I’m 42 (TransFemme). I work from home. Have precisely zero close friends and not even any real surface level friends that don’t live 4+ hours away. Acquaintances at best and none I can comfortably call upon when shit goes sideways. I have no family. They all have either passed or, like my original friend group, disowned me about a decade ago when I came out and transitioned. So no one to put on an “In case of emergency” contact form.
Work holds no meaning other than a paycheck. I don’t really feel a desire to improve a billionaire’s bank statement with my hard work.
It feels like I’m just going through the motions. Biding my time until the inevitable. I know I can’t be the only one. Heck some of y’all may even be flourishing after similar situations. For me? Everyday feels more lonely than the last.
How do y’all do it?
(No this isn’t an unalive myself cry for help. Yes I am in regular therapy. I just don’t have any other avenue for asking such things besides publicly here and some other socials)
EDIT to add: I live in very rural US and unfortunately moving is not an option for me at this time or anytime soon.
Mid-50s here. Maybe not quite as isolated as you. Stopped working (60 hour weeks) a few years ago; family all 4+ hours away - visit 2ce/year; couple of friends on the other coast I exchange daily-ish emails, but no hang-out-and-watch-the-game people.
Everyone’s different, and I don’t really feel the emptyness you describe. I read, both print and web. I post on lemmy maybe 1/day, sometimes twice, sometimes not for days, but reading threads here, I think, satisfies my need for interaction, even if it’s just voyeuristically watching other people’s conversation. Video games, all single-player. Youtube cooking channels and a bit of my own cooking - can’t really cook that much for one person. Some wood/craft/metal projects.
I thought I’d become lonely when I stopped working. Planned to look around for volunteer opportunities, maybe take up a yoga or other fitness-type class, but that loneliness or emptyness just hasn’t hit. I did spend a couple years sort of tapering off contact with the people I used to work with: get coffee on the weekend or consult on some project, but I haven’t even heard from them in years now.
All that just to say: the people you see flourishing may just have a different experience of social satisfaction than you, and just because you see someone apparently happy in a situation doesn’t mean you can be happy in the same sitch. There’s lots of good advice in this thread, but you can start even smaller. Check in with a neighbor - make up some pretense if you need, like baked too many cookies, harvested too many tomatoes, can’t lift heavy-thing into the right place. If they aren’t complete assholes for that 5 minutes, try something else. If they are, try a different neighbor.
On the ‘in case of emergency’ thing: the last time I needed a ride to a medical thing, because they won’t discharge you to Uber, my neighbor was right there. Lived next door to him for 20 years, but we exchange, maybe, three sentences in a month. I don’t even know his daughter’s name or the grandkids that visit periodically. I don’t know what I’ll do if/when I start to have medical stuff that needs recovery assistance. Maybe a home health worker. Maybe just hope I can hold out until Medicare will pay for inpatient rehab. But I was happy to see the ‘community pulls together to help its own’ phenomenon in person, even a recluse like me.