I got fed up with it, been somewhat a loner all my life(main exception was nightlife starting in the late teens, social life at work always messed me up, I have had very little interest in work ppl), I feel like there always had a lot of stuff I wanted to explore internally, intellectually, etc. Now though I feel like I've exhausted that and would prefer the unpredictableness of social life, and also feel more like sharing.. In a way now it seems egoistic to have tried grasping a lot of stuff to then just doing nothing with it.
My big thoughts are mostly the same, moving in the same rate when I'm cooking them up by myself but now in social situations I feel like I can crack some great jokes and mental maneuvers in trying to translate my philosophies to others.
I think being a true loner brings peace in that you don't need to think much about social pressures and such, on another hand though, it can feel a bit like you're some virtual computing machine entity isolated from everything else. Now I'm sort of looking at mental & physical exertion as a way to distract me from the boredom of 'not existing', maybe it was always that and I've been good at it, took skateboarding at 27, practicing by myself like some crazy person 6 years already, and now I started working on a game project too.. It's just weird to me how self-exertion and 'social fasting' go together. But anyway, I've exhausted so many interests already that I sort of crave of breaking off of it, I'd just take some 5 or 6 projects with me and that's it.
Social lives aren't unpredictable. They're almost comically predictable as time goes on.
Everyone in a group falls into patterns, roles. The same jokes get told, or variations there-of. You do the same thing every year. BBQ for Bob's birthday. Jill hosts a cheese/wine night a couple of times over winter. The geekier sub-group all gather to watch the first few episodes of the new marvel series. Everyone gets together for a picnic in woolaton park on the first or second sunny weekend of sunmer.
Occasionally something new gets thrown in, and if everyone likes it, it becomes the 'new' regular thing. Or something gets dropped due to changes in life or circumstances. No more games nights till 2am now 80% of my male friends have kids. No more Saturday night clubbing in the cookie club after we left our 20s.
If you want to keep doing unpredictable things, you really have to meet someone who's extremely hyper/exhausting, or keep joing new social groups (by meetups, etc.). And of course, they become predictable too, by their very nature being a scheduled meetup about a specific thing.
And it's worth it. Personally I feel the best experience in life is laughing so hard you end up crying while chatting with your friends.
You bring up a good point, even though I enjoyed drinking / partying with a startup I worked at in college, an experience I wouldn't trade for anything - at 26 I draw serious boundaries between work "outings" / social groups and personal friend groups. Personally, if I ever had a startup there'd be no alcohol at work and work would be for work. The last thing I need is someone claiming someone said something off color at a work outing. Work friends also get messy when you leave a company for good or bad reasons.
I was actually convinced by the stoics that social and public life participation is some kind of human imperative :P
I also believe humans are social animals, but really actually most of what society or civilization pretends to be is bullshit to me, but I think when you dig there's always more to it to discover and etc(+sometimes you appear to have found gold ie.: epiphanies), the thing isn't maybe that you'd want to interact with it on your terms instead of doing the play along game? I was never the play along type but for example lately a big topic of interest to me has been language, culture and communication.. I don't know I just like getting stuff from the root. But anyway your take might be completely different.
My big thoughts are mostly the same, moving in the same rate when I'm cooking them up by myself but now in social situations I feel like I can crack some great jokes and mental maneuvers in trying to translate my philosophies to others.
I think being a true loner brings peace in that you don't need to think much about social pressures and such, on another hand though, it can feel a bit like you're some virtual computing machine entity isolated from everything else. Now I'm sort of looking at mental & physical exertion as a way to distract me from the boredom of 'not existing', maybe it was always that and I've been good at it, took skateboarding at 27, practicing by myself like some crazy person 6 years already, and now I started working on a game project too.. It's just weird to me how self-exertion and 'social fasting' go together. But anyway, I've exhausted so many interests already that I sort of crave of breaking off of it, I'd just take some 5 or 6 projects with me and that's it.