To start, I’m okay being alone, but I sometimes try to take an objective look at myself. I try to understand how I think and do things the way I do.
If my brother didn’t live with me. I would probably live alone. I work from home and have infrequent meetings, outside of that I would probably have almost no interaction aside from the people I see doing my weekly grocery shopping. I have probably 2 or 3 people I could call a friend, and a few acquaintances, and all of them are previous coworkers. My interactions with them are generally constrained to discord chat. This is simply setting the stage, lets continue to set the stage for how did I get here?
If I’m being critical, I don’t know that I have ever had many/any friends. In grade school, I had neighbors who’s houses I would go over to, but I don’t think they ever came over to mine. I was a member of many clubs, but I didn’t really talk to any members outside of the club itself. After starting college, I think I might have kept in contact with one person from high school, but that was only once or twice. I haven’t talked to anybody from then for over 10 years.
Surely people from college, right? Well, again I was in the marching band and lived on campus, certainly many friends from there. Everybody in band has a friend right? Other than attending alumni events, and some volunteering, I don’t talk to any of them either.
So what does this all mean? Well I think I can say I can be alone in a room full of people. I can go to a meetup, after working though the anxiety that would keep me from attending, and leave after barely talking to anybody. I have anxiety that keeps me from going to events where other people would be, and if I do go, I have no idea how to interact. In general I would say I don’t really know how to start a conversation with others outside of a professional setting. I can respond in a conversation, but leading is out of the question. I’m bad enough at reading people in person, online I’m even worse. It takes effort for me to only say “fine, you?” instead of a full explanation in response to someone I know saying “hi, how’s it going” as a greeting.
I used to say I was an introvert, but I don’t even know if that’s true. I’d much rather do things with someone else than just alone, I just don’t have anyone to do it with. I just don’t want to be in a group of people having fun, and not knowing how to even start a conversation. Anyway, yep I’m lonely and usually okay with it.
For reading the above, here’s a silly music video with lots of cartoon violence (including cartoon death) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-atRsitNsY Song is let your love flow by the Bellamy Brother and animation is by Tirrelous
I think one of the things that I can detect not just in your post, but in this entire thread, is just how fractured we are as a society. We’ve been separated and pushed apart in ways that make us easier to advertise to and consumerize. We are all broken people trying to cope with an increasingly frantic and atomized world. We’re anxious of socializing but we feel the void where it should or even just could be.
In some ways I find that the fandom can be incredibly helpful for meeting with and engaging with new people. Because of some of the lewder undercurrents, it’s actually very unappealing to commercial interests. If a major company thought they could make a lot of money selling branded fursuits, they would already be a thing.
But in other ways, it’s a bandaid for a chainsaw wound. Our society needs to shift, because we’re gripped with a massively unhealthy culture that is making us simultaneously more connected and more alone than ever. And that aloneness is really damaging to social creatures. It may not be the cause of what ails you, yes, you, the person reading this, but it is certainly not helping your situation.
What that change looks like, I can’t say. I have some thoughts and ideas, some of which you can probably glean from my tone and tenor here. But I’ll refrain from positing solutions. It wouldn’t do any good anyway. All I can say is that I hope that y’all can seek out those connections, make them, and hold them. They are truly one of the most valuable and precious things in the world right now. I understand your anxieties, OP, but if it helps, then one of the more revolutionary acts of today might just be making a friend. And if it doesn’t help you, then I hope it helps someone else who reads this down the line.
Sorry for the rant, this one kinda caught me at a weird moment and I really just wanted to get my loosely-related thoughts down.