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wvlia5yesterday at 2:11 PM0 repliesview on HN

Games, hobbies, meds are not good. Those are like candy, you need real food.

There are 3 aspects to the issue you need to tackle:

# existential, deep

What you need to do is to get a glorious vision of 1- who you are and 2- what you are doing, aka. the plan.

Examples:

1- I am a scientist, 2- I'm getting a phd to then change the world with my research.

1- I am a father/husband, 2- I am raising a happy family.

1- I am a skinny/fat guy who will have an impressive transformation to bodybuilder, 2- I am targeting to raise my lean body mass by 2kg/year.

1- I am a guy with troubled emotions that feel like hell, who will overcome his suffering and find happiness, 2- I am becoming a buddist monk.

# physiological, shallow

Your negative emotions will be a burden in your journey to glory.

You need to feel comfortable being alone. You need to be able to be alone without intense negative emotions about it. It is like getting used to feeling cold/hot, hunger. Like adapting very hot sauna or marathons. You need to physiologically adapt to solitude.

The root solution will be what I explained before. Short-term, it would be good to have a break and to restart fresh (next time recognizing you didn't do it well the 1st time with your games, and that you need to work on a glorious plan). Options to get a break:

- move back with your parents for 1-2 years

- go to some cheap and nice destination and live in hostels, shared room. Change hostels every few weeks. Chat with guests. Just having a 'good morning' goes a long way.

# practical solution

While you have to adapt to solitude, you can also work on getting relationships. In order to do this:

- go out and talk to people physically (Internet doesn't count). You can actually go to a stranger on a park/mall and talk. Try it. Also explore bars, courses, events. When you go to those, you have to talk to people, you get 1 point for each person you talk to, otherwise 0 points.

- make a list of people you have known and see if you can get back in touch and deepen the relationship. Include in the list people you currently have some relationship with. Yes, even the cashier that always gives you a good smile when he says: 'debit or credit?'. You can deepen the relationship over several days in this sequence: polite smiles -> trivial chit-chat -> personal talk -> invitation to hang out.