Lately, I’ve been noticing that, since the pandemic started, it’s become nigh impossible to find people who want to put the time into making new friends. I’ve made a lot of friends since the pandemic started, but all of them are online, and all of them are generally social people as-is.
It feels like people have passed a nihilist tipping point, seeing the world end before them under the capitalist system. It seems like very few people see any reasoning to put time into new people, some people I know fully self-isolated over the course of the pandemic and now don’t engage with anyone more than they need to.
This issue seems worse in person, I just moved to a new city. Only been here a few months, but it’s looking like absolutely no one wants to make friends here. People’s jaded-ness is much more noticeable in person, everyone expects to be ghosted or mistreated, no one’s willing to be vulnerable around others.
Is anyone else noticing this? does anyone else have tips for getting around this? surely I’m not the only one who’s feelin’ a lil more lonely than usual.
Your misfortune aches my heart. I know I too have suffered under long periods of isolation before even the pandemic. I basically purposefully committed social suicide soon after high school during a mental breakdown and I was a very particular breed of picky and insufferable. I’ve been much more fortunate in recent years but in the last week my fortune seems to have dried up a little. I hope you are doing better now this many months later. Thank you for sharing some stuff about your life, even if just a glimpse. It is very humanizing.
The behavior I presented until 2019 that I mentioned in the text actually affected my social life to the point I was temporarily dismissed from my party in October last year to “protect the image” of the party, so one of the pillars of my life also broke down then. It was obviously awful at the time, a big rupture which saddened all of us. It does contribute to my social isolation. But funny enough, I don’t feel bad about it now. I became critical of my party’s methods, because in a sense they were simply reproducing bourgeois punitivism, treating a structural social issue by focusing on the individual case, and avoiding facing contradiction. Still, it’s a party I still respect, and remain in agreement to its program.
I feel better because I didn’t realize how I had slowly created an identity for myself, which was a “militant” identity. As a result of this, I was losing my critical reasoning “protecting” my party from criticism and became less and less accessible to criticism for some subjects related to my party’s political line, which hampered my learning. I became a more open individual after the event.
I appreciate your empathy, but in any case it shouldn’t 🙂
In life and history, nothing is sacred, everything is destroyed and transformed. Whether under pleasure or suffering, nothing is gained, nothing is lost. I’ve suffered, yet I made many people suffer as well. I am living the consequences of my actions, and this is reasonable, I accept my fate and will happily live through it.