All the time.
Less frequently out loud than I used to though, thankfully.
I spent entirely too much time alone once.
I think it temporarily made me insane.
Because for about a year after that I would talk to myself out loud in public places and I'd get strange, confused, frightened, and disturbed looks from people who assumed I was on drugs.
In all actuality I was sober.
I was just alternating between being sad, lonely and depressed.
I thought about killing myself a lot in those days.
Pretty much every day, actually.
Because I was in my middle to late 20s and had no close friends around me.
Most people in my age group, being around 34 or so, we don't really have friends, at least not like we did when we were in our teens.
When we were in our teens, the friends that we did have were mostly authentic.
But into adulthood that changed, and in talking to my parents about it I think I understand why that is.
Back in the immediate post-counter-culture era, so 1970s/1980s, and some even up into the 1990's, the people who were 30-ish around in those time periods began to use friendships as a utilitarian approach to work around the logistical and legal conundrum of the socio-economic ladder at the time.
So as kids, my people got the "use your friends" approach from our parents, who did so to get by because they couldn't afford to have us.
And they got that from their parents, who are mostly in their 80s and 90s these days.
But by now the reason why we don't have friends is because a lot of us either don't want to be used like a utilitarian tool because it feels disingenuous, nor do we want to use our friends as tools in this way.
Unfortunately we have to in certain circumstances, but we try to be in the practice of forgiving and giving back from those which we've taken from as a proper approach.
Those of us closer to our middle 30s and up understand the difference between an authentic friendship and a friendship that's based around utilitarian necessities, or what's commonly called a "business friendship."
The trouble is, that even though WE understand this, our parents typically don't.
So the most common argument is that our parents are like:
"Well, as a family we need help that we don't have. So why don't you ask your friends?"
And they don't understand that we understand why that's kind of a messed up thing to do.
It's one thing if sometimes honeysuckle happens in life, and your friends have to help bail you out. That's totally normal.
But it's a totally different thing to abuse your friendships by trying to keep them on regulation to avoid a more properly structured parameter.
And that's the part that they typically don't understand.
So the response to "why don't you use your friends," is:
"Because if you use your friends like tools you will eventually turn doing so into a bad habit, and pretty soon after that you won't actually have any friends."
Or as the old saying goes:
You can't bullshit a bullshitter.
