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Comment by ytturbed | Hacker News Reader

If you have a creative personality, a source of income, and an internal source of validation then, yes, social time is time wasted.

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You don't think there's anything more to life than supporting yourself and being validated in your creativity?

I agree these things are wildly important to a happy life. I still think there is more though.

I had fun and socialized a lot more in a long time ago. Don't have much to show for it now and kinda wish that I spent the time differently now.

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).

FWIW, this sounds like you agree with eunoia that there's more to life than supporting yourself and being validated in your creativity.

And it sounds like you're not getting everything you want from life, and if that's the case, you have my sympathies.

Damn man, not sure how I should respond. Thank you? Don't worry though loneliness isn't so bad once you get used to it.

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 think that the key to socialising is taking genuine interest in other people, not "pretending to care for the sake of socializing".

I often find myself genuinely disinterested in other people where I live. I live in Somaliland and people love to talk local politics here. I don't get involved in it anymore because it's not really about politics but tribalism. It's not about right or wrong but just blindly defending whoever you're tangentially related to. I'm actually quite worried how children I have will end up if raised here.

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.

You should try to spend your next vacation in a nearest city with a hackerspace, you will find like-minded people there.

http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces

I would say that by and large it's actually the social people who get lonely. They need the acceptance of others in order to feel good about themselves. Newton had his God and his work. Sure, there's 'more to life' but bear in mind that by any reasonable measure his work was full of life and, logically, every choice he made precluded other choices. We're all the beneficiaries of those choices and I expect they were intensely meaningful to him.

That's a matter of personal preference. I have never been in a relationship and don't currently have any friends, and I'm perfectly happy this way. Life is what you make it.

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