I’ll give a little bit of background to my situation. I moved back to my home state about 11 years ago. For almost 10 of those years, I worked a soul-crushing 60+ hour a week job, and I’ve been at a new job for almost a year. The point is, that entire time at my old job, I never met a single person I wanted to form any sort of long-term friendship with. Plus, any free time was spent trying to catch up on sleep, so I hardly ever went out anywhere, and I never met anyone outside of work.
I’ve become a major loner, and the thought of trying to form any sort of friendships just feels foreign and intrusive on my life. I have all the me-time I want, I don’t have to worry about my behavior keeping anyone else happy, and I’ve hardly had to deal with any drama in so long.
That’s not to say that I don’t get lonely. I still occasionally crave being around people, but I don’t really have a desire to interact with anyone, since I hate both small talk and talking about myself: two things that are essentially a necessity to forming a relationship.
My chosen form of ‘social interaction’ has become people watching and people listening. I don’t mean that as eavesdropping on strangers’ conversations. You know how when you go out to a restaurant or a bar / taproom and there are different groups of people all having their own conversations and all the voices blend together and you might occasionally pick out some words here and there, but not enough to be able to listen in intently on their conversations? That’s what I mean. For me, I feel satisfied just being amongst other groups of people and being able to hear other voices interacting with each other. That alone is usually enough to fulfill my need to interact with other humans.
Like, don’t look at me, don’t acknowledge my existence, just let me be another face in a full room for a little while; at least, until I start to feel burned out and weary of all the noise and hustle & bustle. I really should go to another concert sometime soon. It’s been a few years. Just as long as no one talks to me, I’ll be happy.
Does anyone else feel the same way or have any similar experiences? I’d like to hear some stories.