Basically what the title says, two questions:
- Do you feel lonely or socially isolated?
- If you are, what are you trying to change that?
According to the WHO it’s an epidemic,
I’ve been emigrating to different countries about every 15 years and had to rebuild a network of friends from scratch every time. The younger I was the easier it was obviously. But that is a lot of work and you need to invest time and energy which I sometimes don’t have so much, especially now with a small child which needs a lot of attention.
We meet up as a family with other families about once a month and it’s really great, but while my wife keeps in contact with the other mothers in between online, somehow we dads don’t even have a group chat where we would do that and perhaps propose to meet up, it’s always the women who propose it.
It’s kind of weird that its like that and I should change it.
While the WHO doesn’t call it outright an epidemic, it seems they think it’s such a big problem that they created a specific commission to foster social connection: https://www.who.int/news/item/15-11-2023-who-launches-commission-to-foster-social-connection
I have a severe circadian rhythm disorder (combined with a handful of complicating mental health conditions) and unfortunately can’t be awake during the day 😅
if I manage to move my schedule it just drifts back to being extremely late, and when I’ve had jobs I’ve progressively found it harder and harder to be awake when work starts, or when I was in highschool, struggled more and more to get up for school until I was just missing school a lot of the time (though that was also in part because I was going through the first real mental health episode I’ve experienced and didn’t know what to do about it or how to cope)
The not working is mostly due to social anxiety and mental health hurdles with applying and interviewing, but I do think that’s changing. I’ve been kinda stuck for a while though.
A friend group of mine who all rented a house together used to do movie nights and I really enjoyed it :) we all took turns picking stuff and I haven’t seen almost any movies so I had a great time. Unfortunately they don’t live together anymore and some moved away. That friend group is a lot more split up a now, so I was thinking about stating a new one :)
Edit: lmao, who downvoted me for explaining my medical condition, what a dick