Why do people feel disgust towards lonely people?

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It took me a long time to realize how and why loneliness is my own cross to bear and nobody else’s.

The thing you have to realize about loneliness is, is that there’s always an element of selfishness to it. You never just want someone to talk to. You want a specific kind of person to talk to. You want to interact with that specific person in a specific way.

Because if you think about it, there are people literally everywhere who are way lonelier than you. If you were really, truly, selflessly lonely, then the homeless guy down the road you’re always ignoring could satisfy your need for human connection. Or that aunt you’re never calling.

There are people literally everywhere that would love to talk to you. To connect with you, to listen to your worries and tell you theirs. All you have to do is want to actually connect with them.

But you don’t. Your mind is playing a trick on you. It is presenting social status-seeking behavior to your consciousness as something to be pitied. You can’t see it in yourself but other people can. That’s why people feel disgust whenever you complain about it.

Whenever I feel lonely, I try to work out exactly what kind of human interaction I want, and with who. I don’t try to hide these details from myself. If it really turns out to be social status seeking that I really want, then I don’t really have a right to complain about the feelings that I’m having. In fact, I’m not really lonely at all, because if I was, I could just go down to the coffee shop or bar.

In fact, if it really were loneliness, I’d be happy about that, because it would mean that I could easily satisfy my desire for connection by calling up any of my friends or relatives and having a chat or setting up a time to have beers or whatever.

But it’s not, the feelings that present themselves as loneliness to me, when I finally get down to the bottom of it, have a weird romantic or sexual component that is both specific and not easily satisfied. So I keep it to myself.

If someone complained to me about loneliness, I would be like, “I’m a person, I can be connected with, talking to me right now should be helping you out, why isn’t it?” Then I’d realize they don’t really want to talk to me. They want to be having sex with a hot chick. I’d just roll my eyes and stop being interested.