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Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

>Accept social invitations, even if you don’t feel like going out.

>It isn’t enough to rely on random invites. Get your calendar out and map out your social life. Make sure your week is scattered with social activities.

This is the worst advice possible. I did this when I was a freshman at uni. Just saying yes to every invitation. Disco, birthday party, cinema, whatever. I thought it'd reduce the loneliness. But I never ever enjoyed it, and I felt lonelier than ever before. Then, at some point, I got a tinnitus from a disco visit. It's not loud, luckily, and I can barely make it out throughout the day, but it's there. But that was when everything changed. I started saying no to everything. Now, I maintain very few relationships but they're much deeper. And I'm happier like that. Don't ever say yes to things that don't feel right.

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College may be a bad example, social interactions are pretty available generally speaking. I think this advice is more targeted at people who are going long stretches with big, psychologically dangerous holes in their social "nutritional diet." This can happen much more easily later on.

That doesn't mean go to night clubs when you hate them, but it does mean that if you rely on chance, you could go without for a long time. You could join a book club, a political party, volunteer in a kennel, do street art, join a architectural restoration organization, boxing club, sex club or anything that you do like. The thing is that you need to plan something that will include the types of social interactions that you need for psychological health, if they are not serendipitously available in your lifestyle at a point in time.

As a counterpoint to your experiences, accepting invitations despite not feeling like going out works very well for me - at times when I'm feeling loneliness (or its onset) I almost always find that forcing myself to accept an invitation gives positive results.

Perhaps as suggested by another commentator here, the concept of loneliness is nuanced - e.g. you were looking for deep connections whereas usually I just want some fun companionship, or something like that.

Agreed.

I've got friends that I like spending time with but for the most part I like being alone.

Sometimes (a lot of the time actually) I just don't feel like going out or socialising in any way.. There is some solitary activity I am looking forward to, like coding or learning some new programming skill (I'm learning Rust at the moment), learning guitar, reading a book I've just bought etc.

Hell, maybe I just want to relax and play a game like Cities: Skylines.

At those times I'll just tell people straight. I won't be out tonight, I've got stuff to do/I don't feel like it.

It doesn't need to be treated with any more significance than that.

Not to mention that people who scatter their calendar with social activities, in my experience, often get stressed and have an actual more stressed weekend/vacation than the stress at work (if any).

The message, at least, is sound. You need to be proactive about making friends and being social, not just sit around and wait for life to happen to you.

This kind of advice seems to miss the point of what it is to be lonely.

Tangential comment, but regarding your tinnitus, there was this on reddit the other day that reportedly helped some people, you may want to take a look:

https://np.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3l3uri/these_guys_light...

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