I have been alone for quite some time in my life, for various reasons.
Here is my advice
1. Don’t listen to people telling you that there‘s something wrong with you if you aren’t happy alone and that you need therapy. You probably don‘t.
If you aren’t able to survive a single day on your own, then you have an issue, but in general people are social animals and need talking to and touching other people on a regular basis to regulate themselves emotionally. Some don’t, but you don‘t seem to be one of them. (In my experience people who honestly enjoy being alone for weeks at end often got used to this in their childhood, for example by being single children. If you had a noisy, lively house when growing up you will always miss that.)
2. That being said it is still nourishing and useful to follow the tips for spending time on your own (cooking for yourself, going into the cinema) now and then. But don‘t expect it to magically fix your yearning for social connections.
3. Doing sports and going to the gym often is great advice, because sports generally gives you a more positive mood and a better outlook and it quiets down negative thoughts. But also keep in mind here that it will not replace social interactions and touch.
4. So the question remains where you get your social interaction from, and I suggest that you replace the single person you had with a lot of tiny social interactions.
None of those is going to fix your solitude on it’s own, but the mixture will enrich your life. If you do all of those things once per week, your mood will improve:
- Online dating and chatting with friends (but don’t expect anything to come out of it)
- Dancing classes (this is especially great because you get the physical touch component)
- Regular coffee/dinner dates (1-2 per week) with a friend, coworker or relative.
- Going for a walk and talking to a random stranger
- Singing in a choir or similar hobbies
- Going to pubquizzes or free to join community walks
- Commuting to the office instead of doing home office.
5. I won‘t argue against your psychiatrist, but I find that medication is only useful in a minority of cases. Both anti depressants and anti anxiety meds can actually reduce your motivation to go out, by mellowing you into a not-great-not-terrible dreamy state.
I once digged into this database out of curiosity and found incredibly detailed research on many edge cases. Like time zones in Germany being temporarily aligned to Moscow during soviet occupancy after World War Two.
One particular commenter stood out to me, so I looked him up because I was interested which kind of people spend so much time correcting timezone information.
Turns out he was an astrologer and wanted his astrology-program to work perfectly correct.
I find it funny that we have to thank astrology for the correct calculations in our banking software :).
On the other hand, it was also astrologers that made copyright claims on the database and caused it to become unavailable to the world for a short period of time.
It were not astrologers, it was a company that creates astrology software.. Don't mix people with companies, they are different things! One is there definitely for the money, the other may or may not..
> Almost no one is shopping multiple supermarkets, buying cheaper alternatives, buying in-season veggies and fruit when it’s cheap, waiting for sales to stock up, buying in bulk and freezing, using coupons, meal planning based on the latest supermarket Sunday circular, etc. only a tiny minority of people have been doing so.
I don‘t know where this observation comes from, but here in Austria a majority of people in lower income sectors than IT do all of this?
> I don‘t know where this observation comes from, but here in Austria a majority of people in lower income sectors than IT do all of this?
The observation comes from myself, from a medium to low income background. Think mechanics, janitors, construction laborers, etc. family background. Along with most of my peers and extended family members.
The "old" generation - e.g. my grandparents did all those things. Their kids (for the most parts, exceptions do exist) and my generation (and my kids) do basically none of them. They go to whatever supermarket they go to every week or two, stock up on whatever they usually buy, and that's it. Zero consideration for anything else. It is very surprising to me.
In the book „the design of everyday things“ it is mentioned that „natural mappings“ exist. Moving the knob of a vertical slider to the upper end universally means „brighter“ or „louder“, not „less bright“ or „more silent“.
maybe the chicks and norman get it, but i'm currently renting an apartment in france that has a bunch of these light switches installed all upside down, with "-" at the top:
While technically possible, it is a very unusual situation that the car is already parked at the car wash, while the owner is somewhere else.
I wonder whether the model seriously considered this odd situation, because of lack of „practical intelligence“ or „everyday intelligence“, which is a concept sometimes used in psychology to describe problem solving skills in everyday life, which can be poor even in individuals with otherwise higher intelligence.
Differently put: „You can‘t learn everything out of a book.“
> The car wash is only 50 meters from my house. I want to get my car washed. The car is at my house currently. Should I walk there or drive?
> Walk.
>
> At 50 meters, walking is faster than the full “start car → pull out → reposition → park” cycle, avoids cold-start wear, and you won’t risk arriving with dusty brakes/tires or water streaks from immediately driving afterward. Drive only if you can’t comfortably walk (mobility, heavy weather, you need to bring bulky items), or if the car wash explicitly requires you to drive it into a queue/track.
I wish they didn't call it "GPT-5.2 Thinking" when what the word "thinking" here means is "might choose to think if it wants to". I reproduce your result, but it does no reasoning; it eventually catches itself and ends with:
> Practical approach: walk over, check the setup/queue/payment, then walk back and drive the car the 50 meters when you’re ready to enter.
I read somewhere that Google will ultimately always produce the best LLMs, since "good AI" relies on massive amounts of data and Google owns the most data.
The 555 is a versatile little thing. I used it at university for a simple circuit which allowed an arduino to cut it’s own power for 5 minutes and then boot again.
They probably won‘t. I recently watched a talk (in german) with Julia Friedrichs, who wrote a book about millionaires and billionaires and did many interviews with them:
In her research she found that many of the ultra-rich people actually have deep/patriotic/nostalgic ties to their home/community and want to invest there. They often use certain tax-evasion measures because everybody else does and she argued that those few ultra-rich people who really just care about minimizing their taxes have already moved everything abroad.
> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department.
Yes, yes, "agile" everything...
I remember clicking on a perfectly honest button in Azure Dev Ops (Production) and it told me that the button is completed but the actual functionality will be probably delivered in Sprint XY.
Here is my advice
1. Don’t listen to people telling you that there‘s something wrong with you if you aren’t happy alone and that you need therapy. You probably don‘t.
If you aren’t able to survive a single day on your own, then you have an issue, but in general people are social animals and need talking to and touching other people on a regular basis to regulate themselves emotionally. Some don’t, but you don‘t seem to be one of them. (In my experience people who honestly enjoy being alone for weeks at end often got used to this in their childhood, for example by being single children. If you had a noisy, lively house when growing up you will always miss that.)
2. That being said it is still nourishing and useful to follow the tips for spending time on your own (cooking for yourself, going into the cinema) now and then. But don‘t expect it to magically fix your yearning for social connections.
3. Doing sports and going to the gym often is great advice, because sports generally gives you a more positive mood and a better outlook and it quiets down negative thoughts. But also keep in mind here that it will not replace social interactions and touch.
4. So the question remains where you get your social interaction from, and I suggest that you replace the single person you had with a lot of tiny social interactions.
None of those is going to fix your solitude on it’s own, but the mixture will enrich your life. If you do all of those things once per week, your mood will improve:
- Online dating and chatting with friends (but don’t expect anything to come out of it)
- Dancing classes (this is especially great because you get the physical touch component)
- Regular coffee/dinner dates (1-2 per week) with a friend, coworker or relative.
- Going for a walk and talking to a random stranger
- Singing in a choir or similar hobbies
- Going to pubquizzes or free to join community walks
- Commuting to the office instead of doing home office.
5. I won‘t argue against your psychiatrist, but I find that medication is only useful in a minority of cases. Both anti depressants and anti anxiety meds can actually reduce your motivation to go out, by mellowing you into a not-great-not-terrible dreamy state.
6. Don‘t start rummaging and contemplating your thoughts when you are lonely. Being lonely makes you weird: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/lonely-people-see-th...
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