It didn’t used to be. At least for me and i don’t recall constantly seeing posts on social media about how lonely and sad everyone was or how to make friends. Now every other magazine article is about how lonely everyone is, nobody gets together, and gen Z doesn’t socialize, drink, or have sex.
Why is there such an epidemic of loneliness and why are people content to be lonely rather than socialize?
Why is so hard to connect? Because people having nothing in common anymore? I used to connect with people over books, movies, hobbies, etc. But now it feels increasingly hard to do that. Most folks I meet don’t care about any of that, they just mostly complain about their lives to you or go on political rants about how unfair the world is.
My friends and my dates no longer seem to watch films, or do much of anything other than spend time on social media? I dont’ use social media so I’m pretty ignorant of it all.
@TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
Perhaps I must illustrate this with a story I write as I compose this very reply.
Imagine someone is brought into this world, to a house of three.
Year after year, the small family slowly improves the house: the backyard got new toys for the kid to play with, a new bedroom is made, cradle becomes a desk for doing school homework. As the kid grows, he starts helping his parents with the reforms, both for him and for them.
Kid becomes teen, then he modifies much of his bedroom to fit his tastes. He grows more, then his former toys get carefully wrapped and stored for his intended, future children.
He becomes adult. He starts college and job. He’s made himself a career and he got promoted. He buys himself a better PC (the first thing he got to buy with his own paycheck) and he repurposes a corner of his desk for tinkering with electronics and ham radio.
One day, a strong climatic disaster happens, and the house partially crumbles to the ground. The whole family dies in the disaster. They get buried at the local cemetery. What’s left of the house is sold and the new owner, a construction corp, decides to further demolish to merge the land with the neighboring houses they also bought.
Land becomes a warehouse and, after a few decades, a data center for a mid-21st century tech corp, where exabytes are stored in quantum servers. The story of that very family, however, is nowhere to be found, as their gravestones, and the cemetery as a whole, have been seeing fewer and fewer mourning guests as time passes, also gets bulldozed cause more data centers are needed and cemeteries are such a “waste of space” for landlords.
Now there’s not even a gravestone number plaque. Nobody knows the names of those who used to be buried, let alone their stories.
This is the legacy 99.99% of humans are going to leave: none at all. Every happiness and sadness, every pain and relief, every fight and war, every love and passion, everything will end up being buried and all the bones will eventually be treated as part of the dirt of a land to be repurposed, first by “powerful” wealthy people, then by Mother Nature as climate change begins to redeem back a land which was originally Hers, and finally by the cosmos after Sol dies and Andromeda finishes the merger.
Why is my life so pointless? Not just my life: the whole existence. I don’t even need to rely on fictional stories: we don’t know names and personal lives from all those serfs of 14th century medieval Europe struck by Plague. We, living on a world highly reliant on writing, ironically don’t know the name or life of the very first Sumer person to ever do cuneiform in Mesopotamia.
And when one realizes how mindbogglingly fleeting this existence are, and how even our individual subjective experiences are just neurological tissue to be dissolved as cadaver fluids to be consumed by vultures which will also become cadavers themselves someday, it’s hard to unsee the fleetness.
so if you aren’t internationally famous there is no point in living?
that’s extremely egotistical. sounds like you need to get over yourself. you’re not that important. your argumentation that you need to be important or your life has no meaning is totally absurdist and incredibly selfish. you have a deep impact on the people around you, but apparently these people do not matter in your worldview. only fame.
that POV does seem to be incredibly lonely and sad. it’s basically saying life has zero value apart from the being on wikipedia.
@TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
What?! No, absolutely not even close to what I said! I guess you totally missed what I tried to express. Sorry to ask but, did you even read my replies?!
First and most importantly, I must thank you for reminding me and you’re right in this point, specifically: I’m well aware how irrelevant I am. I deeply know it and I live with this irrelevance on a daily basis, knowing how I’ll be nothing as soon as I get to finally die and find my own spiritual annihilation at the tip of Reaperess’s scythe, still thanks for making me to remind of my irrelevance once again!
Having said this, irrelevance isn’t exclusive to me: so is the entire humanity before the countless species on Earth (even though humans think of themselves as some kind of superior species). So is the earthly biosphere before the entire cosmos (even though life tries to fight the cosmic entropy). So is the entire cosmos before the underlying, transcendental fundamenta within it.
In fact, nothing is relevant when we consider cosmic fate, which is either one or more of (a) dark energy and cosmic expansion infinitely stretching the fabric of spacetime continuum to the point of quantum rupture (Big Rip) (b) depletion of energetic transformations (Big Freeze) © another cosmic bubble colliding with this one (Big Bounce).
Either way, all star stuff has expiration date, even though this expiration date is as far as billion, maybe trillion years from now. Life, by extension, is limited to that cosmic deadline, so both human’s hopes of legacy and Nature’s evolution of species are pretty much pointless if this farthest cosmic future is to be considered.
Then humans, aware of their own mortality, often hold on to religious views as to believe they’ll get to some afterlife, and while I do have spiritual views (dark pantheistic ones), I don’t believe in afterlife. The belief of an afterlife, a “fatherly god” is rooted on our deep fear of The Reaperess, She who’s part of the aforementioned cosmic fundamenta, She who touches the spiritual spark of every living being and pulls every baryonic matter to its inexorable decay.
Still we tend to be afraid of Her so we hold on to materialistic, we hold on to mundane, with the hopes of an afterlife being a spiritual extension of this.
So, back to previous point, at absolutely no point I said about the mundane having relevance, much to the contrary: the part where I said about me slightly believing in purpose and relevance uses past tense. It’s gone to me.
Currently, my views aren’t just of a personal purposelessness, it’s about cosmic and ontological purposelessness. Everything from “fame” and “Wikipedia” to “me” and “people around” are so trivially infinitesimal compared to the cosmos where all star stuff, macro and microscopic, are inhabiting and part of now; and compared to what’s going to happen with all those.
ontological and cosmic purpose lies entirely within yourself.
that’s why nihilistism is nothing more than egotism projecting infinitely into the world.
Ok but the flip side of this is some ultimate freedom. If everything you do is going to eventually be forgotten, you may as well do what you want. And the concept of meaning doesn’t exist in the universe outside of the human experience, so whatever meaning you decide for your life is equally valid. If you decide your meaning to life is eating Doritos and watching anime, that’s just as valid as a CEO and ultimately through history just as important.
So go out and be weird and do whatever you feel like.