I'm very introverted, so loneliness was usually not a big problem for me. But now I feel like I just need some more people to talk to. Just something else to do besides work.
How do you all do it?
I'm very introverted, so loneliness was usually not a big problem for me. But now I feel like I just need some more people to talk to. Just something else to do besides work.
How do you all do it?
Okay, but none of that is relevant to what OP asked, which is how they can meet people, not how they get over their extreme social phobia.
Also that's great for Alex Honnold's conception of climbing, a guy who is literally famous for being a guy who climbs alone and who started climbing before the sport exploded in popularity in the early 2010s, but that is not the case for basically every other person who takes up the sport.
It's relevant to what you were saying the problem was with OP's predicament, which you were wrong about.
It was for me. Doesn't matter if it's not the common rock-climbing experience (and I'd bet it's more common than you realize). It still shows that your reasoning for why people tend to be alone is completely vapid. The fact remains, a person can take up rock climbing and have such a hobby that never alleviates their loneliness no matter how serious they get about that activity and no matter how self-actualized they become. Your original statements to that effect are nonsense and it's unfortunate you can't seem to just accept that and try to be better about it in the future.
It so happens that Alex Honnold now often climbs with friends and has many videos where he does so, but it's because he addressed deeper issues, overcame systemic obtacles our capitalist society erects that especially impede neurodivergent people with social difficulties, and made efforts to put himself into social situations, not because he took up the hobby in the first place. His solitude was not because he was failing at "pursuing self-actualization by cultivating special interest or hobby skills" because he has been able to do that in a way to a greater degree than most humans ever will. He was also fortunate enough to eventually get so good and proficient at his solitary "hobby" as to be financially self sufficient and relatively well-off, things that make it infinitely easier to overcome the social alienation we all experience under capitalism but that hit people with social anxieties and certain personality disorders much harder (which is part of why what you said is in fact ableist). Like countless other people, he spent many years being deeply passionate about an activity, finding himself through it, but still lived an intensely solitary lifestyle. He was living out a van all by himself and without any other home, traveling to wherever he wanted to climb at that moment.
Whether that's common or not, (and I'd argue it's quite common to have many hobbies and interests but still struggle with isolation and loneliness) it puts the lie to what you said about the problem so many people have with meeting others, even having to ask how to do so or to interact in social settings, being due to their failure to self-actualize or develop interests or hobbies. It's a sweeping ableist generalization based in ignorance. And then you doubled down on it in an even more derogatory way when muslimmarxist correctly called it out. Just...
disengage