Loneliness is the wont of intimacy. Hence, when mass anxiety fails to challenge our very way of life or to trouble the powers that be, and thus individual dystress fails to evoke sympathetic feeling and therefore mutual aid, and if none any longer shall rally to the alarm sounded, then such only will signal vulnerability to predation and exploitation, merely endangering others as well as oneself. If as we are told, indeed keeping things light is indeed so crucial to popularity and social success, then popularity and social success must come at the sacrifice of all happiness. Popularity and social success on the one hand, and friendship on the other, remain starkly antithetical. This is because friendship is genuine, substantive and intimate in psychological visibility, while popularity or social success depend upon boring facile superficiality and ever maintaining lonely distance. Therefore the inherent contradiction remains irresolvable in very principle, and nothing but a setup for frustration, failure and craven exhortation to lowered expectations and making do with mindless small talk.

The FoolQuest.com work ethic of trustworthy gregarious professionalism:

The good influence

 

“My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.” —  Henry Ford

The dream of bringing out the best in one another is indeed powerful, ancient and long frustrated.

"Be good and you will be lonely.” —   Mark Twain

But cynicism and frustration aside, hope of even relative and imperfect realization thereof, may still be gleaned in the tenure of human civilization, from extensive experience and observation, often consistent from the sages of old through to the cutting edge of modern science. This much remains clear: Be reliable so that others may count on you. Stay interested. Pay attention to one another! Keep interaction engaging. Make time for one another, but also leave space. Mutual support is crucial. Encourage one another's dreams. Reach out and be willing to follow your passions and likewise seek to be supportive of others in their decisions as well.

Thence let us craft new vision together. As Oliver Cromwell put it, not only to strike while the iron is hot, but to keep striking until the iron heats up. To set groundwork and make opportunity.

For many heads, as they say, are better than one. And indeed, there is also the uplifting personal validation of, together with others, genuinely focusing upon achievement of one's own dreams and goals put forth, and likewise reciprocating. Hence the emphasis upon collaborative creativity, agenda and planning.

Of course, the positive power of negative thinking aside, friendship nevertheless remains a trustworthy positive value proposition. Indeed, according to Aristotle, some level of friendship can found itself upon pleasure or utility. And why ever not?

Or as we generally expect, similar common interests, concerns and burdens may even be the least of complex and completing factors accounting for how close friends may uniquely relate to and identify with one another, with sympathy for imperfection. Indeed, that not only is convivial company entertaining and cooperation useful, but that true care is actually uplifting.

Indeed, again, according to Aristotle, the truest friendship manifests altruistic concern and even sacrifice for the other's best interests even to the point of good influence, care towards optimal character, the healthiest condition of the personality which is meaning as derived from purposeful active orientation of living towards value and hence the sterling character of ones life as a whole, with morality and integrity of fortitude even to withstand misfortune; indeed, hence the sharing of good conduct through ongoing relationship and the the practice of philosophy which is discourse ever extending one another's moral insight and compass (or, as according to Adam Smith, entirely appropriate enhanced self esteem in reflecting thereupon) being of greatest wholesome satisfaction.

In brief, that truest friendship is actually a reciprocally supportive good influence between rare individuals of sterling character. Better still, however, let us also recognize autonomy as morally indispensable virtues, thus perhaps even reconciling aforesaid ancient ideals with modern views of friendship as equal, private and voluntary.

And the most ideal networks of friends somehow together strive towards all their most cherished values and ideals as above. But how might such lofty ideals ever inform any realistic and practical minimums necessary to effectiveness and happiness?

The answer arises from bearing in mind that effectively regimented or else discarded, divided and conquered as we are, we all need to be needed and outside at large free from the tyranny within established institutions with extensive resources, only autonomously tight knit pooled effort, task interdependency met with trust and respect by ready mutual assistance can ever begin to attend to and pursue aspirations well beyond all that can otherwise be self achievable for any lone individual. Also, the simple truth endures, that even in the most scarce attention economy, the most stimulating attention exchange value, with best return and most productive involvement possible, nevertheless remains for full undivided attention and in return for likewise in kind. 

For any purpose under the sun, building true community and optimizing a thriving attention economy may require more expansive involvement than afforded from pointlessly banal hanging out and making idle vapid small talk with mere acquaintance. Friendship denotes co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more individuals. And indeed, just as with productive creativity, sustaining social connection often depends upon the active attentive investment of such fundamental resources as interest, sympathy, time and concerted effort.

Moreover, all the same principles by which pleasure, engagement and meaning drive gratification, all remain applicable in sharing the  pursuit of happiness pertaining thereby no less in interaction and relationship.

Happiness requires positive self worth, control and self determination, optimism, security, outgoing expressive extroversion, adaptability, purpose and immediacy. So, is there any recipe for ever at all reliably serving up all of these cherished values? And what might be the required resources?

First of all, vital to the interaction of any productive free collaboration, coordination and task interdependency as ever arises, will always be the cultivation and preservation of  reciprocal logistical support by the honest assessment and nurture of the integrity of healthy quid pro quo, assuring that everyone's needs including one's own are met in the exchange of all prompt and diligent vital assistance, all proffered in spirit of generosity and respect received in due appreciation and trust vindicated reciprocally.

Division of labor amongst various specialists is common in any any larger venture or endeavor. But real collaboration and cooperation often entails mutual assistance addressing cross-functional task interdependency of crucial specialized parts of another's otherwise specialized tasks or rôles therein. Again, task interdependency refers to circumstances wherein any particular tasks must be accomplished first, and within what time frame, in order for other tasks to even become possible in turn, and then accomplished efficiently on schedule. Therefore participants become responsible to one another.

Passing beyond whatever pathologically insecure extremes of empty, insatiable and pathetic manipulation of Narcissistic supply, into healthy quid pro quo and even genuine reciprocity, one ought ever be positively eager towards nurture and support in assistance to aid and better equip anyone else in any tasks, after all, involved in the very life support towards fruition of one's own vision at all shared by others, and expect no less in return; all only given requisite trust and good will to actually value and even take pleasure in such an accord, and not as any begrudging or reluctant sacrifice.

For honesty remains the best policy.

Of course, on the one hand, purposeful obscurantism, or on the other hand, simply stonewalling and playing stupid in order to deliberately obstruct, must be anathema. Moreover, however, even passive non response due to sheer good faith incomprehension must be explicitly forbidden as well. In case of deadlock due to incomprehension, the uncomprehending party or parties must be obliged to coherently formulate and then to ask questions and to demand whatever explanation or assistance until adequate comprehension is achieved in order to move forward in a timely manner. Reciprocally, all others, especially the uncomprehended party, must make every effort to oblige. After all, never moving beyond whatever is immediately clear to all, means never doing anything challenging, new, different or creative and inventive in problem solving.

In order to forestall needless drama, never lie or hide issues because problems will only escalate. Never hesitate to be truthful and open. Resolve needless and painful uncertainties. Never prolong mounting tensions. Talk over any signals raising mistrust or discomfort because ultimately trust suffers in the face of nagging doubt or resentment.

Appreciate another's effort. A simple "thank you" requires little trouble. And apologize: Put pride aside and say sorry when you're wrong.

The FoolQuest.com work ethic:

Realism is job one!

Trustworthy Honestly rigorous due diligence...

Towards Eudemonia, authentic wellbeing, fulfillment is achieved by  optimal reciprocal engagement, meaningful and pleasurable. For happiness, Epicurus espoused freedom, friendship and thought. All of this is paradoxically weighty stuff, for lightening the heart! But there it is. Indeed: Happy People Talk More Seriously together, freely, and with less small talk. Because otherwise, to quote Olmstead: “After all is said and done, much is said and little is done.” And to quote Benjamin Disraeli: "Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.” Indeed, a key feature of serious conversation is agenda. Moving from the abstract and general, to the concrete and particular, characteristics of agenda are questioning open endedness, the practice of criticism and controversy, strategic planning into expanding collaborative action. Agenda is therefore taboo. In any bureaucracy, especially as in any way influenced by or affiliated to what passes for education, if call to agenda cannot simply be ignored or condemned, they will typically be countered with call for compromise in the name of convention and sensitivity, all amounting to the heteronymous annihilation of all the aforementioned responsible and liberating characteristics of agenda.

Relationship is an attachment arising either from free and coherent even substantive communication, or indeed from common purposeful interaction and endeavor or else from the seduction of play that finds purpose and substance of its own within itself, and from the dignity of social risk with trust, security, ultimately openness in yielding to temptation; all the aforesaid that are the competencies of autonomy, along with organization and congenial social grace to manage and sustain contacts, reciprocally. -

All of that is such anathema and typically obstructed by such drone-like heteronymously arbitrary social acumen, skilled incompetence and cronyism, that everywhere buttresses the tacit institutionalization and twisted value of indeed all the most flagrant insensitivity and ineptitude imaginable, the bad driving out the good, and worse, actingout the destructive evil that is rampant bullying. Indeed, gregariousness and engaging personality may even be reviled as subversive and impertinent to a malagenda of sheer heteronymous group validation in sheer denial of all such profound endemic and pandemic alienation from all true innate and intrinsic drives of human expression and connection. And all to often, the favorite mode of all such denial is willful positivity and keeping it light! 

By contrast, happiness comes in meeting ones needs by capable interaction with responsible others. And this is a very serious matter indeed. As Oliver Cromwell put it, not only to strike while the iron is hot, but to keep striking until the iron heats up. To set groundwork and make opportunity. Whereas, bland small talk is safe because there is no risk, no real self disclosure. There is also often little risk involved in reporting the circumstances, actions and even the ideas of others. All of which accounts for approximately 90% of conversation amongst the lonely. Indeed, in the famous words of Eleanor Roosevelt: “Great minds discuss ideas. Mediocre minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” The Nihilistically attachment disordered amoral a'priori dismissal in very principle, of consciousness and meaning whatsoever, all in favor, instead, of mindless travesty and mimesis that is behavioral structure, intentionally arrested development stifling of all genuine spontaneity, all quasi-legislated under tabooistic bullying mass exhortation to bogus support group etiquette, permanently arrested in small talk and idle chit chat, plus "sharing" as a craven Orwellian euphemism for reciprocal constructivist listening in uncritical bland agreeability, is no remedy for loneliness, but guaranteed perpetuation thereof. Is anywhere else, all recommended practical means and instruction more diametrically taboo from well understood and relevant abstract principle?

In blithe apologetics for the promised spoils of eager conformism, what 'You are not above small talk. Nobody is.'  actually delineates, is not the pertinent whole truth of often so toxic social reality, but the benign functions of small talk most ideally, and one might hope, in any moderation and proportion. Even putting aside social skills in construction of smooth routine and dexterous ongoing catalogue of hierarchical social position all as extolled in The Magic of Small Talk, Forbes Magazine makes the case for the interpersonal Importance of small talk, but far from passive aimless lonely boredom bereft of personal identity, even the initial small talk in question strives to relatable sympathy and empathy, while the situational assumption seems to be of how amongst serious people with so much at stake, crucially important matters ever hang in the air, redolent with promise and only ever awaiting some tension-breaking deft opening into new beginnings.

For only in personal disclosure of ideas and assessment does risk of intimacy begin, watching carefully for reaction, sharing any opinions. Only given favorable response, then escalation may ensue. In more profound emotional revelation, there is significant disclosure and fear of rejection and failure, but also unique and indispensible opportunity for individual growth. Peak Communication involves considerable commitment and trust, and no need to hold back.

Beware interminable boring pointlessly belabored superficial small talk, often forced and awkward, only leaving one actually the more depleted, empty and discontent, all urgent need of truly important expression still mute and frustrated.

“A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.”  —  Bert Leston Taylor

“What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.”

— Temple Grandin,  ‘The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's’

Not withstanding, and somewhat to the contrary, it has even been theorized that the Neanderthals lacked Social Skills and therefore, undone by their own rugged Individualism, died out for wont of such civic-virtues as division of labor, extended networking and social support!

Perhaps among those most notably challenged in life skills of Social and Emotional Intelligence today, being individuals, even high functioning, diagnosed on the Autisms-Asperger's spectrum, are well known often to compare themselves to Anthropologists abroad in a baffling strange new land. Alas, nothing in practice seems to have emerged from that salient insight. 

A cultural feature of Individualistic democracy and autonomy along with relative equality and criticality, low-context communication style, perhaps better described rather as low in subtext, is persuasive, even ambitious, eloquently articulate, precise, direct, and specific with little need of reading between the lines, all content and no status relationship dimension, thus also useful in the minimization of cross-cultural misunderstanding.

Introversion, Intuition, Thinking, Judgment Myers-Briggs Personality Types in particular, tend even to aversive impatience often stymied and exasperated with typical socially validating small talk, favoring instead just cutting to the chase, initiating any conversational substance of ideas.

•  Conversing with an INTJ

 

Boredom is an acute lack of excitement and often accrues from the dire mismatch of intrinsic motivation and relevantly meaningful activity to unique individual value, given any dearth of adequately engaging alternatives often for want of authentic respect and autonomy support with the freedom and power not only to avoid and refuse boring activities, but instead to do anything more interesting. Because boredom can be more of a reaction to situation or circumstance, than a trait of indivifual character. Fun is a powerful motivation aroused by stimulation, particularly novelty, under-stimulation engenders boredom, the very opposite of fun. The despair of meaningless futility and boredom undermines hope, bringing depression, anxiety, even illness and the dangerous clumsiness of fatigue, as well as risky behaviors and addictions. Often, boredom results or is exacerbated in response to pressure. Individually purposeful endeavor and motivation is an expression of autonomy. But competence in planning, organizing and following instructions challenges both personal resources and social aptitude, often unto frustration and dystress. Observably, boredom may often both result from and exacerbate incompetence in planning, organizing and following instructions, as well as the lack of purposeful endeavor and motivation in stimulus struggle which is the ongoing struggle against boredom, just as social stimulus struggle is the ongoing struggle against loneliness.

All living beings are perpetually engaged in stimulus struggle which is the name coined by anthropologist Desmond Morris for the perpetual striving of all living things, to regulate, to obtain and maintain, the optimum kind and degree of stimulation and arousal from the environment. Everything that we do is in order to modify subjective experience thereby altering consciousness, Stimulus struggle, then is the struggle against boredom, and social stimulus struggle is the struggle against loneliness, loneliness consisting of any deficiency or discrepancy between ones own desired versus actually achieved or at all available, quality of social interaction, stimulation, arousal and communication.

“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.” – Albert Camus, The Plague

In 'The Conquest Of Happiness' Bertrand Russell argues that jaded boredom is frequently exacerbated by the very fear of boredom motivating such incessant panicked pleasure seeking and craving for excitement as may characterize just such ostensible hedonism. Be that as it may, Russell however extols a certain endurance of another kind of boredom that he calls “Fruitful Monotony” inspiring quiet reflection amid nature. But is Russell truly advancing a consistently corroborated Empirical Ontology or merely fallen prey to the bias of his own perhaps somewhat Moralistic Axiology? Indeed, aren't people different with different needs and troubles?

To quote from 'The Miracle Morning'' by Hal Elrod: “Repetition can be boring or tedious, which is why so few people ever master anything.”  In 'The Pale King,' David Foster Wallace proffers the recommendation: “If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.” In context, Wallace was talking about the convolutions of the tax code in accounting and tax preparation, and he committed suicide before finishing his literary opus, an anti-dramatic Postmodern testament to meaninglessness.  

•  : There Are 5 Types Of Boredom. Which Are You Feeling?

Confinement in nagging unfulfilled frustration is often the experience of any gifted individual whose situation howsoever fails to provide an arena for uplifting application of their talents. Depending upon all manner of statistical factors and correlates such as individual stimulus needs, coping, and self-efficacy versus helplessness, patience versus impatience, hope versus despair, procrastination and introspection, gifted underachievers in particular may even however the more flagrantly tend, seemingly by disposition, intelligent and extroveritedly seeking more variety in external stimulation, to be more greatly than others, boredom prone, indeed actually requiring a constant and changing flow of stimulation for optimal arousal and engagement. "Stimulus struggle" seeks engagement in arousing even if nonutilitarian frivolous activity or: play. An optimal level of arousal is highly correlated to intrinsic satisfaction and value, the flexible imagination towards the comparison of fresh perspectives upon experience that is called: perceptual freedom, and peak performance.

Intellectual stimulation from the social environment remains ever paramount to the endeavor of FoFoolQuest.com. The engaging and invigorating trigger of intellectual stimulation is an intrinsic need, even neurologically. Intellectual stimulation opens the way for the enthusiastic autonomy of egalitarian close collaborative creative solution finding and thereby liberation from hierarchical heteronomy. Intellectual stimulation Is an intrinsic human need. Intellectual stimulation differs psychologically with individual character, and will therefore defy precise definition. Intellectual stimulation engages thought and imagination to challenge ambitious capability to insightfully identify and find creative solutions to problems. And yet intellectual stimulus deprivation remains pandemic. Clearly, either the system is broken, or else individual failure and confusion can actually be intentional, even deliberately brutal, boring Absurd and irrelevant Zen surreal by design, brainwash to break the will, indeed as it has been since antiquity. A hallmark of the compliant and complacent conservative personality is the the boundless capacity to endure boredom. And in the annals of formal education as so readily observed in so many other social institutions such as religion, politics and employment among others,  the tradition is recorded even most anciently in Plato's Academy, of deliberately and calculatingly quashing the very intellectual freedom and Dialectical intellectual stimulation so cherished  by and fatal to Plato's beloved but impractical mentor Socrates, via the deliberate infliction boredom in order so diligently to weed out innovators, tending to boredom proneness, and of novelty that ever threatens change. For many are the sages of old in fervent embrace of the value of social stability at any cost, the maintenance of sheer conservative inertia even in the most arbitrary status quo. -And therefore concerning themselves in all gravity with the contrivance of reliable production process and systematic filters of endlessly bland mediocrity enduring to this day, bureaucratically screening out deficiency and excellence alike and entirely without distinction. Indeed such remains the function of peer review in academic publication, and worse, of the FDA in the approval of medicines. No snake oil and no breakthroughs either. Such is heteronomy and the dread of all temptation into nonconformity replete with any possibility ever of Socratic Wisdom and the acknowledgment of ignorance, error and uncertainty.

•   Psychology Today: What is Boredom?

•  Scientific American: Why Boredom Is Anything but Boring 

•  : Types of boredom  

 

Not that boredom isn't actually quite ordinary and prevalent to any dull routine. Boredom, after all, is a luxury of affluence and indifference free and secure from any actual struggle for survival. After all, as Bertrand Russell notes, the opposite of boredom is not specifically eustress or pleasure, but merely excitement without distinction, even such distress as sheer terror or any simple over arousal, because after all, diminishing returns apply even to stimulation. Boredom is known to inspire action from bad judgement, in sheer desperation for any distraction. However, aversive emotion including boredom, is valuable as an indicator of suboptimal circumstance, even spurring on productive action, even meaningful altruism, foresight and planning. One of the actually good things about boredom, is that boredom bring the mind to wander, greater boredom even more greatly increasing creativity. Which helps explain both the cultivation of even the most grinding monotony to assuage and stave off extreme anxiety, overstimulating or outright dystress, to which boredom may actually come as a relief, and then if not unexpected creativity then the lengths and heights of malignant madness and danger often undertaken even inspired out of sheer boredom.

Boredom is a reactive state to wearingly dull, repetitive, or tedious stimuli or under arousal, distress, distraction, disengagement, the lack of interesting things to see, hear, or do physically and/or intellectually arouse and engage curiosity over time. Boredom is the dystress of life inertia. Boredom is an aggravated nervous fatigue, an angst-ridden intrinsic yearning to occupy time with relevant meaningful value. Boredom is a particular restless and even irritable condition of passivity opposite to optimal arousal and active creativity, anxious and overwhelmed, powerless and yearning for escape, not liking what one is doing but neither knowing what else to do for desperate wont of any better idea; arising, as observed by Otto Fenichel, simply “when we must not do what we want to do, or must do what we do not want to do.” Indeed there have always been many reasons why it may even be deemed a mistake to strive for ultimately boring inner harmony or tranquility: Heraclites said: "All is fire!" Nature is of clashing forces, and human nature likewise, is of inner conflict and passion. Therefore, true insight is likewise thereof, honestly. And so is engaged creativity that makes even ones own company at all the more interesting and congenial, particularly as in the eustress of scientific curiosity.

• SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: Bored?

Whereas, indeed, the condition of loneliness is entirely distinct from any mere circumstances of solitude or benefit of privacy. Hence, however counter intuitively, and far from maladaptive dysfunction, the benefits of privacy, retreat into high quality solitude, refreshing volitional solitary activities and behaviors, is often actually known to at all ameliorate rather than simply exacerbate sensations of loneliness and boredom.

Similarly, adaptive introverted strategies, Existentially Absurd, Ecclesiastically futile, alienated, desperate and even somewhat standardized recreational stopgaps in lieu of crucial meaningfully relevant engagement, for coping with understimulating tedium of employment, formal education or recreation hanging out socially and waiting patiently for an opening to the most empty and banal small talk in order to advance in popularity, by in the meantime eking out any small satisfaction, include fantasy, daydreaming, mental games, self amusement via the cultivation of new interests, appreciation, skills or hobbies, striking up conversation, arbitrary variation in routine tasks and careful observation of incidental environmental detail.

After all, in order to optimize stimulus struggle by prolonging interesting events, intentional activity must be organized towards the relation of actions to objects given whatever aspects of the environment howsoever allowing and supporting whatever particular activities.

A common twice exceptionality, lifelong deadly social and career learning disability among gifted underachievers, ongoing products of lifelong asynchronous development, in even somewhat rebelliously stunned apathetic bored and lonely deficiency of all such executive function including poor memory and low organizational skills, may be entirely due to fully active responsiveness arising only to howsoever valued high standards of pleasurable, engaging and meaningful opportunity.

And that is why FoolQuest.com in combating loneliness and boredom, remains dedicated, first and foremost, to the advancement of social engineering of more optimal social stimulus struggle: the systematic and concerted cultivation of more optimally pleasurable, engaging and meaningful interaction so essential to human flourishing. And what could be better?

Just as boredom may illicit the biological defense which is disassociation, conversely inattention and therefore distraction and disturbance, be it from self-conscious inner emotional turmoil or any bothersome external nuisance alike, all do factor into boredom by undermining interest and involvement. Hence, indeed, one way or another, actually ignoring the problem by attentive Zen mindfulness towards immediate activity and experience and tuning out external static and ego distraction alike, indeed, metaphorically even running away from oneself, has indeed ever been found to help in coping with the lonely grinding urgency of boredom, but much like unto extrinsic motivation or chemical stimulants, surely only temporarily. -For such can never be enough, Existentially... 

This article extends the study of a phenomenological investigation (Bargdill, R. W., 2000) in which six participants wrote protocols and gave interviews describing the experience of being bored with their lives. This study found that the participants gradually became bored after they had compromised their life-projects for less desired projects. The participants felt emotionally ambivalent because they were thematically angry with others involved in their compromises while being pre-reflectively angry with themselves. The participants non-thematically adopted passive and avoidant stances toward their lives that allowed their boredom to spread to more aspects of their lives. The participants' boredom led them to identity issues because they no longer were actively working toward projects. They felt empty and apathetic because they felt every action led to boredom, and thus action was futile. Preliminary distinctions between the experience of life boredom and depression are considered.

—  THE STUDY OF LIFE BOREDOM (abstract)

 

•    Meaning of values: THE THIRD FUNDAMENTAL

Even transitory boredom may often be regarded as a waste of time or far worse. Indeed, subjective time seems to drag interminably when suffering from boredom because of sheer monotony, the very infrequency of notable events resulting in boredom to begin with.

“Boredom is an emptiness filled with insistence.”  —  Leo Stein

Boredom is often manifestation of exactly such dissident ennui in passive resistance as might actually stem from the depressive stressed out apathetic alienated lack of interest and self-knowledge of repressed desires under any static situation of manipulative coercion or captivity, unsettled, fidgety, helpless and out of touch even with ones own sense of oppression, likely thereby even overshadowing whatever joys otherwise experienced.

“Boredom: the desire for desires”  —  Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy, ‘Anna Karenina’

Dangerous human error is often attributable to inattentive, stultifying and debilitating boredom and frustration on the job. Indeed, boredom is a contributing factor in however sullen and deadened anger, aggression and worse: thence to all manner of folly and vice.

“A yawn is a silent shout.”  —  Gilbert K. Chesterton

“the shriek of unused capacities.”  —  Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

"Boredom is rage spread thin"  —  Paul Tillich

“Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism”  —  Wendell Phillips

“We often forgive those who bore us, but never those whom we bore.”

—  Maxims of François Duc de La Rochefoucauld, 

“The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault.”  —  Henry Kissinger

Yet exactly such an unhappy and painfully distressful evolutionary trait or response even such as sheer boredom, when seen nonetheless as a quality filter and an individual protest in defense of autonomy and self determination, may nevertheless be valued as useful even if aversive, and recognized as a cry for change rather than blithely pathologized as entirely maladaptive. Indeed, one positive value of boredom is in how transitory frustration from external understimulation in solitude facilitates inner focus, inner life, imagination and creative play. Whereas, disinterest and boredom likewise in sullen protest but actually as a defense mechanism of heteronomy, is a feature of crimestop, an aspect of doublethink.

“When work is a pleasure, life is joy!
When work is a duty, life is slavery.”
— Maxim Gorky

“To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.”

—  Heraclitus

"The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes."

—  Saul Steinberg

 

in accordance with the Axiology of G. E. Moore, just as pleasure is only the second order desire pursuant to whatever perceived and understood good, likewise avoidance of pain is only the second order fear or aversive desire pursuant to whatever perceived and understood evil, avoidance thereof being first order desire. Desires thus are meaningful, after all. Therefore, so is living life. Because, if the aversive emotion of boredom is, indeed, to quote Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy in ‘Anna Karenina,’ "the desire for desires," then in that case, what could be more meaningful, even than the worst boredom, let alone whatever heights of fulfillment! Indeed, boredom is so intensely value loaded, as to be most greatly meaningful. In the words of Gilbert K. Chesterton: "A yawn is a silent shout." For in the words of Leo Stein: “Boredom is an emptiness filled with insistence.” Death then may end boredom, but addresses none of the outcry of boredom.

Whereas, indeed, the condition of loneliness is entirely distinct from any mere circumstances of solitude or indeed actual benefit of privacy. Indeed John Paul Sartre went so far as to opine: "If you are lonely when you are alone, then you are in bad company.” All hence, however counter intuitively, and far from maladaptive dysfunction, the benefits of privacy, retreat into high quality solitude, refreshing volitional solitary activities and behaviors, is often actually known to at all ameliorate rather than simply exacerbate sensations of loneliness and boredom, and the connected continuity of grinding consciousness whereof over time. Isolation and loneliness are invisible and unseen, situationally. Much as hunger and thirst call attention to depletion  to ones individual nutritional wonts and needs to be met, loneliness calls attention to ones unmet social needs and desires. And the loneliness of the isolated will be entirely unsuspected by others from whom they are isolated and hidden. But lonely isolation may arise for the stranger in any new situation, in times of involuntary celibacy, among friendly seeming people who won't just find the time to befriend, in the company of untrustworthy friends, among the quiet and detached, and often simply for one who is different and just can't relate. 

“Loneliness might make it harder to establish a true sense of connection with others. Having to socialize with others without achieving a sense of connection might feel particularly draining and meaningless, damaging one's psychological well-being.”

— ‘Alone in a Crowd: Is Social Contact Associated with Less Psychological Pain of Loneliness in Everyday Life?’ Olga Stavrova and Dongning Ren of Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

Indeed, as per dialogue scripted by Bobcat Goldthwait for the fictional character of Lance Clayton as portrayed  by actor Robin Williams in ‘World's Greatest Dad:’ “I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.”

Attachment theory was the foundation for an influential psychological theory of loneliness developed by the sociologist Robert S. Weiss. Weiss identified six social needs that, if unmet, contribute to feelings of loneliness. Those needs are attachment, social integration, nurturance, reassurance of worth, sense of reliable alliance, and guidance in stressful  situations. As would be predicted by attachment theory, Weiss maintained that friendships complement but do not substitute for a close, intimate relationship with a partner in staving off loneliness.

—  Encyclopedia Britannica

As dubiously attributed  Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel): "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." But oppression is a situation, circumstance or state of affairs wherein those who do indeed mind  actout and  bully. And resultant lonely isolation is a situation, circumstance, state of affairs or experience, howsoever quite bereft of folks who don't mind.

All living beings are perpetually engaged in stimulus struggle which is the name coined by anthropologist Desmond Morris for the perpetual striving of all living things, to regulate, to obtain and maintain, the optimum kind and degree of stimulation and arousal from the environment. Everything that we do is in order to modify subjective experience thereby altering consciousness, Stimulus struggle, then is the struggle against boredom, and social stimulus struggle is the struggle against loneliness, loneliness consisting of any deficiency or discrepancy between ones own desired versus actually achieved or at all available, quality of social interaction, stimulation, arousal and communication. Common causes of social isolation and therefore loneliness include bullying and intimidation, shyness or social anxiety, living away from home for the first time, friends moving away for employment or further advancement in formal education, and simply growing apart from those with whom one has grown up with. Or whatever failure of social integration, Or because no one seems to relate to whatever howsoever unique dystress or sore travail of ones own. Or having nowhere to go, no propinquitous routine behavioral structure, moreover uneventful and leaving one stymied and at a loss for any new news to share with others. Lonely people often fall prey to their own wishful thinking and unrealistic expectations, even sheer snake oil everywhere proffered to the vulnerable and unwary. Lonely people craving popularity, may often struggle to keep themselves occupied, drift into unhealthy habits or even addiction of one kind or another, join into dysfunctional social circles or bullying cliques, even gangs and cults, and enter into generally unviable relationships.

Alas and astonishingly, across the socio-political spectrum, no matter the range of ideological perspective upon responsibilities, the authentic wellbeing and thriving that is subjective and individually variable intrinsic reactive happiness to favorable circumstances of doing what one loves for whatever intrinsic value, even the most ambitious meaningful collaboration, autonomy, friendship, freedom and thought, such being the primary focus uniquely of FoolQuest.com. are elsewhere barely even considered if not fearfully taboo from consideration at all, so really dismissed as pipedream for wont of prior foundation or justification! Nor are values of authentic relationship often found at the crux of any practical outreach, as they really need to be.

For to idle and uneventful quiet, solitude may ever at least be at all private and  tranquil, beyond sheer boredom alone, loneliness is the distress of being isolated and estranged from others, perhaps even rejected, unseen and unknown, helpless to connect, a painful awareness and important desire not being met, to feel needed, wanted and connected, and a longing not merely to interact at all, but actually however to relate to others, to genuinely react and respond to one another.

Loneliness, after all, remains the wont of intimacy. Hence, when mass anxiety fails to challenge our very way of life or to trouble the powers that be, and thus individual dystress fails to evoke sympathetic feeling and therefore mutual aid, and if none any longer shall rally to the alarm sounded, then such only will signal vulnerability to predation and exploitation, merely endangering others as well as oneself. If as we are told, indeed keeping things light is indeed so crucial to popularity and social success, then popularity and social success must come at the sacrifice of all happiness. Popularity and social success on the one hand, and friendship on the other, remain starkly antithetical. This is because friendship is genuine, substantive and intimate in psychological visibility, while popularity or social success depend upon boring facile superficiality and ever maintaining lonely distance. Therefore the inherent contradiction remains irresolvable in very principle, and nothing but a setup for frustration, failure and craven exhortation to lowered expectations and making do with mindless small talk. Because given the intrinsic human need of psychological visibility, every pretence typically buttressing popularity and social success, so antithetical to friendship, remains ever miserable and no less alien than unpopularity and more overt isolation. Either way, only set up for failure and suffering, a sore travail. And indeed all such preceding complaint, nothing so surprising, remains well known, tropic, even somewhat cliché iconoclasm: knee-jerk indignation notwithstanding, and coming as little surprise to anyone, attacks upon cherished beliefs, thrust whereof having long dissipated all true shock value, and therefore rousing ever less urgency and concern. But then, beyond just griping and grumbling, for the genuinely disgruntled, entirely just fed up, realistically, what manner of alternatives, when no one much seems to care, and the only winning move is not to play?

 

Alas that substance and purpose remain actually shameful, awkward, nerdy, uncool, socially unacceptable and taboo. For such is what is most often called: Anti-intellectualism (hostility and mistrust towards intellect, intellectuals, intellectualism, and deprecation of culture whatsoever) but perhaps more properly designated: anti-intraception (a discomfort or opposition in very principle, toward the subjective, the imaginative, the tender minded). And if indeed interminable emotionally and intellectually distant, unwelcoming and disingenuous small talk ever keeping it light, remains key to popularity and social success, then such do-nothing busywork dronelike Orwellian anti-intellectual or anti-intraceptive path of popularity and social success, remains antithetical to true friendship, because it remains in the very taboo nature of friendship, that friendship must be open, genuine and fully engaged, not cagy and mindlessly distant. Only an oppressor demands of one never to think or to speak out. And in the words of Barbara Sher: “Isolation is the true dream killer, not your attitude.”

Expression or else isolation: Meaning and by implication, engagement, is most noted for assuaging not only boredom but loneliness even during solitude, and solitary pleasure with no one to share it, for most quickly wearing into loneliness. But eventually meaning too yearns for expression and communication, for the most passionate engagement will ever be, of course, with others.

And that is why FoolQuest.com in combating loneliness and boredom, remains dedicated, first and foremost, to the advancement of social engineering of more optimal social stimulus struggle: the systematic and concerted cultivation of more optimally pleasurable, engaging and meaningful interaction so essential to human flourishing. 

“You know I had troubles with depression in my early adulthood and I never really got it, I never really understood what was wrong; I didn't know what to do to fix it. Whereas when I was lonely, when my loneliness lasted I knew exactly what I needed and I needed more connection and I understood that if that increased connection came into my life my loneliness would go away. So there wasn't that sort of mysteriousness to it, I knew what I needed and it just wasn't there. And I think that's what is so frustrating about loneliness, is that you can picture and intuit and you are very acutely aware of what it is that you need but you just can't get it.”

 

—  Emily White, 'All In The Mind' interview with Natasha Mitchell

ABC National Radio, Australia  

 

 

“Loneliness breaks the spirit.”   —  Jewish Proverb

 

“Isolation is the true dream killer, not your attitude.” — Barbara Sher

 

“No man is an island.” — John Donne

The human brain is neurologically structured so as to equate loneliness with danger and death. Hence the aphorism of killing socially, to describe covert relational hostility and bullying, shunning and mobbing, and the sheer fair game gaslighting terror all therefrom. One feels adequate, secure and comforted in friendly company, the more so as love deepens, and especially following protracted absence. For loneliness is dystress in response to whatever kind of separation or isolation. Loneliness, rightly dreaded, therefore, alas, is shunned and despised. Loneliness, rapidly contagious and pandemic, actually propagates. Loneliness and attachment disorder is often a worsening Component of Psychiatric Disorders and conditions, sufferers feeling isolated and alone, just when they need social and emotional support more than ever. Indeed, a common twice exceptionality, lifelong deadly social and career learning disability among gifted underachievers, ongoing products of lifelong asynchronous development, in even somewhat rebelliously stunned apathetic bored and lonely deficiency of all such executive function including poor memory and low organizational skills, may be entirely due to fully active responsiveness arising only to howsoever valued high standards of pleasurable, engaging and meaningful opportunity. Loneliness may even accrue simply from values, frustrated yearning and vision of any conceivable way of life howsoever more open and genuine between individuals. -As exhorted by Epicurus, freedom, friendship and thought. Moreover, according to one study, sad, lonely people more likely to become ‘natural’ social psychologists. Indeed, melancholic introverts are often more perceptive than others in understanding how people act in social groups.

"Have no friends not equal to yourself."  —  Confucius

"Loners, by virtue of being loners, have at their fingertips the undiscovered, the unique and the rarefied; innate advantages when it comes to imagination; concentration; inner discipline; a knack for invention; originality, for finding resources in what others would call vacuums; a knack for vision."

 

—  Anneli Rufus

"Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate to others the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible . . . If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely."

 

—  Carl Gustav Jung, 1989, p. 356.

“There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.”

 

—  Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

 
“Philosophers, writers, artists, even scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking. If Defoe had really lived on a desert island, he could not have written Robinson Crusoe, nor would he have wanted to. Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.”

 

—  ‘Conversation with a Pacifist’ by George Orwell

 

Loneliness, social and emotional isolation, dystressfully consists of any deficiency or discrepancy between ones own desired versus actually achieved or at all available, quality of social interaction, stimulation and communication. Loneliness accrues not from separation from just any companions, but separation from preferred companions. All therefore, so paradoxically, feelings of painful isolation are often actually triggered in the presence of and by interaction with others. Loneliness is the wont of intimacy. The most wretchedly abandoned, confused and damaged, lack even concept of intimacy. Moreover, social support as ever may remain amongst the foremost predicate of capability and success, hence deficiency or mismatch to whatever actual needs of social support, the very recipe for failure.

“A more accurate way to look at loneliness is that it’s a human experience and serves a purpose in the same way that thirst serves a purpose.”
—  Jeremy Nobel

“People think being alone makes you lonely, but I don't think that's true. Being surrounded by the wrong people is the loneliest thing in the world.” 

—  Kim Culbertson

• Why We’re Fated to be Lonely
• The Lethality of Loneliness
• needing targeted solutions
 
• How to identify the most-isolated  
• Expression or else isolation
• psychological visibility to penetrate psychological asymmetry, not so odd

Religion typically blames loneliness upon separation from God. Some people become lonely without an animal pet. Indeed, according to psychologists, there are six types of loneliness:

1. Interpersonal loneliness: This is the result of lacking or losing a significant, or intimate, relationship.
2. Social loneliness results when a person is on the fringes of a group, excluded from a group, or is actively rejected and even bullied. But even in the midst of seeming sociable congeniality, to quote Mark R. J. Lavoie: “Life dies inside a person when there are no others willing to befriend him.”
3. Cultural loneliness: This is where a person belongs to a different culture and feels that they don’t fit, or belong, in the new culture.
4. Intellectual loneliness: This is where a person feels intellectually, or educationally out of synch with their peers, their family or their social group.
5. Psychological loneliness: This is where a person has experienced a trauma, to which others fail to understand or to relate, and which therefore separates said person out from others around them.
6. Existential or cosmic loneliness: This is an isolating loneliness experienced by a person who is confronting death. Indeed we are all mortal and therefore prone to terror management.

—  Are You Lonely?  Agnostics.com 

Loneliness is entirely distinct from solitude or seclusion even by preference or choice at any given moment. Loneliness, even in a crowd, is an emotion or experience, a powerful hollow feeling of emptiness and isolation, beyond merely the desire for company or human interaction, a sensation of disconnection, cut off, even alienated from others, an experienced difficulty and frustration even in forming meaningful human contact, separate and isolated from the world.

Dutch researcher Jenny de Jong-Gierveld defined loneliness as “a situation experienced by the individual as one where there is an unpleasant or inadmissible lack of (quality of) certain relationships. This includes situations in which a number of existing relationships is smaller than considered desirable or admissible or situations where the intimacy one wishes for has not been realized. Thus, loneliness is seen to involve the manner in which a person experiences and evaluates his or her isolation and lack of communication with other people.”

“Motherhood is so consuming and exhausting that it almost has to be lonely. Who has time or energy for anything else? After a day in the trenches with my kids I don’t feel like going out. Or calling a friend. I don’t even have the energy to have a real conversation with my husband most nights.” 

 

—  I'm Lonely - MyLifeSuckers 

The perceived or evaluated insufficiently rewarding quality of existing relationships, therefore fails to buffer from stress. The lonely are restless and often sleep poorly. Loneliness is a threat to life and health.  Just as stimulus struggle to begin with, is the ongoing struggle against boredom, social stimulus struggle is the ongoing struggle against loneliness.

Eleanor Rigby might have been in worse shape than the Beatles imagined: not only lonely but angry, depressed and in ill health. University of Chicago research psychologist Cacioppo shows in studies that loneliness can be harmful to our overall well-being. Loneliness, he says, impairs the ability to feel trust and affection, and people who lack emotional intimacy are less able to exercise good judgment in socially ambiguous situations; this makes them more vulnerable to bullying as children and exploitation by unscrupulous salespeople in old age. But Cacioppo and Patrick (editor of the Journal of Life Sciences) want primarily to apply evolutionary psychology to explain how our brains have become hard-wired to have regular contact with others to aid survival. So intense is the need to connect, say the authors, that isolated individuals sometimes form parasocial relations with pets or TV characters.

Publishers Weekly review of:

'Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection' by John T. Cacioppo

 •   Encyclopedia Britannica: psychology loneliness

 

 •   Multifactor Dynamic Loneliness Model

 

 •  Loneliness: natural affinity for the internet

 

 •  How to spot a loner 

 

“Loneliness is the first thing that God's eye nam'd not good.”  —  John Milton

Worse, none dare call out dystress straightforwardly, for the pride in self reliance engenders a stigma upon loneliness and shame of rebuke for unpopularity even since childhood. For, whereas the familiar community of old was so stifling, the modern world ofttimes seems simply estranged and obdurate!

“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”  — George Eliot

Rather than trustingly reaching out sociably, lonely people, often long traumatized in whatever hostile insecure upbringing, may tend instead mistrustfully retreat from potential threat. And leave us face it, there is no end of threat, worst of course from bullying, open hostility and abuse outright, but from every sense of pressure conditionality in order to fit in, instead of genuine acceptance or even simple tolerance, the repellant and perpetually frustrating alienated travail of eking out whatever crumbs of emotional sustenance on the social minefield, as do so many others indeed as is increasingly deemed appropriately remedial if not actually even entirely normal and sufficient, amid the vast and phony social wasteland of ever more tedious unfulfilling frustration, the waste of time that engenders only greater aggravation, boredom and loneliness actually in company even than in isolation and solitude. -salt rubbed in the wounds, not any healing balm of comfort.

Furthermore, failure to relate to all manner of seemingly senseless and tediously arbitrary customary interaction, is not uncommon for those who have not been made to feel included, or simply for those who, having undergone positive disintegration and broken the indoctrination under the pervasive cult of socialization, thence forth evaluate for themselves.

To make things worse, the ordeal may elicit mounting sensation of social inadequacy and incompetence.

Beware interminable boring pointlessly belabored superficial small talk, often forced and awkward, only leaving one actually the more depleted, empty and discontent, all urgent need of truly important expression still mute and frustrated.

Loneliness is the wont of intimacy. Hence, when mass anxiety fails to challenge our very way of life or to trouble the powers that be, and thus individual dystress fails to evoke sympathetic feeling and therefore mutual aid, and if none any longer shall rally to the alarm sounded, then such only will signal vulnerability to predation and exploitation, merely endangering others as well as oneself.

Yes, discouraging depression, according to loneliness actually propagates like unto a virus and even promotes the animism of religion.

Rightly and responsibly then, do we hesitate to reach out to others in distress of any kind. Because even though need is the motive ever to reach out at all, neediness is only cloying. Because loosing might rub off emotionally and socially! Because excessive burdens of responsibility to others often only drags down a life of promise. Because of compassion burn out. Because unconditional selflessness only invites the sucker's payoff. Because one never knows what desperately manipulative and neurotic pigheaded wretched bully or unfeeling confidence trickster will only bite the hand that feeds them! -And with utter impunity...

Hence, all the more, loss, decline, disappointment, unhappiness, grief and suffering of any kind, so needlessly shameful in society, are all often isolating and lonely in their subjective intensity and hence introversion. Indeed, loneliness is also associated with mortality. Indubitably, loneliness is formative, for some people exactly opposite as for others, motivating some, for example, to incisive empathy whist others to insecure withdrawn babbling egotism, making some more self sufficient and others exactly less so. And so, it will be in loneliness, whether as abiding in actual solitude or even whilst thronging amid the madding crowds, that are all conundrums and struggles of individuality contemplated, confronted and discovered, the separation and distinction of the self from the world beyond, with all personal longings and on whatever ones own terms.

“There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.”  —  Eric Hoffer

For loneliness is a quality that defies simple objective measurement, even such as the frequency and duration of social interaction, but also of the nature, preference and kind. Loneliness may typically result from the dearth of an engaging social network and activities or interaction towards social integration and/or opportunities for emotional intimacy. Causes of loneliness are, most obviously, bereavement, longing for another absent or unrequited, abandonment, social rejection and abuse, isolation, neglect, not fitting in, discontent, alienation or individual dissatisfaction, reciprocal failure to relate, incompatible values, sheer irrelevance, the unsympathetic helplessness of society in denial before the powerless individual in crisis and tragedy, but also stress, overwork and underutilization of skills and deficiency of stimulating challenge and hope.

The outsider is the reject or unbeliever apart from common activities and purpose. Reciprocally, pandemic alienation and the boredom and despair of wage slaves and students, not even permitted the release of just giving up, is the result of sheer grinding busy work that has has lost all meaningful and satisfying initiative.

The adaptive modes of acquisition include achievement, productive creativity towards fulfillment of desires, even competition, aggression, force or power to simply take whatever one wants, and influence via succorance, reaching out where achievement and aggression are inapplicable, specifically, in solicitation of attention, sympathy, concern, affectionate care and support, to nurturance, the desire to help, reciprocal and complementary to succorance in any healthy give and take. However, without trust and respect, insecure reliance upon threatening and domineering social situations, even however actually unpleasant and stressful, only exacerbates needy codependent frustrated yearnings and bottomless emptiness.

Alas, the social incentives and disincentives so stifling of individual creativity, opinion, controversy and creativity, cheat us all of expression conducive to autonomous interpersonal interest and engagement in return for heteronymous non threatening conditional approval, learned helpless emptiness, boredom and loneliness.

No, loneliness is not resolved by the mere presence of others, marshmallow-throwing touchy-feely encouragement or commiseration on cue, mortification, bullying and scapegoating, nor any other empty social grooming and consensual validation, nor even necessarily by intimate acts, much less any interaction the more superficial or heteronymous. -such as shallow and perfunctory political activism that fabulously promises us each a place at their table, but only really means to say (as in that wonderful line from 'The Last Emperor'): "Join us comrade, or fuck off!" Because volunteerism of any kind will never actually get you anything but someone else's' chores. -Drudgery such as typically does not involve the high levels of interaction and cooperation such as to illicit equally high levels of sociability while curtailing antisocial conduct and rejection.

Rather, loneliness is only ever truly resolved by someone else who relates and responds so as to move you, uniquely, with challenge and variety, compatibly and reciprocally, ever the better to understand one anot

“A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the lyrics.”  —  unknown

And since emotion finding outlet thus becomes motivation, meaningful common goals put forth or inquiries actively pursued may greatly facilitate the aforesaid resolution of loneliness. Indeed, in substantive co-operative endeavor may the flame of just such affection be most readily be fanned and nurtured. And loneliness is but the starvation thereof.

All of this is precisely why simply hanging out aimlessly or meeting others for recreation and consumption, online or even in real life, striving so determinedly only to relax and seek for oblivion from the grind, is so completely boring, futile and irrelevant ever to finding new beginnings and connection out from the sterile void.

Better dead than mellow!

Indeed, healing loneliness requires more than merely satisfice, making do with ordinary casual social contact, even acquiescence to the safest and dullest small talk, conditionality, towing the line, generally going along to get along, but rather, true investment in others and any genuine and meaningful engagement into their individuality. For the deeper and more intense the longing, the keener the deprivation and frustration. And, to complicate the problem, there are many needs of immediacy that are simply ill served by the abstraction and remoteness of interactivity online. That is why truly engaging interaction online best plays to the highly cerebral strengths of the medium, at which the fundamental electronic tools of the Internet even excel.

The traditional Four Levels of Happiness are laetus: material physical satisfaction and immediate gratification, felix: the ego satisfaction of personal achievement, the Beatitude of contribution making an impact or difference beyond oneself, and lastly, the sublime fullness of goodness, beauty, truth and love, possibly so much as self realization.

But even the precious pursuit of happiness is never guarantee even of hope and opportunity. All manner of daunting obstacles remain. But perhaps some measure of freedom may yet at all permit the involvement of stimulating intellectual challenge in practice and experience towards better decision making.

As, one way or another, primary needs still tend to call for attention first, even barring immediate threat to physical survival, economic requirements are often experienced as the most palpable barrier to self-actualization or at least freedom and autonomy in modern life. And as a solution, many yearn for recognition of their true potential and best opportunity for fulfillment thereof, via some capable and dedicated mentorship to success and fulfillment in a situation facilitating due compensation.

Alas, the deck is so often stacked against us at every turn. Certainly, there may be readily available general guidance in pursuit of the conventional expectations of others. But assistance towards one's own ends is by far the harder to find and often deficient if not fraudulent outright. Only compromise and snake oil remain ever abundant, barring the most extreme and resolute self reliance indeed.

Hence, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness increasingly are quickly reduced to an ongoing invitation to bang one's metaphorical head against the proverbial wall! And at a certain threshold of sheer frustration, the realization must dawn that compromise has spared no aggravation, nor do increasingly outmoded expectations manifest any greater efficacy than any other inane sycophantic vogueing cargo-cult mimesis of success.

In the end, only truth to oneself is even worth the trouble. Internet conversation is often so repetitive and of greater quantity than quality. Honestly, how often is there anything new that we all haven't heard before again and again? Conventional thinking about overcoming loneliness and isolation is largely a waste of time. Only FoolQuest.com presents something new and different, worth talking over and not found elsewhere, a project proposal for together addressing loneliness for what it really is and what it really needs.