Hate being alone but hate being around people more

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I lost all my friends a few months ago and I'm living alone for the first time. So I find myself sitting alone all the time. I don't go out much besides for work. Part of me enjoys being alone for a change. Part of me desperately wants to find new people to hang out with. But then I remember what it is like to hang out with people and have social obligations and I mentally retch. I have never gotten as much out of companionship as others seem to get out of it. What many see as a delight, I see as a chore the vast majority of the time. There are a tiny number of people I get excited to spend time with, and they're either family or family friends. Between them it's like 5-7 people I feel any active joy just from being around them. 3-4 of whom I see in a single year. Most of them don't live anywhere near me now.

I would reach out to those 5-7 people (or other people in general) more but, and I cannot emphasize this enough: There Is Nothing To Talk About. Nothing that feels like it matters. Talking about interests is usually tolerable but gets stale. It feels hollow, like: "Talk about interest to avoid any thought of my personal life". I feel no desire to talk about work, and don't want to listen to other people go on about it. I have no personal/social life to talk about, and sitting there silently listening to other people talk about other friends is not helpful. Talking about politics/worldviews is a minefield.

So I interact with no one. Aside from people at work and occasional texts to family. Solitude can be nice but when it isn't I'm just left alone with myself and that emptiness that comes from having no interaction with others. In the short term I could tell myself I need time to focus on me. But in the long term I don't see the above issues going away. I don't know why I even ask here. It beats just sitting there and....thinking....

I am happy being a virtual hermit in real life, but I am not a spring chicken.
Being free from interacting with ppl is such a relief, and for me, so much better than social intercourse in the real world.
But I think you are a much younger person.

Have you considered online gaming?
Some socialising with a common purpose but mostly gameplay?

is it only like this for real life or are you more loose and social on the internet?

You need to meet the right person/s

What kinds of friends were these?

Were they isolated friendships or were they all part of the same friend group? Did you typically hang out with them one at a time, or all together? Also, were they people whom you interacted with as part of your normal life (e.g. neighbors, classmates, work colleagues, members of a shared religious group, or members of a shared recreational activity group) or were they totally separate from other parts of your life?

(Your answers to the above questions may help us gain some insight into how or why you found your interaction with these people to be burdensome. Personally, I find isolated friendships to be much harder to maintain than friendships with people who are part of my normal life.)

Also, if you're inclined to share this, how did you lose them?


What kinds of social obligations did you find to be especially onerous?


I too feel like I have little or nothing to talk about with the vast majority of people.


Do any of them actually share your interests? I do enjoy talking about my interests with people who are interested in the same things. My interests tend to be highly idiosyncratic, which greatly limits the number of people who share them.


In other words, talking only about shared interests, and nothing else, would lack the dimension of emotional intimacy. I agree.

Emotional intimacy is something that can develop slowly, over time, between people who have enough in common to have had lots of mutually enjoyable conversations in the meantime. There are also some shortcuts to emotional intimacy, e.g. a friendship between people who met each other in a support group.

Maybe try to find online friends? I didn't see my offline friends for 13 years, but I've had online friends in that time. Online friends are significantly less stressful (until they want to meet lol).

Have you considered plushies?

I game all the time. Online and offline. I have no interest in socializing with the rando's I meet playing games. And I don't want friendships built primarily around gaming online. Part of why my last friend group was so toxic was because my ex would viciously guilt people into playing games with him. Online gaming stinks of poison.

I avoid multiplayer mode like the plague.
They are always infested with cheating and hacks.
Some don't seem to mind.

In addition to that, the culture is almost always extremely toxic.
When I left MP gaming years ago, one of the worst insults that someone could make was calling a person "autistic".

I didn't leave because of that. It was the hacking that disgusted me.
I have no intention of playing a PC multiplayer game ever again because of hacks.
Console platforms are much better, but there is ALWAY cheating no matter which platform is used.

These were friends I lived with. All four of us were in the same group of friends that included a few other people. We usually hung out together, though Housemate 1 quickly fell out with Housemates 2-3 for many reasons, so she was rarely included in anything after a while. I would still spend some time with her since we shared a floor, but this became more and more rare as I grew fed up with her abuse.
Housemate 2 (my ex) was the one I spent most of my time around. Though this was usually with Housemate 3 present. My ex and HM 3 would bicker endlessly and I could always hear them spitting venom at each other upstairs. Part of why I would go up to hang out with them was because they were more likely to behave when I was physically present. One of my last conversations with my ex was him saying he had **never** considered how their arguing might effect me.
So yes, we hung out basically every day. They were omnipresent in my life. Even at work I would constantly be responding to messages on whatever messaging app. My ex would get very testy if people did not respond promptly to whatever he was saying. He felt ignored any time he was not the center of attention.

It is a long story how I lost them. My ex was married to Housemate 1 out of convenience (healthcare, avoiding homelessness). He had pressured her into buying a house for us all to live in. He gave her very specific conditions for the house that he needed. These were impossible to meet. So Housemate 1 did get the house but was not honest with my ex that it did not meet his specifications. Because my ex destroys the ability of people close to him to feel like they can tell him things he doesn't want to hear.
So he moved 1000 miles across the country and didn't learn what the house was like until he physically saw it. Cue misery. The living situation became toxic immediately. My ex took his frustration out on everyone, Housemate 1 took out her frustration on Me (because my ex would sic his other friends on her when she blew up at him), Housemate 3 took his frustration out on my ex, and I took my anger out on Housemate 1 and on me by harming myself.
I was new to this group of friends when they moved in. It became clear that Housemate 1 was not going to try and repair her relationship with my ex. So my ex felt (justly) neglected. On top of this, he is very disabled physically and mentally. So I decided early on that despite the toxicity all around me that I would try to make this work as best I could. I spent more time, money, and feelings on my ex and that living situation than I was ever obligated to. But I did not make enough money to actually fix the endless problems and drama. Every passing year I became more damaged and less functional. Every year things became more nasty and toxic. Until finally last year Housemate 1 got fed up (and was worried my ex was so unstable he would hurt her), that she took us to civil court and evicted us from the house (I had not signed a lease bc I did not think she would do anything like this). So it then became a traumatic miserable 3 months period of me desperately trying to find somewhere we could live. My ex became exponentially more toxic and demeaning. He tried to get me to manipulate my parents into buying us a house (since he does not understand the value of a dollar). And then openly started saying awful things about them when they did the reasonable thing and did not buy us a whole house. And he became even nastier when he learned my family was begging me to get away from him. And all this time I bit back my boiling fury (because I have always repressed my anger). He tried to pressure me into moving back to Texas with him, but I refused, and he became (you guessed it) even nastier. So he finally went back to Texas to live with his mother with Housemate 3. We kept in touch a little bit after but the venom was already mounting so we took a break. That break is about to become permanent because my contempt for him and everyone else in that group has grown since getting away from them all. I had forgotten how it felt to not be in a toxic living situation with toxic manipulative friends and I never want to go back to that again.
I was only really friends with Housemate 1 and my ex out of the people in that friend group, so losing them as friends lost me the friend group in general (no big loss). Sorry that was long but I have run out of the energy to be concise.


I find most social obligations to be onerous. Are they not onerous just by being obligations? Friendships historically have felt like chores. People ask me to go to some event they want to go to and that is onerous. A concert is an example. Concerts are okay, but they are pointlessly expensive and I hate driving. But people asked me to take them anyway so I did.
I never had a chance to set boundaries with any of these people because it had been constant crisis mode/appease-at-all-costs mode since day 1.

Sure people share my interests. Video games, shows, history, lit. That does not always mean I enjoy talking about those interests. Conversation is tiring and difficult to escape once started.


Intimacy is a mistake or an illusion.

Too much disconnect from online friends. I also tire of primarily dealing with friends via the internet. Talking face to face sucks, but it at least means people are more likely to treat you with decency when there is a real risk of someone's real fist rearranging their face if they run their mouth. I say that as someone who loathes violence. But people feel emboldened to be nastier when they can hide behind a screen than when they have to say it to someone's face.
But then in-person friends suck because it is harder to physically get away from them when you live in the same town.

On top of all this. I have learned that since our parting ways he has continued to vilify me and my family online. Which puts me in a constant state of seething blood rage. But I have no outlet for that. As much as part of me wants vengeance, I realize that that would just set off a cycle of recrimination that we would both lose. I hate. So much. Being the bigger person. Always I am the bigger person. Always I apologize for my misdeeds which only happened because of the misdeeds of others--which they do not apologize for. It just enables.
So now I am just constantly furious at multiple people with no outlet and I don't know what to do. My abusive ex is so fragile emotionally I could do permanent psychological damage with just a sentence or two. He's so condescending and manipulative and acts tough but he crumbles immediately when criticized. It feels so ugly to think that. It feels so ugly to always be this angry. I'm not an angry person. It's my least favorite feeling. I'll take depression over anger any day.

So yeah, screw friends (for now). Haha how do I not feel constant boiling rage towards someone I will (hopefully) never speak to again? I feel like I'm going to give myself an ulcer.

Online friends are much better for me tooo, when you see friends in person, they can talk too fast, you quickly have to think what to say, the wrong thing may come out of my mouth. Online is GREAT, with texting or emails, I can take my time in typing, not rushing into anything.

Can you buy a dog or a cat? You can buy a gaming system like Xbox or PlayStation.