**Not AI generated. Human generated.** *This post may resonate with people from small towns/villages (who have migrated to cities).*
Right from childhood to adulthood (till graduation), we don’t feel loneliness, as we are mostly surrounded by our parents, friends, relatives, and so on.
Loneliness hits when you move to a new city (mostly for employment purposes), where we know no one. Lucky are those who find acquaintances in those places quickly.
However, many don’t belong to this category. Only at this time do we spend most of our time alone.
How I Spend My Time in Loneliness
In my case, I usually spend time with my phone (I am not going to lecture how mobile spoils one’s mind. Frankly, many know it). It’s a kind of escape mechanism for my loneliness. I used to pick up some random movies, YouTube shorts, adult videos (not long — fortunately for me), and thereby spend a crazy amount of time on the phone.
After spending so much time in a day, if someone asks me, “What did you watch?” I don’t have anything meaningful to say. All I would have done was doom-scrolling and watching random videos covering international politics, news, or something else.
But anyway, in my mind, I thought (and still think) that I have escaped the daunting loneliness.
Sometimes, out of nowhere, I also get thoughts about my inner potential — what I can do in my career or life — and it makes me sad at the same time because I am not spending any time on it.
Hard but Strange Truth of Life
I would think (still do) that I am a lazy person and would act correctly only if someone watches me. However, later, after spending so much time with myself, I realized that I don’t know how to spend time with me alone.
“I don’t know how to deal with loneliness.”
The moment I realized that I don’t know how to spend time with myself, it felt quite strange (in a way, it’s very funny to think about this fact).
I came to the conclusion that this is not a peculiar character of mine — this is how human beings are designed.
And this is the strange truth of life: we have to live alone (most of the time).
I read an important quote from a famous radio jockey:
“We have to first take care of ourselves. Only then can we take care of others.”
To be good human beings, we have to be nice to others, but this can only happen when we are nice to ourselves internally.
So that requires us to learn to live with ourselves alone, in a nice way.
So How Do We Achieve It? (I am also still figuring out :))
Well, I don’t know the solution. This is also an enigma for me.
I have a couple of ideas to tackle it, after some researching (both inner and external).
First One, is to familiarize ourselves with the situation.
So whenever I am going for a walk or doing exercises, I intentionally avoid using headphones.
Random thoughts appear in my mind, and I am figuring out how to deal with myself.
(Strange to think that we have to familiarize ourselves with living with ourselves.)
Second is to take care of one’s true love (whatever it may be) each day.
Third is journaling. I am in a beginner stage. But within this short span of practicing, I have realized how bad my thoughts are in my free time and how undisciplined my mind is.
It’s a big topic and an important one for grown-ups to realize about loneliness.
Intrinsically, everyone wants to be a nice person, but they don’t realize that to do that, they first need to tackle themselves.