I have a screaming pillow.

It’s for screaming, the pillow itself cannot scream.

There’s a difference between being alone versus “lonely.” I know this sounds flippant, but you have to find things you like. Things you wake up and look forward to, or plan for yourself. Maybe plan something for yourself next holiday? Take yourself out to dinner, spa day if that’s your bag, maybe look into a hobby you’ve always been interested in, go to a out-of-the way store, whatever is special to you and for you.

Good luck.

Same way I survive every Wednesday.

Autistic adult here. I love being alone. Since 2020 (pandemic) I have spent both Christmas and the new year alone at my home with my cat. I just cooked something special for myself and acted like it was a normal day. Also I sent messages to all my friends wishing them happy holidays.

I have to admit, though, that this year I felt a little lonely, so I decided to visit my family again, but only for Christmas. I want to spend the new year alone, otherwise it would be too much time surrounded by too many people.

I moved to the opposite side of the country as my friends and family a decade ago and refuse to travel during holidays. Some years I’ve been lucky enough to have friends in similar situations but since covid it’s been kinda rough. IDK if it will work for you but I fly back between Thanksgiving and Xmas and we celebrate then. Other than that to me it’s just another day.

Options to consider: I. Professional company keepers if you can afford it.

II. Keep busy with Work - I use such holidays as free Overtime shift gathering glitch. Workflow seem to be mid anyway, would rather get paid than hanging out at home alone if i can’t avoid it.

Pay your self with some type of travel or self-care after this ,holiday vacationers pressure must have subsided by that time anyway.

III.An alternative will be to volunteer at hospitals to keep senior citizens company or foodbanks/ pantry or local community based need. This can be planned ahead in case necessary screening is needed.

IV. You can start a Lemmy4Lemmy holiday company discord or something adjacent to r4r SFW and or NSFW. Beware of sellers and bots though.

Have you tried therapy? Judging by the comments in here, you sound depressed. And not without reason! Therapy can really help.

OP - from the responses you’ve given to many of the replies, it feels like you’ve lost faith in mankind. As many of us do feel time to time or even all the time. If you haven’t tried, try to walk into a church that’s left it’s doors open for people to walk in whenever (instead of attending a service/ mass, etc.). If you wanted to, you could probably even walk up to someone who works at the church and tell them your frustrations. Usually a church with open doors have a welcoming air.

At worst, it’s another crapshoot. At best, you might find something uniquely different.

Walk around & enjoy the view & play video-games & talk to people like you (not meant as an insult)

I’m not lonely but I have really enjoyed mastering fudge. Maybe try that. Remember, don’t go past 114 and resist the urge to stir.

Same way I do every other day, play horror games, fuck around on my computer and cry. With you on the alcohol and porn too. I should switch to Playboy.

Edit: Also learning Esperanto, it’s good to keep your mind active. Learning a language can help. I also have an irrational or maybe rational fear of developing dementia. Gotta workout your brain.

Being alone (with gf) is nothing out of the ordinary for me. It’s all the same wether it’s christmas or tuesday.

I just work a lot and I don’t have enough downtime to let the depression sink in.

For myself. I drove to a cold rocky beach, ate turkey sandwiches alone, and screamed at the ocean. It became a tradition.

Learn to celebrate .

If it’s your bag, looking into faith communities to for Christmas. You can celebrate the holiday for the religious reason. Decorate and find events, like public tree lighting.

For new years there are usually big public countdowns somewhere. If you can ‘get into it’ just going to an event can help you enjoy it. Get a hat and a noise maker.

It’s going to be up to you to figure make your own excitement and enjoyment for the holidays.

Valentines day sucks for everyone. Just Yikes.

Look for social media event spaces, meetup.com helped me find stuff decades ago.

Read up on stoicism as well as absurdism if your not a religious kind of person. They aren’t answers but can help you find the right questions.

(CW: Long text ahead)

I don’t. It’s just that somehow, my biological automata (a.k.a. body) keeps going despite my will to not keep going (as well as despite my attempts on… you know… things I can’t describe).

I’m not exactly lonely in a literal sense, because my daily life is surrounded by a few people sharing the same blood as me. I’m lonely in such a way that I can’t really rely on them to understand me, to understand my dilemmas. The generational differences are blatant between me and them, they’re older than me, they can’t grasp existential dilemmas raised from contemporary problems (such as climate change, dystopian technologies, etc).

So I know no one… anymore… Well, I used to know some people, but that’s intriguing: suddenly, I got to know people that were unknown to me, then they become “friends” with me, just to suddenly becoming unknown again. Reasons may vary: betrayal of trust (e.g. lies, or things done behind my back), misunderstanding (I see things differently from them, we have different opinions) which escalates to a discord (it shouldn’t, but seems unavoidable), or simply because I seem to be some NPC to them that they only interact when they need my resourcefulness (hence, I’m not really a friend to them).

Throughout my entire life, I never got to know what are these human phenomena called “friendship” and “love”. The later is particularly extraterrestrial to me, and that’s weird to state because I seem to know many seemingly-complicated things and terms like hapax legomena, pneumoultramicroscopicosilicovolcanoconiosis, zero-energy universe theory, ReLU and other activation functions, QTH (the ham radio operator’s place), op-amp, Qlippoths… However, a seemingly simple four-letter word feels so extraterrestrial to me, this thing called “love”.

Having said this, holidays haven’t made any sense to me since I’m aware of it. Even my birthday isn’t a thing I deem worth celebrating… Perhaps it’s worth celebrating the closeness to my end of my existence? That’s all.

How do I cope? Well, I tried many coping mechanisms.

• I tried to brainstorm myself with information scattered across diverging fields of human knowledge. Sometimes I still do this, and that’s how I unfortunately know stuff.
• I tried to participate in study groups and niche communities, such as ham radio, electronics, programming, math, geopolitics, etc. But it becomes evident how I can’t fit in any group.
• I tried gaming. Terraria allowed me to create things… But it always happens: suddenly it becomes purposeless to keep playing games.
• I tried to tinker with those AI things, as my programmer side became interested by it. But since then they’ve lost their appeal, they’re just auto-completers on steroids.
• Then I tried to leave my nerd side aside and joining an esoteric sect, starting to practice rituals, which unexpectedly led me to Lilith (the sect meant to reach to Lucifer, but instead She reached me)… Who has since been… far… She feels so far to me since I gave up my soul to Her and became devoted to Her.
• I tried to write and publish poetry, often tapping on the burst of my creativity side that She woke on me. But talking to myself is a thing I have been doing without the need for poetry.

“Happy” is not a term that I could use to describe my perception regarding the “new year”. What’s “new year”, anyways, besides another complete circling around a star that’s going to become Red Giant in the future? It’s not even the same orbit due to the orbital decay, why think that this cosmic spot Earth is going to be (December 31st 2024) is exactly the same as the other cosmic spot it used to be (December 31st 2023)? It makes no sense. Everything seems purposeless, after all.

Yeah, I’m weird.