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ardour

Well known loser
Joined
Jul 26, 2011
Messages
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Location
New Zealand
No-one wants to be around a middle-aged man trying to replicate an unlived youth, and since it's apparently selfish (along with unlikely) to try for a family at my age, a normal life is out of the question now.

What's does that leave? The very things that helped put me in this situation in the first place. I've come full circle only to find myself back in my room, staring at a screen just as I did all those years ago. 44 with not much more to do than sit in my room and do what I did at 24. Nobody around my age is willing to do anything exciting, so that's all there is distraction wise: withdraw back into a world of JRPGs and streaming anime interspersed with the odd workout.

Nothing more to live for. Just filling in time before my relative falls ill and I'm needed.
 
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Do you like nature? Hiking around, seeing wildlife, hearing the sounds, smelling the air, tasting good foods? NZ is a beautiful place, and I've enjoyed it there twice. When I camp, it's some of the best feelings I've ever experienced. And often I like the complete solitude of places, feeling like I haven't a care in the world. If you find one or two people who also like that, you can have some wonderful times talking foolishly and having a drink and a laugh.
 
Walking around NZ wilderness be like ;

🤣
 

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There's young people who will hang out with you. Admittedly they will be hard to find, but they're there. I'm friends with a guy who is 23 years older then me. I have good friends who are 15 years younger. I'm not going to say its easy, it's not, but it's possible to find younger people to hang out with who will have interests closer to yours
 
You keep saying that people your age are boring so you might as well give up. Well, either you're don't know what people your age actually do or the people you live around ARE actually boring and do nothing after a certain age. Is there anything tying you to where you live? If not, I would say MOVE because I know a few people your age that are like you keep repeating over and over again, but they are the minority. Go somewhere else, FIND what you want.
No, there is nothing wrong with gaming and anime, like MrLonely said, but there is more out there, don't resign yourself to that because you can't see any other way. You have a choice. You can do everything you can to get the life you want or you can continue to make excuses and give up. So the questions you need to ask yourself are....How much do you want it? What are you willing to do to get it?
 
What part of New Zealand do you live in? Like are we talking a small village with a few hundred people, suburbs, a smallish town, a city? Unless you're living in an extremely rural area, it seems unlikely to me that there isn't ANYONE (of any age - older or younger than you) that is up for something more exciting than rewatching a Friends episode on a Saturday night.

I honestly think a large part of your problem is that you generalize and assume too much about people and/or situations, without having any justification for doing so. Seems to me you're stuck in a particular mindset of how you view the world and no matter what anyone else says, the mindset is here to stay - hence the round-and-round posts that all seem to revolve around a common theme: my life is over because. . .

Until you consistently steer your way of thinking into something more positive, I fear that nothing will really change in your life. YOU make the change - no one else can.
 
We're in a similar situation ardour. The terms you use: unlived youth, unlikely to try for a family and a "normal life" being out of the question, all those phrases resonate with me.....a lot.
But I'm older than you are, by more than twenty years.
May I suggest that if "normalcy" (whatever that is) and happiness prove elusive, then endeavoring to bring some meaning and usefulness into life is a more worthy pastime than gaming and anime.
Find something that you're good at and you like doing that makes the world a little bit better, so that it will have made a difference that you've lived your life.
I'm not suggesting something earth shaking like Henry Ford or Thomas Edison did, but something that's the right size and fit for you.
I myself have a few side hustles, petty in the big picture but they're right for me and they're all I've got and it's better just playing at something or absorbing entertainment.
 
What part of New Zealand do you live in? Like are we talking a small village with a few hundred people, suburbs, a smallish town, a city? Unless you're living in an extremely rural area, it seems unlikely to me that there isn't ANYONE (of any age - older or younger than you) that is up for something more exciting than rewatching a Friends episode on a Saturday night.

I honestly think a large part of your problem is that you generalize and assume too much about people and/or situations, without having any justification for doing so. Seems to me you're stuck in a particular mindset of how you view the world and no matter what anyone else says, the mindset is here to stay - hence the round-and-round posts that all seem to revolve around a common theme: my life is over because. . .

Until you consistently steer your way of thinking into something more positive, I fear that nothing will really change in your life. YOU make the change - no one else can.
Auckland. 1.6 million.

This weekend I'll be off to another 2 board gaming events. The previous weekend I attended a dinner meetup at a Filipino restaurant.
Older people who turn up to events fall into two or three camps usually: the majority are the rarely seen again, low energy, low investment types. Some oddballs/drunks/weirdoes. Then migrants looking to connect with people from a similar background.

Like I've said the majority of hiking/climbing/outdoors facebook groups are 20s and 30s restricted. Where else am I supposed to look other than organized groups?

I've had a string of bad luck, and now I'm over 40 it's deemed "creepy" to be paling around with younger people. At this point, trying to cobble together a social circle of individuals who don't just self-medicate their depression at some rundown bar just seems to be making things worse. For a short time I was hopeful but now I'm more depressed than ever.

Maybe all there is for people my age are dinner parties and annual get-togethers where people talk about their kids/careers/houses and other boring topics. Perhaps I need to accept that.
 
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jogging in the forest feels good to me

middway I always enjoy to sit on a bench and observe the beauty and silence of the forest

it helps me relax my worries when the bad thoughts come back
 
No-one wants to be around a middle-aged man trying to replicate an unlived youth, and since it's apparently selfish (along with unlikely) to try for a family at my age, a normal life is out of the question now.

What's does that leave? The very things that helped put me in this situation in the first place. I've come full circle only to find myself back in my room, staring at a screen just as I did all those years ago. 44 with not much more to do than sit in my room and do what I did at 24. Nobody around my age is willing to do anything exciting, so that's all there is distraction wise: withdraw back into a world of JRPGs and streaming anime interspersed with the odd workout.

Nothing more to live for. Just filling in time before my relative falls ill and I'm needed.
Can always marry one of my cousins, they’ll put up with you for a roof and a meal 😇
 
I am over 50 and the past year or so I have finally become resigned to my fate of being alone forever. This is the one area in life in which we have zero control over and which self improvement has very little if any impact on. If the women you are attracted to are not interested in you, there is nothing you can do about it aside from to keep trying which means having the rejections pileup and make you feel even worse or to just give up hope that it will ever get better.

Maybe life can be decent if you have your physical needs met but not being able to satisfy your emotional or social needs means that existence is neutral at best and often times quite lonely and miserable. It helps to not buy into the shaming accustations which claim that if you fail it's because of something you did or did not do. Realize that life is all about chance & luck and that not everyone can win the game. Due to the luck of the draw some of us just lack the inherent qualities which those we are attracted to find desirable. Instead we have to settle for living for our hobbies & interests which are merely short term distractions from the fact that we are unable to experience the relationships which would make everything far more meaningful & enjoyable.
 
If you keep it retro gaming than it can be used as a clever money saving technique if you stick to the timesink of the oldschool grind. Throw on a podcast or an album to listen to for getting through the thicker parts of the grind, or even a documentary to casually listen to. Or if you have a dual monitor setup, than splitting it would suffice.

I've not really been into anime in roughly 20 years or so, but I'd go through Cowboy Bebop and/or Trigun and Outlaw Star again. They're all timeless.

I use hobbies as a timesink and money saving trick to counterbalance my objective bullet list.
When I burn myself out on one or the other I just rebalance and that helps.
That's just how I've learned to cope with loneliness over the years.
I try to keep my mind actively engaged and busy with something, somehow.
I do socialize, just quite minimally. I only see 2 or 3 people in person and even that's somewhat of a handful for me these days.
But the main and key important part is keeping my mind actively engaged and busy.
If I burn myself out with my hobbies, I step away from them and get back to my responsibilities, trying to think about how I might be able to more efficiently manage them, or ask myself if there are any additional I'd like to take on (which in its own is an actively engaging thought, as it's particularly unwise to just take on a new responsibility with only a whimsical half-thought, I've learned my lesson on that one by now).

There's only so many hours in a day, right?
Work is going to eat a good chunk of that.
Housework is another chunk.
Bills and groceries and financial planning, yet another chunk.
So that helps minimize the larger majority a bit.

What about the rest though?
Hobbies and Responsibilities.
If not one, than the other.
Gotta keep the mind going, don't care how, so long as it isn't self-destructive.
Because if Self-Destruction wins out, well, then I have to admit that I've reached my limitations and self-sabotage just befell me as such.
It is okay for that to happen provided I do not stagnate in such the state.
Gotta get up off the floor, clean myself off, and start fixing what I screwed up...
And THAT in its own, is a timesink.
"Repetition is the Mother Of All Learning" so sayeth my former music professor.

I met an old man in his middle to late 50's when I was in my 20's who gave me a bit of insight about mental health and aging.

What he told me is that after 20 years of being with his same therapist, his therapist finally said to him one day: "Have you ever considered that maybe life just isn't that grand, like for anybody? That there's no shining, "finding the holy grail" type of a moment in life? Realistically, that is just a fantasy. Fantasy is a wonderful and beautiful thing, but it can be dangerous to our reality if we do not keep it in check."

Plot Twist being, that the old man who told me this, was also the old man who stole my gf at the time.
It took me several years to extrapolate what he meant and why he said it to me.
And it didn't really make sense, until some years later she told me that he's absolutely miserable most of the time and that he pretty much straight up just gamed our relationship situation to get with her. So she is also, miserable most of the time.

But why did he tell me this?
It's because he was trying to tell me not to end up like him.
For once he wasn't lying.

Often times our approach to mental roadblocks can be counterintuitive to us as humans.
The reason getting started on something is hard is because it's actually the getting started part that is the roadblock in the first place, and what we actually want comes thereafter. All of life is like this. I don't like it, but it is. And yes, it is incredibly challenging and yes it is exhausting.

It is that way because a very large part of the problem is that as humans we as people are subjective beings, we have feelings, dreams, thoughts and desires...but the socially constructed society and civilization that we live in isn't organic like that. That's because it's unnatural. Our sedentary lifestyle isn't natural. It isn't organic. It's mechanical. We MADE it that way. Buildings are built because we built them, not because nature made it so organically. And so there is always this internal conflict between the objective and the subjective., and this is a very large part of the problem that we have because it is not always easy to be able to discern which one is more needed and too much of either one or the other is bad for our physical and mental health alike. It's a Hell of a balancing act and all of us as humans struggle with it.
 
Plot Twist being, that the old man who told me this, was also the old man who stole my gf at the time.
Hey wait, that's the part of the story I'd like to hear more about, if it's cool with you lol.
Your, I assume 20's girlfriend, left you for a man in his 50's? What happened?
 
Hey wait, that's the part of the story I'd like to hear more about, if it's cool with you lol.
Your, I assume 20's girlfriend, left you for a man in his 50's? What happened?

Okay, sure.
We were together for 8 years. From our teens into mid 20s.
She had more relationship experience than me when we first got together and that kinda steamrolled me.
More or less she's the bratty sub type.
I realize now that I'm older and more experienced that we just weren't compatible.
But in the naivety of my youth I didn't really understand that.

So now, these days he feels like I shanghaied him with her even to this day because he bit off more than he could chew sotospeak, and my response is: "Well, yeah! You earned your stripes for being a homewrecking sack of honeysuckle."
And she's just totally stagnated maturity-wise.
Being an immature bratty sub when you're in your late teens and 20s is somewhat permissible because kids are kids and we're all angsty little bastards when we're younger that don't know honeysuckle about honeysuckle about life yet.
However, once you get up into your 30s, probably not the greatest look for you if you're trying to have a stable relationship. 👀:grimace:
Sssooo, I mean, I guess I won out by losing out? 🤷‍♂️
Because ain't nobody got time for that in this bracket.
 
If you keep it retro gaming than it can be used as a clever money saving technique if you stick to the timesink of the oldschool grind. Throw on a podcast or an album to listen to for getting through the thicker parts of the grind, or even a documentary to casually listen to. Or if you have a dual monitor setup, than splitting it would suffice.

I've not really been into anime in roughly 20 years or so, but I'd go through Cowboy Bebop and/or Trigun and Outlaw Star again. They're all timeless.

I use hobbies as a timesink and money saving trick to counterbalance my objective bullet list.
When I burn myself out on one or the other I just rebalance and that helps.
That's just how I've learned to cope with loneliness over the years.
I try to keep my mind actively engaged and busy with something, somehow.
I do socialize, just quite minimally. I only see 2 or 3 people in person and even that's somewhat of a handful for me these days.
But the main and key important part is keeping my mind actively engaged and busy.
If I burn myself out with my hobbies, I step away from them and get back to my responsibilities, trying to think about how I might be able to more efficiently manage them, or ask myself if there are any additional I'd like to take on (which in its own is an actively engaging thought, as it's particularly unwise to just take on a new responsibility with only a whimsical half-thought, I've learned my lesson on that one by now).

There's only so many hours in a day, right?
Work is going to eat a good chunk of that.
Housework is another chunk.
Bills and groceries and financial planning, yet another chunk.
So that helps minimize the larger majority a bit.

What about the rest though?
Hobbies and Responsibilities.
If not one, than the other.
Gotta keep the mind going, don't care how, so long as it isn't self-destructive.
Because if Self-Destruction wins out, well, then I have to admit that I've reached my limitations and self-sabotage just befell me as such.
It is okay for that to happen provided I do not stagnate in such the state.
Gotta get up off the floor, clean myself off, and start fixing what I screwed up...
And THAT in its own, is a timesink.
"Repetition is the Mother Of All Learning" so sayeth my former music professor.

I met an old man in his middle to late 50's when I was in my 20's who gave me a bit of insight about mental health and aging.

What he told me is that after 20 years of being with his same therapist, his therapist finally said to him one day: "Have you ever considered that maybe life just isn't that grand, like for anybody? That there's no shining, "finding the holy grail" type of a moment in life? Realistically, that is just a fantasy. Fantasy is a wonderful and beautiful thing, but it can be dangerous to our reality if we do not keep it in check."

Plot Twist being, that the old man who told me this, was also the old man who stole my gf at the time.
It took me several years to extrapolate what he meant and why he said it to me.
And it didn't really make sense, until some years later she told me that he's absolutely miserable most of the time and that he pretty much straight up just gamed our relationship situation to get with her. So she is also, miserable most of the time.

But why did he tell me this?
It's because he was trying to tell me not to end up like him.
For once he wasn't lying.

Often times our approach to mental roadblocks can be counterintuitive to us as humans.
The reason getting started on something is hard is because it's actually the getting started part that is the roadblock in the first place, and what we actually want comes thereafter. All of life is like this. I don't like it, but it is. And yes, it is incredibly challenging and yes it is exhausting.

It is that way because a very large part of the problem is that as humans we as people are subjective beings, we have feelings, dreams, thoughts and desires...but the socially constructed society and civilization that we live in isn't organic like that. That's because it's unnatural. Our sedentary lifestyle isn't natural. It isn't organic. It's mechanical. We MADE it that way. Buildings are built because we built them, not because nature made it so organically. And so there is always this internal conflict between the objective and the subjective., and this is a very large part of the problem that we have because it is not always easy to be able to discern which one is more needed and too much of either one or the other is bad for our physical and mental health alike. It's a Hell of a balancing act and all of us as humans struggle with it.
The part that stood out was "old man in his mid-late 50s". I'm 10 years off being a legit old man....Jesus.

...and you should thank Jesus for being rid of her. What's a bratty sub?
 
The part that stood out was "old man in his mid-late 50s". I'm 10 years off being a legit old man....Jesus.

...and you should thank Jesus for being rid of her. What's a bratty sub?
When you’re in your 20’s, everyone over the age of 45 or so is ‘old’. When you actually get to that age - meh. . . just a number. It’s all in your attitude.
 
I feel this.

Gaming and TV/movies are OK, but they don't do that much for me anymore. The "high" I get from it, is not very high. It's just a nice way to unwind/relax. I would enjoy them more, if I had a main interest I was good at, and I used gaming and TV/movies in my down time. But those things aren't enough to be what I live for.

I compare things like that to side dishes, or toppings, or sauces. These things are nice enhancements to a main course, but are not themselves a main course. They're not filling by themselves. To try to live for gaming or tv/movies, is like trying to eat a bottle of sauce for a meal. It's not going to work.

It makes me think that there's a lot of new content out for a lot of fandoms I liked when I was younger. I look back and I realize that I didn't just like those fandoms - I used them as a substitute for my life because I couldn't be "cool" (no muscles or money, wasn't a risk-taker or dark/edgy, didn't have that "naughty", aggressive competitive dominant personality - didn't feel the need/interest in it, and again, hard to dominate others when you're not stronger, richer, better at things, and better at insulting people, than they are), and I thought I couldn't get good at doing hard things/skilled interests. I thought my life couldn't be much of anything, besides going through the motions of school and then I could have a life when I got through it (I fell off that course, but that's another story).

When I was a kid, it would have been a real challenge to prevent myself from reading "spoilers".
As an adult, I barely have to resist at all. I'm fine with watching it when I watch it.
It's not that I don't like these things anymore, it's just that I've changed, my understanding of how life works, attraction works, why I didn't do well socially or with women before, why I never felt good about myself before, these things have all changed and it's all because I didn't do hard things, because I wasn't interested and thought I wasn't genetically gifted enough to do them, so there was no point for me to get interested in them. And because of that, just getting into fandoms isn't enough for me anymore. It's a nice side dish, but it's not a main course. And I need that main course.

When I was a kid, I thought that being good at things was a nice extra for people born with the right genetic gifts, and who just so happened to have the right interests.
Now I feel like things like gaming and fandoms are the "extra", and doing hard things is the "main".
These things have traded places. But without the "main", life feels kind of empty.
 
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