This is unbearable.

yes, that's right @Historylover

'Wilson'... a volleyball, I think.?

It's funny: by the end of the movie he's still at a crossroads... 🤔

Hello @Historylover I have not made a lasting friendship since my friends all died. My friends were heavy responsibility requiring a lot of effort on my part or being more senior than me also requiring the same. I have felt alone for many years and have pondered the concept of friendship. I think the contemporary version of it has devolved from civic duty to one of convenience.

Astrologically you may have Saturn in your 11th house to do with friendship which may make it hard for you, just as it has with me. Saturn imposes heavy obligations and can have a restrictive element to it meaning you can also experience aloneness and isolation.

It used to really bother me but not anymore. It would be nice to have a special connection with someone but owing to my circumstances I'm in a similar boat to you. I honestly think it gets harder as you get older putting yourself out there.

I had a friend who used to run a shamanic lodge from her house and there were nice people but I never connected with anyone except her on a loose basis. I had another person I used to know run a wiccan pagan community from her home and was surrounded by people yet once again people asking more and more of me and not respecting my health deficits surrounding my capacities to give.

Lately I have taken to wearing a Picasso Stone crystal which links you in with your tribe. That certainly happened for me with someone i knew off SANE but due to anonymity couldn't get to know her. But yes Picasso Stone draws your tribe to you. I've seen it happen. Got to be more consistent wearing it but just let it fall by the wayside while I just indulged myself in my alone time and the complex nature of my situation.

You are certainly an amazing woman @Historylover with incredible insights, being wellspoken and having an honorable nature. Please ponder that and don't allow yourself to be caught up in the pain of feeling all alone. What you share regarding your observations around life itself is quite engaging on many levels. I think you are just feeling an acute sense of alienation which is something I do from time to time. You may just be feeling bleak outlook about your situation and hemmed in which can be an awful feeling when all you want to do is connect.

I have to go for now but will be holding you in my heart praying for your wellbeing and happiness. God knows your distress and understands your feelings. I wish there was something more I could do for you but many of us on here are here precisely for the same reason - having no-one.

Galbraith's quote is so apt, @scruffypuffball.

I agree that 30 years is on the light side. Divorce was just really taking off about 40 years ago, and well on the way to becoming the next social movement. I think most people have at least one! My birth family has a large collection. But I think everyone is asking 'now what?'

Tragic way for your mother to die. So sorry.

Mmm. Moral depravity. So very sick of it.

Looks like I'll never get off my island, @Kyle1...I've got the wrong ball!!

I don't remember the end, but I hope mine is not the same. 😟

Read this at your leisure, @Former-Member. I have to make something to eat too. I didn't bother last night, but I have to have something more substantial tonight!

I have never had a true friend in my entire life, more pronounced since moving to Melbourne where I didn't have birth family or relatives either. I'm no longer looking for friends in the real world. Acquaintances would suffice, but family would be ideal. I'm a difficult match but I think friendship is baffling terrain. I wonder how many people really have meaningful, long-standing friendships. You're right, it certainly does get harder as we get older. Life is full of trials, isn't it?

Anonymity here is a nuisance sometimes, and I often wish it wasn't so, but perhaps it gives us all the opportunity to get to know each other on a level we wouldn't have otherwise done, and to plumb the depths of our own true selves. I'm not the person I was just 3 years ago thanks to the folks on this forum. It seems we are never too old to grow up a little more.

You're an amazing woman too, @Former-Member, and thank you for the compliment. And you're quite right—my alienation and isolation are painful to bear, but who knows what the future may hold. Something good for us all, I hope.

I'm feeling much lighter in spirits since posting my cry for help. I was thinking I couldn't go on any longer, but tomorrow is another day and there are still many YouTube videos I want to watch which keep me beneficially occupied. You can't have too much education. I'm just trying to broaden my outlook and get as much education as I can absorb. We really are lucky to have such access. I would never have had the like under other circumstances. Such magnificent minds. Oxford and Cambridge University Professors, no less; debates and fascinating interviews on every imaginable subject. Education is one of few things I envy, so I'm always striving to achieve more. I've such a shortfall in so many areas.

'Bye for now and thank you for caring. Let's have a good week ahead.

Thank you, @Historylover . 🙂 Nice to be reassured that I've been making things better, not worse, for a change.

---

@Historylover wrote:

Do unto others as we would have others do unto us is an excellent motto.

---

That phrase has gotten me into more trouble then you would ever believe, over the years. It sounds great on the surface, I agree. But what happens when you're surrounded by people who want you to treat them very differantly to how you wish to be treated? How do you proceed when you reliably know that treating them the way you would want to be treated is toxic and offensive to them?

It is such a debilitating ethical dillemma. The most obvious approach is to treat these people the way you believe that they wish to be treated. But then you are living a lie; carrying yourself in a fashion that you likely find deeply immoral and offensive. Your compassion is likely never repaid; the people you try to accommodate don't begin altering their conduct to appease you. And, because the mindset you are trying to appease is almost certainly completely foreign to you, your almost certainly botching your performance on a daily basis, because you can't grasp the nuance of what these others want. Hence, you are still decried and alienated as a visable "outsider".

Life was so much easier when I was ignorant of the natures of the people I knew. When I just wandered around automatically assuming that they were just like me, and that treating them how I wanted to be treated was the right thing to do. Paying attention to others; learning who they really are has been the most toxic, hopeless endeavor I've ever embarked upon. Not that I get invited anywhere anymore, but even if I did, there would be little sense in obeying, as I've found that there is no winning strategy for dealing with other people. Even if taken from an absolutely selfless standpoint of: "It doesn't matter how much I suffer, so long as those others are appeased." and, I regret to say, I am nowhere near that benevolent.

---

@Historylover wrote:

You may have noticed that I am looking into theism. I truly am finding solace there, but belief (very serious consideration) in the reality of God, and religious ritual as practised, are not necessarily yet aligned to my current understanding. I don't want to be brainwashed without questioning. That's not how I'm trained, and the Bible is a source of considerable need for answers to many questions. I'm treading a new path and finding my way, and if religions can't answer questions, they are not doing their job.

---

I think a lot about religion, myself. I was raised christain, but I don't buy in to it, for various reasons. Less a question of whether God exists, and more a question of whether or not he would be worthy of praise and worship if indeed he did create the world around us. I find that a very questionable position, since everything even remotely good that I've ever observed has been man made.

The gnostics, so I'm told, believe that the godly force that created the world we see around us - the so-called "demiurge" - is a false god; and that the goodly god we should really be looking to for spiritual satisfaction and guidance is actually a higher being who did not have a hand in the creation of the world we endure on a day-to-day basis. I can't help but imagine this higher god guiding the hand of the artists and characters who pour unnatural goodness in to the world, such as with movies that thrill and inspire us. Movies, symphonies, and the other masterpieces that give life value were never present in the original world as it was created, so one can only surmise that it was not part of the "demiurge's" original design; they've been added in by some secondary force.

Heh. I could go on forever about religion. And probably grow more and more offensive to others as I did so. I think it is an essential building block for a worthwhile society, but it all hinges on everybody being placed in the right religious community for them. Finding the theocracy that worships the "God" who is the paragon of all the virtues that you naturally hold in high esteem; not virtues that you've been dictated to hold in high esteem by others.

Thank you @ArraDreaming. I hope you're ok too.

Good day to you, @chibam.

Well, firstly, while I may not have directly quoted the bible, the essence is reasonably well conveyed in 'treating others as we wish to be treated'. I cannot imagine anyone not wishing to be treated with respect. However, it's earned not automatic. It's not difficult and, in life, things go along much better when everyone is aware that none of us is armour-plated. I don't give others what they want, I give them what suits me to give them based on my appraisal of them in each situation. Others' sense of their own self-importance is not necessarily one I share. I'm not perfect, but I do my best. Relationships are so bruising today and it's just not right.

I agree that we were ignorant in thinking others were just like us! How naive were we? I believed what people told me. Why would they tell me things that weren't true? I didn't lie. How I wish I could have my life over again. How wise I'd be now, but why should survival depend on being distrustful? Daily I have to wrestle with the betrayals I have endured from those to whom I gave my all. It hurts more than I can bear as it's just so unfair.

As for theism, I cannot imagine that this ever-expanding universe will ever be explicable by science. It had to have a beginning, so what power could do that? It is a matter that I don't think many of we 'universal ants' can even get our heads around. We just sit here suspended in a vacuum of unimaginable complexity and vastness, and few ask, 'what is this all about?', 'how did we get here?'.

Many speak of 'God of the gaps', that God did everything that can't be explained. But if science is claiming that it will understand one day, then that is 'Science of the gaps'.

If God is real, then he started this juggernaut of our existence and what we do with it is up to us. Too easy to blame God for everything that goes wrong and, as Stephen Fry so indignantly cries 'Where is God when children get cancer, and people are killed in earthquakes?' or words to that effect. Children getting cancer or any other disease or disability is usually attributable to their genes which is a product of what has gone before in their ancestry, or their experiences, or effects of chemicals etc. It has a cause, and it isn't God. Mankind should start owning the consequences of its own actions. Everything leaves an imprint on our genes, and some dreadful disabilities provide natural shocks that bring us to our senses and back to our humanity. As for earthquakes killing people, or the Holocaust, or terrorism—God didn't do that. Except for earthquakes which are an inevitable part of living on this planet, man did. Man misrepresenting his God, or the lack thereof.

As for mankind creating all the good things of this world, if God/Creator is as real as currently seems plausible to me, he gave us the cell which is so incredibly complex that scientists cannot even replicate a functional cell membrane, even after decades of research, as I understand, let alone its mind-bogglingly complex contents—which have led to evolution and to us sitting here questioning if God is real. I'm just seeking the truth. I hope to find it.

@Historylover Well, there's no denying that mankind has done a lot of awful things, but they've also done a lot of very admirable things, too. That, I think places them a league ahead of the remainder of the universe.

IMHO, the cell is a very inefficient means of achieving an end. I think that, in coming years, with the rise of AI systems and androids, we will be very eager to abandon our organic prisons, and either transplant our consciousnesses into superior android bodies, or exist solely as incorporeal code in Matrix-like simulated realities. Of course, that will almost certainly be well after either of our lifetimes. My point being that humans only tollerate the burden of organic existance simply because there is currantly no other alternative available (at least if you live under the mythology that death is an undesirable alternative).

As for the rest, well, I have nothing new to contribute there that philosophers haven't been arguing about forever, so I'll just leave it at that.