The Next Move
Alone for days, weeks, months in some kind of waking coma. Mad at yourself, mad at everyone else, everything. Loneliness rewires your brain—makes you question every decision that got you here. And it doesn’t matter how many friends or acquaintances orbit your life. You’re utterly alone.
The second you catch the idea that something about this life is deeply wrong, depression follows. You pull the covers over your head and genuinely can’t imagine finding the strength to get up. You’re going to die here. No question.
I came up with this theory once while drunk, and it’s never left me: the lonelier you are now, the better your friendships used to be. There’s always that moment—usually in your teens—where you had this perfect, unbreakable group. Just a handful of people you could show up to at any hour with your entire life falling apart and they’d just… be there for it.
You’d do stupid, reckless things together. Mock the cops in the street and run. Crash parties you weren’t invited to. Steal food. Stay up gaming, five of you crammed in one bed. Share secrets and shame and porn and skipped school and the kind of loyalty that felt infinite.
If you’ve felt that before, experienced what real friendship actually is, then everything after is just surface. Other people living in the same place at the same time. You get along fine. You have things in common. You see each other sometimes. It’s pleasant. But that specific bond—that particular combination of trust and shared history and secrets and raw survival—that’s gone. Just a memory now, getting fainter every year.
So you’re sitting in the dark at your computer, night after night, pouring wine down your throat, scrolling through the world’s garbage, and your brain spirals. Especially in autumn. The weight of it all presses down and you can’t breathe.
Was it smart to leave home? To chase money and meaning in the big city? Staying would’ve meant poverty and disappointment and no future, but at least you’d still have the people who actually understood you. The ones who knew you better than anyone else ever will. But you left them anyway.
Maybe that crushing loneliness isn’t an ending, though. Maybe it’s a signal. A sign that you need to move again—not back, but forward. The life you’ve built has settled into place. All the surprises are already behind you. You’re not growing anymore, just waiting.
So maybe it’s time for something actual. Travel somewhere you’ve never been and find out happiness isn’t waiting on the other side of the world—but at least you’ll know. Move to a city where you don’t know a single person and rebuild from zero. Finally do that one dream you keep thinking about before sleep, the thing you abandoned when life got complicated but never actually forgot. Anything but this slow fade.
It comes down to one question: Do you have the guts to actually do the things you think about constantly, the things that would make your life feel like something? Or do you stay and watch time disappear, so you can regret it later?
Go or forever alone. That’s the choice.