Man, I feel your loss. Don't give up. We all must die sometime. Life gives you some hard times to deal with but it also gives you solutions. I for one have read your comments and they touched me. Thank you. My thoughts are with you.

Henry Patrick

. . . talk that suddenly morphs into a lecture on how people fail to live up to your expectations in terms of accepting and conversing. It's ironic, and I'm actually not judging. This is how we humans are. We're sometimes a cranky lot. And if we don't absolutely have to stick together for survival, we won't.

I think we do need to acknowledge that Christmas is the time of unrealistic expectations, adding a double-half-twist to the degree of difficulty in our already difficult human condition.Truth is, we are death-bound, and most of us will accrue lots of painful losses if we are lucky enough to be on the planet for any length of time. Right now, I'm facing the loss of my only sibling at a too-young age, and the recent loss of my dad. Soon, it'll just be me and Mom in my family of origin, and she's not exactly happy with the prospect of being left behind on terra firma with just me, the family goofball.

I enjoy solitude, but if I get too complacent, it slips into loneliness. I married a man who is slightly more gregarious than me and had a pile of kids--as a hedge against loneliness, I now realize. The upshot: I don't even have privacy/solitude anymore either, but I'm temporarily not gnawed alive by loneliness.

So do I vent my disillusionment on my spouse and rambunctious kids, just because I tried to take the Cliff's Notes, shortcut way out of loneliness? Of course not. Even if it's fifty percent theater, I focus on having fun with them, and I make fun of my own inept attempts to lay out that Martha-esque yuletide fantasia on the Big Day.

What's the alternative? Being frozen in place with melancholy and saying, "Well, at least I'm authentic--not full of false cheer, like the rest of these sheeple!" What end, exactly would it serve?

Really, people's loneliness and their individual responses to it come it all kinds of flavors. And there truly is so much darkness in the world, just waiting to creep into every capillary. Or to metastasize from within us. My advice is, laugh whenever possible.

And bjtoth, your thumbnail sketch of Jesus had me howling!

Mieszkowski suggests helping at a food kitchen as a way of feeling connected with people, and it's certainly an important kind of help. Take it farther! What if each of us leading a relatively stable, secure life chose ONE person who is not, to have ONE hour of coffee and conversation with every week at a cafe'?

At the food kitchen meal, sit down with one or two people and chat. Return to help with other meals, find the same person or two for more conversation, and choose one person to invite out to coffee. If that works, make the coffee meeting a weekly one.

You don't need to know about causes or cures for the person's condition or about available resources. The objective isn't to try to change someone's life (though gradually YOU will change!), just to sit and listen and talk. For a person stranded on the margins without companions from mainstream life, these separate, seemingly trivial hours of interested attention add up.

"Freestyle volunteering" is so personal and rewarding, and I really like the simple, self-contained nature of showing up once a week to buy my chosen someone coffee and chat for an hour. There are more suggestions and some stories at Time4one4one.

what else is new?

Nobody EVER seems to question the metamessages they receive from the EVIL overseer social elites. It is no wonder, because most of us cannot see American society for what it is-- a GIANT petri dish for elites to test out Brave New World tactics, that therefore we attribute loneliness to other things.

What is society steering all of us towards but total isolation and total obeisance to soulless and anonymous so called leaders? Did ANYONE protest the eight years of abuse under Bush to any significant extent?

While I often feel lonely, partly because I do not suffer fools and I am a free thinker (and most people do not seem to think for themselves but to ape thoughts they like), I AM blessed to have had a number of close friends in my lifetime as well as a close extended family I can count on. Thus my lonely feelings are relative to the bigger picture that I am still much better off than many.

I have stopped trying to analyze why it is that most Americans seem to me to be incredibly desperate, lonely, uncommunicative, and depressed. There are just too many reasons, most of them driven by the elites and their BIG PICTURE agenda.

Some things I see going on..

So many people who dismiss their family and relatives-- always arguing that some small set of distresses is grounds for isolating oneself from these people forever.

So many people who complain about feeling lonely (or worse, cannot admit they are) yet their whole lives revolve around engaging with machinery.

Conversely, when they do get together, people tend to engage in one night stands, further exacerbating their plight.

People eat wrong, they trust the food system. The food system is EVIL, to be blunt. There are too many things so wrong that it is not worth going into in detail. But if something makes you feel ill consistently, makes you fatten out, etc. don't you think it will turn you into all but an isolated vegetable?

People seem closed minded and short sighted-- if it is not immediately apparent what their personal behavior yields, people never have any generosity to display to anyone else. Now WHO in their right mind would want to be around that?

This society is doomed in my opinion. There is no hope until people wake the fuck up and begin to actually ACT as their own change agents. There is deep wisdom in society, but you have to actively seek it out. The truly wise do not have bullhorns, unlike the scumbags who are steering us all wrong in the name of power and profit.

But do people care? It all seems too futile. I can imagine hundreds of great things I love to engage in with others but that I find difficult to find others to do them with. Scrabble, hiking, discussing the day's events, cooking together. The list goes on. Again, I HAVE people I do this with, I engage the world. Our lives are not infinite but end all too soon. But still, so few others are magnanimous and self aware enough to place themselves out there to ALSO engage with others in these fun things.

Hey, who's got time when the teevee is calling?