Do you really think time spent being social is wasted?
No judgement, just curiosity.
No judgement, just curiosity.
Being lonely by myself hurts. Being lonely in a group of people hurts more. Learning about algebraic topology doesn't hurt.
I think it's a bad idea for people to be by themselves, but I can more than empathize with the "I would rather not" sentiment in this thread.
I have wasted so much while being alone and while being very social. It's a vicious thing but all I can do is improve my habits and seek out balance.
Being lonely is being alone and being unhappy about it.
If you're alone but you're perfectly happy about it, you're not lonely, you're just alone.
Since the world is dominated by extraverts who feel lonely whenever they are alone, it is not surprising that these two terms are often used interchangeably. But to a raging introvert like Newton, they can have completely different meanings.
I agree these things are wildly important to a happy life. I still think there is more though.
People disappoint; my computer rarely does.
Also I would be more willing to socialize more today but finding like-minded people is kind of hard. Finding like-minded people of the opposite gender harder still (at least where I live).
And it sounds like you're not getting everything you want from life, and if that's the case, you have my sympathies.
I'm actually on vacation now and spent most of it in my room. Rented my first VPS, figured my way around Docker, set up nginx as a reverse proxy, kept tabs on my auth logs and noticed a lot of ssh login attempts from Chinese IPs. These are all firsts for me and I'm having fun. I don't think I'd trade those experiences for just to hang out with people who couldn't give two hoots about any of the things I'm interested in.
Ideally I'd love to share those experiences with others but if the choice is pretending to care about whatever topic I don't care about just for the sake of socializing and being alone and doing things that interest me, I'll take the latter every time.
I'm genuinely interested in people here on HN. In people I see presenting conferences I watch. In people who share my interests. I don't believe I can manufacture genuine interest. It's supposed to come naturally. However, if I don't even try to at least pretend to care then I will literally not talk to anyone for large portions of time.
Thanks for the advice though.
A lot of social interaction is, however, a waste of time indeed.
Waste in the sense that if you could take the net sum of the learning and the enjoyment you would get from it, minus the effort (in particular if you lean towards the I end of the spectrum), depending on the kind of people you have the luck or misfortune to surround yourself with, you could easily go into the red.
I think, if you disregard the small amounts of self-validation we get, most of the socializing time is not beneficial.
(and no, facebook is not social life, but it's a fingerprint of it)