Yeah I thought that was weird, along with joining ethnic organizations. I don't really need to explain the religion thing, but ethnic organizations are weird since you are forming an identity based on your unchoosable parent's DNA. I've seen both used by leaders to weaponize their members at their members detriment.
Although, if you are doing politics, I can see this being pragmatically useful.
So in my city there used to be some clubs, like the Ukrainian Lounge, the Polish Club, etc. which was a club where people paid dues and the only real requirement was to be part polish, ukrainian etc. It was basically just a bar to hang out at. The reason I put it there is that those guys seemed to get lifelong companionship and socialization out of it. Instead of shaming people for what may drive them, I am throwing out options I have observed.
Telling people to bond over traits they can't choose seems like an excellent way to isolate people with rare traits they can't choose.
I have more in common with a factory worker in China than I do with the president of my own country, even if we happen to share the same skin tone. I am defined by my experiences, after all, not things like genetics, culture or history.
it also doesn't even fight loneliness. Loneliness isn't solved by merely not being physically alone. I grew up in a Catholic environment but because I bought exactly none of it the religious environments were exactly where I felt most isolated.
You're not solving loneliness by joining a cult or a gang. You can only deal with it by making authentic connections to people you actually want to be with. Countless of people are lonely and miserable within families.
I agree, unless faith actually means something to you, forcing yourself to go to church won’t help. Sitting through Mass miserable, disbelieving, and avoiding everyone defeats the whole purpose.
Churches get brought up a lot because they regularly gather people (weekly or even daily) and offer events, volunteer opportunities, and so on.
The point is to find an activity you like, with a specific group of people and consistently attend.
P.S As a fellow Catholic, I’m really sorry you went through such an isolating experience. I hope things feel much better for you now
I never used Erlang, and I'm a functional programming fan. But languages based on heavy VM that abstract OS away always make me doubt that's the right direction.
That's not a crazy instinct, and maybe if OSs were better you would even be right, but there's not really another way to get a skrillion communicating processes that can all crash/fail independently. Without a dedicated VM, all the other approaches are either less safe or too inefficient.
I consider BEAM an indication of a direction that OSs could and maybe should move. It's even possible to run BEAM on bare metal, (almost?) entirely in place of the normal OS.
I've built a hobby OS around BEAM... BEAM doesn't require a whole lot from the OS, I built a minimal kernel that runs a single process, which you could consider a unikernel or at least very close. I had originally wanted BEAM in ring 0, but I had a lot of trouble getting started. This way, I can just use a pre-compiled BEAM for FreeBSD and don't have to fight with weird compilation options. Anyway, with x86-32 at least, I can give my Ring 3 process access to all the ioports and let it request a mmap of any address, so the only drivers I need in the kernel are IRQ controllers, timers, and pre-beam console. Once beam is up, console i/o and networking is managed from erlang code (with a couple nifs)
It's almost like an OS in itself and initially designed to be like a more capable and robust OS on top of rather constrained computers. In my experience it's trivial to shell or port out to the environment when I want to, and I also see people that I don't think of as highly skilled low-level programmers do things with NIF:s so that can't be exceptionally demanding either.
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