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.
Same thing is happening here, and I even thought about that as well. I think lockdowns related to the pandemic have made us “locked-down” on our electronic devices and individual homes, which tends to make our sociability even more damaged. It reminds me of a Marx quote:
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
I see this quote very related to this, and I think the less time we spend talking to friends, hanging out, having conversations, the more we will tend to feel isolated. All things the pandemic have made very difficult to do.
For me personally, it’s been tough, because I love people, I love talking, I love listening. I had more than one breakdown this whole time, and it’s difficult to maintain your mind straight through this. The only things that make me not lose it completely is my comrade-love, my Party comrades, and other comrades I talk to on the internet, including Lemmygrad, and of course my flaming hot hatred for the bourgeoisie.
This is actually one of the reasons I created this sublemmy, so we can have a space to talk to each other, which is one of the things I thought was missing in Lemmygrad. We tend to focus on the political aspects of our struggle, but we sometimes forget that we are all human, we need love, we need friendship and affection for a healthy functioning.
I have no “friends”, besides my Party comrades. I lost all my friendships in 2019, because I was honestly an asshole back then. I have been through a lot in that year; I was persecuted by a mob agitated by an ex-girlfriend whose feelings I hurt, I was hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic and I have been in isolation even before the pandemic.
Besides the study of Marxism-Leninism, one thing that made my “shell” a bit thicker was meditation, where I sit, and do nothing, so that the only thing moving are my thoughts, paying close attention to not feel attached to a particular subject that pops up. After a while, like 30 minutes in the same position (which must obviously be comfortable), thoughts tend to fade more and more, and you start to feel as though there is no distinction between the inside and the outside. It’s a state of mind where your “self” disappears, and it’s quite interesting.
Through meditation I have developed an emotional detachment from things, but not like a nihilistic detachment. It’s a detachment from the self, and you feel a connection with the whole. Of course, your mind accumulates a bit of dust over time, exactly like Mao once said. So for me it’s supposed to be a practice to maintain my own health, but it’s been quite a while since I’ve meditated again because I haven’t felt the urge to do so, but I’ve been thinking of doing it again eventually, because this urge will come eventually.
Another thing I suggest, if you use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube etc., try to limit the time you spend on those networks, or even stop using them for a while. It did good for me.
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.
I hope you are doing better now this many months later.
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.
Your misfortune aches my heart.
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.
This is still very relatable and your observations are still very apt 9 months later.
In the past few years, when I could muster the time and energy I have tried to make friends. I got pretty far one time with someone who shared a career aspiration but the poor bloke was a heavy, heavy alcoholic (among other things) which is hard for me because of my own personal life reasons. I ghosted him and, nearly a year later, I still feel bad and think about him and think about what I should say to him to try and undo things.
The hurt, desperation, and insecurity of many strangers is indeed very visible in their eyes and energy. I DoorDash so I interact with a half dozen or so people at a couple dozen different restaurants regularly. I sometimes try and gently test talking with people when I’m free and waiting for an order but either my bullshit, their bullshit or a combination fucks it up and we awkwardly ignore each other more or less. I wish I could be loud and frank and just acknowledge these ugly things so we could move past it but alas this is far from acceptable in the tense, plastic atmosphere of America circa 2022.
I talked to a friend about this, to boil down what they said in agreement of it being way too hard to meet new people lately; ‘Emotional energy is a luxury nowadays’. And honestly, that’s absolutely the case.
Yes, it almost feels like another mechanism with which they keep us down. Drain us dry so we have nothing left but to drown out the day with various opiates.
