Loneliness
Loneliness
One of the most common questions I’m asked by people who’re curious about my full-time traveling lifestyle is whether I get lonely when living in a new place amongst limitless unfamiliarity, with no friends, history, or knowledge about the local language, customs, and so on.
The answer, of course, is “definitely,” but with caveats.
It’s lonely to find yourself in a new place without your usual habits and friends and myriad comforts, but it’s often a productive flavor of loneliness: it forces you deeper into your own mind and life and processes, but also pushes you out the door to meet new people and engage with the world around you.
I crave this type of fish-out-of-water feeling when I haven’t experienced it for a while, because it really does stoke a near-panic response (in me, at least) that nudges you to prioritize different things and build up from zero, rapidly, in terms of your social root system and relationships.
All that said, it’s a very different thing to feel lonely temporarily (and to know it’s temporary, and perhaps even self-inflicted) and to feel lonely in a more absolute, inescapable, seemingly life-long sense.
Here’s a piece on how loneliness can reshape the brain, and generally not in optimal ways (reinforcing negative-valenced behaviors, rather than pushing against them): https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-loneliness-reshapes-the-brain-20230228/
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