I genuinely don’t understand why society treats social interaction like it’s one of the most important things in life.
If someone spends a weekend alone, people assume they’re lonely. If someone has no interest in constant messaging, group chats, or hanging out every week, people think something must be wrong.
Meanwhile, a lot of social interaction seems repetitive. The same conversations, the same small talk, the same routines repeated over and over.
People talk about socialising as if it’s automatically meaningful, but for many interactions the main purpose seems to be avoiding boredom or avoiding being alone.
If somebody has no friends it’s often treated like a tragic disaster, but what if that’s actually what they prefer?
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see why being comfortable alone is viewed as strange while constantly needing people around is viewed as normal.
When you’re with the right people, yeah, it’s the best. Sounds like you haven’t found people you click with.
People right now are weaponizing isolation. They are using it to seem appealing. Why interact with someone at the check out counter when you can do a self check out? Don’t worry about people losing jobs over it. Why buy things from a store when you can stay home and buy from Amazon? Why go to a movie where you can chat with strangers about the movie after you leave, you can just pay to stream it? Why bother getting to know your neighbors, that might lead to organizing, ew. Why talk to friends when you have this convenient spy website? Why talk to people at all when you can talk to the environment destroying machine? And if you’re feeling lonely, buy something you’ll feel better
Chronically online people who already are isolating themselves will tell you socializing is bad and try to present it as a misanthropic rebellion, but ultimately that’s feeding into what works for the corporate overlords.
If they didn’t want any interaction, they wouldn’t comment nor post.
So what to do?
You go do things that are interest to you, then make friends based off of that interest. Weed out shitty people and keep the good ones. People are more multi dimensional than you might give them credit for.
Or if you really feel like being a hermit, at least go all in and don’t interact with people online. So a socialization purge and don’t do anything that’s involving other people. Go on a hike alone or, if you stay home, go for a week without watching anything with dialog or other people. Just nature videos without dialog. Make something or meditate, and see how long it is before you actually want to hear another person’s words. You might actually miss it.