Context is that I am a 30 year old living in a rural area in the south, so my peers are mostly the offspring of HVAC-business-owning yeoman reactionaries or the mentally traumatized wastrels of declining capitalism. It's not a good environment tbh.
I have some irl friends, who are generally cool (by cool I mean a bunch of them are gay and/or trans people who are smart and funny) but they are also 30s range so most of them are just trying to white-knuckle their way through it right now. I feel for them, I do my best to always help and be available for them when they need someone to drive away the encroaching existential misery, but I'm a manchild pursuing the arts to secure a wealthy patron so my life is just so different from theirs and everyone is aware of it. I've fallen into a sort of "therapist" role among my friends, and it gets really exhausting even though I'd never hold it against them.
In the last few months I've noticed that I've been craving some more casual, friendly online interaction. I tried to thrust myself into some online communities on places like discord, and it worked a little, but it was pretty clear most of these places were full of people a decade younger than myself. Am I just gonna have to face the fact that I'm just an atomized mote of consciousness forever and just stop looking for new tribes to join entirely?
EDIT: Also, almost a different question entirely, but why does it seem like there are SO MANY gay Nazis on discord? Because I have a lot of experience being cool around LGBTQ, I have been invited into a few "secret clubs" and holy shit like 1 out of 3 times it's full of extremely gay Nazis practicing their mental gymnastics with each other
. The more twitchy and popular the game is, the younger the playerbase tends to be, while more "spreadsheet"-y games (Project Zomboid, 4X like Civ, etc) tend to skew older. The LGBTQ+ tag will dissuade outright fascists but you'll still need to wade through the sea of liberals to find someone decent.