Loneliness on your gap year and how to combat it- aka Schrodinger's Satire

You’ve decided to take a gap year, for whatever reason. It could be that you want to reapply to somewhere ending in -ford or -bridge (bad idea), you want to travel around the world for cheap beer, or you’ve self-sacrificingly got an interesting job that will look good on your CV. Regardless, around the 2 month mark loneliness will set in. A deep, pervading loneliness conjured by watching everyone else’s Snapchats et al, and by seeing them all be horrendously successful with wonderful social lives whilst the highlight of your week is watching a ‘Top of the Pops’ that aired 14 years before you were born. However, there are ways of combating this. Here are my (completely serious) top 5.
  

      1)      Get into something so bizarre you’d feel lonely about it anyway.

Everyone you know is into grime, Kim Kardashian, ASOS Marketplace. Because they’ve all gone away, you have no one to talk to about these things. You can no longer be up-to-date on all the happening trends of 2018. So, instead of feeling isolated because you’ve got no one to fangirl about these with, why not adopt some weird, special interest that nobody would want to talk about even if they were here? That way, you are the master of your own loneliness, and have something to occupy yourself with whilst everyone progresses their lives. My own personal pick is Anthony Newley: no one under the age of 50 knows who he is, he’s a Marmite choice at best, and the fanclub hasn’t done anything in 10 years- a wonderful combination for someone looking to be lonely on their own terms and thus cancel out all the other feelings produced by other people.

      2)      Get a job.

It doesn’t have to be a good job. It doesn’t have to pay well. It just needs to involve you getting out of bed in the morning, so as not to sink into a depressive haze. Other bonuses include: gaining skills (such as dealing with customers complaining that their drinks too hot when they could easily have just let it cool down for God’s sake), making friends (if you’re good at that sort of thing), and enjoying the marvellous phenomena of ‘a day off’. That simple feeling makes the whole ‘other-people-having-a-good-time’ thing worthwhile.

     3)     Join a club.

Firstly, this stimulates human contact. Two, you can have something to put on your CV. Three, it may get you featured in the Guardian, thus validating you as a person who does things for five minutes. And finally for a moment it stops you checking social media, and for one glorious minute you forget about anyone outside of yourself- other people being of course the chief cause of loneliness.

      4)      Makes friends with dead/fictional people.

An old favourite. This way, no one can let you down. They never knew you, they never cared, so they can never ditch you or have their own lives outside of your perception of them. They are, essentially, avatars for your own brain; you can project what you want onto them. This also links to number 1- you can’t feel lonely if you have a group of weird, obscure fictional people to back you up! You’re not lonely, you’ve got friends- you desperately tell yourself at night whilst crying into your pillow.

       5)      Write a lightly satirical blog post about it.

This allows you to release long held feelings in a way where no one can quite decide whether you’re joking or not. Also, for one thrilling moment, you have people’s attention. Then they stop reading it. And we’re back to stage one again.