I for one am looking forward to retirement. I am planning on being high all the time, gardening and yelling at children passing by my property. Growing my hair and beard, wearing a bandana and a tie-dyed shirt and paying for my coffee in quarters in a wooden treasure box I carry as a purse. The goal is to liberate the crazy.
Hey friend, I am also 38, and I am also recently "aloned". I had a break up in August and lived with my parents until February.
At first it was strange, I was acutely feeling the loneliness. But gradually I started seeing its upsides, and I am beginning to dangerously enjoy it haha.
I am using the time and space to take care of and express myself. Live slowly, cook myself warm dinners, nice coffees; I made a cozy nook for reading, I am planning on adding fragrant flowers to my terrace.
I am planning on a routine, which includes going to the gym and actually trying and enjoy moving my body. Sometimes I have the luxury of just sitting in the park next to the gym and soak up some sun, enjoy the sounds if birds and the water fountain.
I am hybrid so I get to go to the office and see my colleagues. Somehow, luckily, every weekend some social event happened, a dear friend came to visit. It was my aunts birthday. I also have a housewarming planned in two weeks which motivates me to make the place beautiful to show off.
My advice would be, simply, to focus on the current moment. Thoughts take you awry, try not to ruminate. Have a plan, and trust the process. There are five things absolutely needed for health and happiness(not in a particular order):
So while you are alone, I would question the rest too, do you eat well? Do you exercise? Do you go out? Do you sleep well?
The way our mind works is whenever a state comes up, it ups the likelihood of that state to come up again. So try to summon happy states, would be difficult and feel fake at first but it really works. Gratitude is a good one. Writing or expressing it doesn't work well for me, so I like to do it when I clean, I feel grateful as I am gently scrubbing the mirror for instance for helping me fix up my appearance. Find yours.
From what you wrote it sounds like you already know what to do, but you are reluctant. Why is that? One could identify with one's depression by ruminating over it.
In closing I highly recommend the book, the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, it has a free audiobook on YouTube too.
I wish you the best of luck. Life could be whatever you want it to be and there is no true self, all is constructed and you can engineer your psyche anew.
You can tell him and he will love it and I bet he has encoded the behavior of working better because of it just how some tried threatening LLMs to work harder