Find a way to help others. You'll feel a part of something if you do. Being alone isn't hard but being lonely is crippling. Even getting a kitten as a pet will alleviate some of that. All the best.

Learning to feel comfortable with yourself and to be grateful to those who are with you in the present.

Everyone gets off the train sooner or later, including ourselves. Don’t worry about it, just enjoy the ride and the company of the moment.

I'm 100% sure some people can be relied upon. But only if it's a two-way street. IF it works one way, it will only be once.

Reliability isn’t black or white, there are varying degrees to it. Some people can be counted on more for some things than others. Some people can only be counted on in certain contexts or with proper preparation. You’ll never find anyone you could rely on 100%, I’d wager you couldn’t even rely on yourself that much.

How much you can rely on someone or vice versa isn’t what I would consider in my rubric for whether I’m alone or not. Sometimes you have to deal with things alone, sometimes you choose to. That’s just life. Support and help are nice when you can get it, but it’s your life in the end. You have to be the one to live it.

I’d only consider myself lonely if there’s no one I connect to and if that were the case, I’d look for new people. Eventually I’ll find someone I connect to in some aspect of our lives. Even if I can’t always talk to them about my struggles in that aspect, I’ll know they’re out there struggling too and that will give me some peace and validation.

You join my cult

how do you deal with the logical conclusion that no one can ever truly be relied on and that you can always find yourself alone with no support?

I simply don't think that is the logical conclusion to come to.

I don't have an answer and it is the one thing I am truly afraid of. As an autistic man in this society I have come to the conclusion that I will most likely be alone in the future. Developing relationships of any kind is extremely difficult for me. Right now I'm ok because I have family that are still alive and want to care for me. But when they die where will I be? I've fully accepted that I may die by suicide in my 50s due to loneliness.

I contest that it is not a logical conclusion, and more likely you're suffering from loneliness and not coming to that conclusion with a clear mind.

You want people to be "truly relied on"? What does that mean? At your beck and call with whatever whims one has? People can be reliable but there are limits. Unless you yourself think it's acceptable to be everyone else's gopher.

What's your standard for being reliable that makes you, through a twisted facsimile of rationality, think you're going to be alone? Why would someone have to meet that standard to give you company?

Tough one. I think the answer depends on what it means to be alone and what loneliness is.

In my 20s I had lots of friends I could call up and hang out with any night of the week, but I felt lonely because I didn't have a partner.

Now in my 40s I have a partner and 2 kids who are very dependent toddlers and I feel lonely because I feel like I care for them all so much but there's no one to care for me.

I guess loneliness is the feeling of wanting to share a specific thing and being unable to. With toddlers you realise there's an inverse feeling in that every moment of every day must be shared and sometimes it would be nice to be alone.

Like all feelings, if you try to embrace it and really feel it, rather than pushing it away, the feeling can quickly dissipate rather than consuming you.

I personally find the answer is quite simple, I just tend not to interact with people irl. People suck tbh and the most deranged toxic people I have met are irl, online I have my silly gay frens :3

I wish I had an answer too. The realization that no one in the world is guaranteed to be on my side except my mother was hard for me. As a person with no social skills, I'm completely screwed in this life.

The first step is to understand that all relationships are transactional. Not a single human relationship is unconditional.

You start by making yourself useful, pleasant and interesting to be around and people who understand and accept the “deal” will reciprocate and most of them will be reliable.

There are no guarantees so it’s also a little bit of a numbers game. More is better to a point… usually about a dozen close relationships is optimal.

It’s just a closer and more intimate version of the broader social contract. Break it and suffer. Maintain it, nurture it, and benefit.

Learn what you can, and are expected, to bring to a relationship (be it romantic or otherwise) and work on improving what you offer.

All human relationships and communities since the beginning of time have relied on this transactional nature of relationships.

Anyone who says otherwise is blindly naive or misunderstanding what any given individual can bring to a relationship.

People ca be relied on up to the point they can handle. You can't expect someone who is barely getting by on an hourly job for example to take off work for some emergency or for someone living with a roommate to take you in without getting the roommates ok. There are plenty of people that I know that would love to help me in a variety of ways that are just not really feasible. I know there are friends I have had and we live in different states and such that likely remember me fondly as I do them. Heck I even have a brother not to far away and we help each other some but we both are married and our first repsonsibility is to our spouse and family. We do what we can. But yeah in the end we mostly die alone as others go before or after us. If we don't die alone its usually a pretty horrible thing.

Learning to suffer through it. Embrace silence and stillness.

I've just gotten used to it

I'm enough.

how do you deal with the inherent human yearn for others when you know that you can never truly rely on them?

Two remarks:

1. How can you be that sure you can never rely on people? 'Never' seems quite a long time and 'people' is more than 8 billions of us: that 's quite a lot to be that that affirmative. We regularly leanr about people giving their live to save another person’s life (say helping a kid that is drowning, or rescuing someone in a fire or a car crash, and so on). Isn’t that quite a convincing demonstration of some people out there one can rely upon?
2. Rephrasing your question as an affirmation may help see why I think it's based on a flawed premises: I wish for a perfect friendship, or a perfect relationship, or even just a perfect date. Or I will not rather try.

I'm trolling, here but only half because the moment one stops expecting more than what others are willing to give them, there is no risk of ever feeling disappointed. Perfection, or even just expectation of it, is one of our worst enemy:

‘I will only write that story when I’m ready and sure I write it perfectly!’ say countless wannabe writers that will never write their story.

‘I will only marry the perfect dude/gal’ say so many people that will remain single for their entire life, missing out on potentially amazing lifelong partners while they’re waiting to meet the perfect one that probably doesn't not even exist outside of some fantasy land.

My spouse and I have been together for 25+ years and counting. One of the reasons our couple remains that strong (if not stronger than ever) is that we’re both keenly aware of our own and the other’s ‘flaws’ or imperfections, theirs and our own limits. And we’re fine with them. We’re also fine being different and often not agreeing on stuff. She has friends and activities that I don’t like at all, like I have friends and activities she don’t like either. We do things on our own and meet those people on our own, and that’s it. But we also know we have each other’s back when it really matters like we know we're happier together, despite our flaws ;)

Exactly like with love, friendship is an exchange. Heck, even a one night affair is supposed to be an exchange. One just don’t exchange the same kind of things but both people do bring something to the other and it doesn’t need to be that special to be valuable and appreciated for what it is: a gift.

Personally, I learned to value what people are willing to share with me more than what I would want them to share with me.

Expecting perfection is also very risky: if one feels they should receive only the best out of any people they interact with, why should they not be expected themselves to always give their best and to be perfect friend/lover/date/whatever? I don’t know about you, but I am far from being perfect be it as a friend, a lover, a date, or as a whatever ;)

Poetry.

Journaling.

Make songs about the fact of the cruelty of this world of constant betrayals... and sing it alone. Maybe in front of a mirror so you feel like you are looking at a parallel timeline you and wont feel alone.

I have like lyrics written about the concept of secrets and betrayal and there is this one line that I've written I want to mention:

“你到底是谁，看不透你的心里
但没办法，生存依靠一起”

Translated something like:
"Who the hell really are you, I cannot see through inside your heart [as in: your mind, what you're really thinking]
But there's nothing I can do about it, survival depends on us [humans] being together"

So... just accept it...

Accept the fact that someone can declare their love for you and can totally stab you in the back

And be prepared for it

But try to not be too paranoid and accidentally shoot them first, careful of friendly fire

But at the mean time, enjoy the company of whoever you might have...

I've kinda accepted the fact the even my mom who constantly told me she loves me and I remember cuddling with her as a kid, could just totally do "bipolar" stuff that would harm me...

You need to have a shield... to be activated when you feel something isn't right.

I have struggled with feeling lonely during different times in my life. I found I was attached to preconceived outcomes and some unhappiness I was feeling stemmed from that. When I stopped searching, I learned to find. I stopped trying to plug that hole and I sat uncomfortably in my loneliness. I'm definitely still a work in progress, but now I try to enjoy my time with people, to be more in the moment and less "10 steps ahead". Now, most of the time, my loneliness doesn't live on the surface, just in that occasional existential dread of knowing that one day I will have to die. I hope someone I love will be there to hold my hand, and I'm scared to be alone. That's a heavy weight and I sometimes wish I was too stupid to recognize our mortality so I didn't have to wrestle with it.

When I was young, I had my parents, grandparents, even great grandparents, and thought I always would. I was friends with a bunch of kids in the neighborhood and at school. I'm down to one parent and a super young and hip grandparent in-law in their 90s. When everyone was sick with Covid and my partner was feeling the stress too, there were times I felt very alone and I really felt the weight of having nobody to lean on in those moments because everyone was just as overwhelmed as me. It's an uncomfortable part of the human experience. I try not to put all my eggs in one basket, but as an introvert it can be hard to maintain a large circle of support. Hopefully some of that answers the question. I'm curious how others see it.

I am trying to tackle my urge to be reclusive by getting out, and doing old school activities, making an effort to smile or chat. I am not looking for anything formative really, but its a step towards making sure i don't feel lonely.

I try not to care what others think (not in an obnoxious way)...it really helps.

Consider a stack of solo cups. They're tapered and designed to efficiently nest one inside another for efficient transport and storage. Though they are filled with each other, we still consider them empty. Because though they are designed to nest together, that's not what they're for.

You cannot fulfill your own life by filling it with similarly empty people.

Fill it with booze instead.

That's the neat part: I don't.

I mean... I'm sure it's possible that there are people out there that'd make it at least better more than 50% of the time. I don't know about you, but I live in a low-density area (carless) and have no real viable options to meet... anyone really.

The other half of the story is that I too have a brain that isn't really wired to do that anyway. I never really made friends in school and probably could live underground and would only go half as crazy as people normally do. Put my brain in something mostly mechanical and it'd probably be hard for most people to notice (especially with people not understanding the difference between robots and cyborgs).

Unlike a lot of people, even the internet isn't really a social space for me either.

It's a tricky balance. You have to learn to let yourself trust and rely on others, but also understand it's a gamble.

Be ready for the possibility that you may end up having to pick yourself up if they let you fall. It's not necessarily because people don't want to do the right thing. They're only human.

You've almost certainly let somebody down at some point. As long as you didn't set out with the intention of hurting the other person, it's nothing to be ashamed of. That's just life.

You have to learn to give yourself and others grace when it's deserved, and accept that sometimes it's not deserved. You have to learn to be vulnerable, but also learn to be resilient. Refusing to take the risk just because you're afraid of being let down or letting others down, is a guaranteed way to be lonely.

i don't know, I've never been lonely, alone for sure but that's often something I desire.

how do you deal with the inherent human yearn for others when you know that you can never truly rely on them?

flip that around, are you someone that can be relied on, they way you write this it seems every relationship is transactional for you?

suffer well.