried to find people and couldn't.

That still doesn't make me or anybody else some kind of defect.


Do you know what makes something wrong with you?

There is something wrong with you if you are worried about

chasing women or being social,

but you aren't putting in some sweat on your own goals.

And that's another problem.

If i go to a club to hang out with friends,

they are long on talk,

short on action.

Everybody can talk.

But how many of these people forego the party,

in order to make their lives happen.

If you take a poll around here,

99% of everyone on the street is a musician.

But of these people, how many either have releases or performances?

If it came to 1%, I'd feel like you got lucky for it to get that high.

How many dudes want to stop looking at porn?

The number is near zero.

But is there value in that?

The value is massive, and if you don't believe it, take a simple test.

Stop looking at porn for two weeks.

If it's hard, then it usually is valueable.

It's easy to talk, it's easy to get drunk, to look at porn.

But who is willing to be alone, to work alone, to suffer alone?

I'll tell you who:

Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs,

Eddie Van Halen, Charles Bukowski, Sting,

to name a few.

Sound familiar?

Success is a lonely and solitary process.

Accept it, get on a streak, and get to work.

 

Reality is painful.

But thank you for the complement.

 

Wouldn't it be nice?

 

Chasing other people only creates expectations.

 

Yep, and they either end up jacked up or dead.

Nobody beats an addiction.

 

When a person, by their own definition, becomes an "addict"

they can't go back to "normalcy" again.

It's the same with drugs, alcohol, PMO, whatever.

An addict can't just go into rehab, and come out after 90 days,

and say, hey I'm cured! Now I can use heroin again!

Nope, once an addict, always an addict.

We have 2 choices, which is to recover, or to become a victim of our

jacked up thinking, and jacked up ways of coping with emotions and problems.

 

You can't talk to people like that on here.

That is not cool, and the admin will remove you if you repeat it.

 

My friend, you are missing my point.

Let me frame it like this:

Nobody can leave an addiction once they are an addict.

They can stop using.

But they are always an addict.

I personally have not used PMO as my day counter reads.

But when the day comes if I were to use again,

then I am back in the decadence and wrongfulness,

and also, just as trapped as I was before.

The part of the addict that gets destroyed is never repaired.

A PMO addict CAN have normal relations with another human.

A PMO addict CAN NOT expect to return to PMO and use on a casual basis.

Addicts do not have that power, or self-control.

But if someone says, "I am not an addict."

That means that they either aren't an addict,

or they aren't ready to recover.

Can you understand it now?

 

What does that have to do with anything?

If you use pmo again, you will go back to square one.

 

I should say that if I use PMO again,

I go back to square one.

But not entirely, I've reaped enormous benefits from these reboots.

But the problem of coping with life does reset when someone goes

back to the drug, back to the PMO when they can't deal.

 

They never can change the part about themselves that uses artificial means to cope.

This process of addiction damages a person that way.

But can they have a normal life and relationships? You bet.

But the addict will always have to do maintenance work in abstinence.

If they don't, what will happen is that they will lose track of the problem.

And they could go 5 years, 10, 15, 20, 30 or more,

but one day, something bad happens.

And they find themselves using the substance or PMO all over again.

That can destroy their lives at that point.

Why do I think so far down the road?

The reason is because the way America operates is bull.

America thinks about now, today, what is here.

That is not how to build a long term program of life improvement.

What good is it to make all these changes, which are hard,

just to see it all get destroyed?

It's a long-term plan, and it's hard, it takes work.

Accept it.

 

Thank you, I'm well, thanks for asking!

Keep coming back, my friend!