Do you feel alone from very early childhood? How do you manage to deal with it?

Like many of us, I found a solution in focusing on building things rather than trying (too hard) to find long-life meaningful social connections. People come and go; you or they outgrow us at some point. Existential loneliness adds on top of normal loneliness: new people often can't understand us after we grow to a certain complexity threshold. Yet building things creates the feeling we're doing something meaningful.

However, the older I become and the more I notice how health failures may affect things I can possibly build, the more meaningless life feels without such deep and meaningful connections. It's kind of a paradox that it was easier to live with the loneliness feeling in the earliest childhood, when the psyche was much more vulnerable.

Psychotherapy and traditional spiritual practices look like a crutch to me in this case: useful but not sustainable enough. It also became another sophisticated way to say "shut up, be happy" to somebody we're not willing to have a deep connection with (it's just "be happy" becomes "have a drink/take a pill/go to a therapist/go to another psychedelic retreat"). While we're still designed to be social, even introverts.

What do you believe is more sustainable in the long run: focusing on building things (and possibly attracting the right people this way, with no direct intention of doing that) vs attempting to find meaningful connections directly (with a risk of wasting your energy on nothing)?