Hello there Frank, can you tell me about some ways to ease loneliness?
And, do you enjoy solitude?
It's possible I'm missing something here, but my impression of loneliness is not "how do I escape it," it is more "how do I avoid feeling lonely."
It's clear that I do not enjoy solitude. I don't do well with it for long, even though it's necessary for my work. I find I have to constantly keep a mental checklist of things I need to do and keep doing. On weekends it takes about 3 hours each day to get everything out of the way so that I can just relax on Sundays instead. When I'm alone in the house for the weekend, I'm constantly aware of all the places where I could be doing things and not be aware that I'm not.
On the other hand, my life is always surrounded by people. Even on weekends I often have a friend over. My day to day social experience is always punctuated by a constant stream of social events, mostly via Facebook chat. I can't really avoid feeling lonely because my days are so full of interactions. I need to have an "alone hour" every day.
I like people and I do enjoy their company. If you don't want to hang out with me on weekends, that's fine -- it just means you're not an option I'm going to. But on a moment-to-moment basis I'm not lonely. I have other interests that are fulfilling enough and I don't spend all day long feeling isolated from the world. I can take solitude without it being miserable and without feeling lonely.
On the other hand, I would like to not live in the real world. I want a universe in which I don't have to get up every day, and I can stay in bed and not have to interact with people, and I can hang out with myself in this universe and I can go for long walks alone through the forest. A universe in which I can enjoy being alone without fearing I'm alone.
But when I have a day where I don't want to get out of bed and I don't want to interact with anyone, it's usually because I'm tired and stressed and have a lot of shit to do and it's hard to be awake and make it through to the weekend. And I find that when I'm tired and stressed and have too much shit to do, loneliness becomes inevitable. It's not that I become less social (though I become less social to be honest). I'm always surrounded by people, and my lack of energy and motivation makes it hard not to think of a million ways I could be doing more instead. (In my experience, being surrounded by people is a great distraction from loneliness, in that the people around you don't usually feel isolated, since they all have their own issues that they can't be bothered with.) It's not that I'm less social, it's that the stuff that socializes me isn't enough.
I would like to be able to stop caring about these things, and care only about them when it's actually necessary. And that's the thing that I don't see as "lonely." It's a feeling of "is this necessary?" and "do I have the option not to need this?" The answer to the question, "is this necessary?" is never really "yes," and in fact it's quite often the case that no one can answer "yes" to that question.
And the answer to "do I have an option not to need this?" has to take into account the fact that no one person exists in a vacuum, and that we don't just naturally "have the option" to avoid doing things we don't want to do. I am, in some sense, always surrounded by other people -- even when they're in other rooms or when they're not there at all. We don't live in a solitary, unconnected world. The world is always full of people, and you will always be one of them. (Unless you're the kind of person who lives alone, of course, and I'm not.)
So I think the way to avoid loneliness (at least some of the time) is to become accustomed to the fact that you're surrounded by others, and get used to the fact that the things you're surrounded by have to be done. But I don't think I have to change my habits to avoid loneliness: I think I can simply change the things I'm surrounding myself with.
This also involves having to spend a lot more time away from one's own house, even if only to visit one's parents or something (the latter of which is another matter that I'm going to talk about in another post).
The "lonely-feeling" is a feeling of "I'm alone." The problem with feeling alone is that, as a consequence, one is alone. And one wants not to be alone. So if I want to not feel lonely, the best way I can think of to do so is to try not to feel lonely. And I think that's possible.
I think this is what the concept of solipsism tries to describe. The concept of solipsism describes the idea that there's some ultimate level at which our experience of consciousness is fundamental, in which case the fact that we are aware of consciousness should be obvious, like the way that one is aware of their own thoughts.
I'm not sure that this is true, but the fact that I am conscious of my experience is part of the reason I am aware that my experience is a part of reality. If I weren't aware of my consciousness, then I wouldn't be aware that consciousness is mine, that I exist, that I'm conscious, that I have this experience, that I'm experiencing these things. Consciousness as it is experienced by a person who is aware of my consciousness is part of "reality," just as the experience of me as I currently am is part of reality. (Assuming my consciousnesses are continuous, it's like the flow of time in that way -- a later consciousness is the outcome of an earlier consciousness. If we go all the way back to the very first moment of consciousness, all we would get would be that very first, primordial moment of consciousness.) But this doesn't change the fact that I have to work to experience the things that I do.
My consciousness is not separate from the material world, but it is a part of the world and it has to act in some ways like it does. Otherwise it could not experience what it experiences, which would be false. It has to have the experiences that it does, and it has to experience those experiences in the way that it does. It is no more or less real than any other experience that I have.
The idea that I'm having right now, a consciousness experience, as an instance of me (I'm not just conscious but I think I am? I was just out, so I'm not, but I think I'm the type of person who exists as a human being, and thus I am also the kind of person who exists -- or something like that -- and so I am in my current experience of consciousness, and I exist by virtue of the things I experience that I experience, such as the things I experience that I experience, etc., ad infinitum). And it just has to do the things that experience that I experience -- experience -- experience, etc., infinitely ad infinitum. And it just has to do them in such a way that it is an experience of consciousness. And when it turns on the light box or whatever, that experience is mine because my consciousness is the fundamental thing through which I experience "reality," which includes the world, and includes everything in the world, including other people who are experiencing the things that I do in my life. But just because the things I experience in my life experience are are "my" experiences, it's not a big
