How do you balance your desire for liberation with your wordly desires?

In the right direction, but still have a long way to go. When your worldly desires fade out, you become closer to liberation. If you are at a cross road, that means something is bothering you, is it the loss of worldly friends ? Or Loneliness ?

In short, they can be perfectly balanced.

"If a fool persists in his folly, he can become wise."

Peaceful states are great in the path, but they are temporary. So you can enjoy them when they arise but don't cling to these states because peaceful states of mind can't be permanent in one's life unless the person completely disidentifies from the core of the subconscious mind, and the disidentification process from the core of the subconscious mind starts in the last phase of the stream-enterer stage. Only after reaching the once-returner stage the person would have continous peace that would not end in time or with the worldly conditions. That's necessary for a meditator to remember time to time because when the peaceful states gone, it can make the meditators very dissapointed and can stop the meditator to keep going If they haven't prepared themselves for it.

Feeling of isolation and loneliness is normal in the path. As you go further in the path you'll be internally more vulnerable and as vulnerability grows, you'll open your heart and mind more to the nature of reality and the feeling of isolation and loneliness will decrease and eventually dissapear completely. Then you can live in a cave or you can be in Bill Gates position it doesn't matter. You'll not feel lonely or isolated anymore.

A Buddhist meditator must either live in solitude or find right people to spend time with and build a Sangha for him/her that would help him/her in the path and give the energy to continue in the path. In some of the countries this is very difficult or impossible, but in the Buddhist countries and many of the western countries this is certainly a doable thing. So when you build a sangha, spend your time with right people, it would be far easier for you to let go of the worldly desires and ordinary wordly people who have completely wrong perceptions, ideas and beliefs and can only pull you down to their own level of frequency and eventually make you stop your spiritual practise completely. That's why being disloyal to the popular culture and society is necessary. Ordinary people's path is the complete opposite of the dhamma. Their path is the suffering path.

Remember what the Buddha said. There is no condition of life that more powerfully influences your development than cultivating wholesome friends and companions. Start with yourself, as you are today, and build on your strengths to become a better friend and companion to others. And choose who you spend time with carefully

https://buddhasadvice.wordpress.com/friendships/

The Buddhist path takes courage, a courage that worldly people don't have and aren't interested in. Whether they realize it or not, worldly people will try to sabotage the genuine practice of a spiritual seeker. They do so out of self defense. They don't want to peer into a spiritual seeker's eyes and see glimmers of the truth. That is frightening and potentially derailing to their own lifestyle. A spiritual seeker progresses easier and faster as he or she moves out of the sphere of influence of such people. Breaking those bonds engages a reflex reaction of fear which is often felt as a crushing loneliness. Persevering through that sadness, it weakens and falls away with time eventually supplanted by a positive conviction of the truth and goodness of the dharma. Find other spiritual seekers to interact with and maintain a careful equanimity (ambivalence) with the rest. Even the mother hen knows her egg won't hatch if it isn't given the right warmth and protection. As the Buddha taught, the greatest blessing is holy company.

I guess "desire" (whether "worldly" or "for liberation") has two components: it's an ambition or a goal for the future ("I do X because I aspire towards Y"), a motive; and it's a preference ("I prefer Y", possibly "I'm attached to Y").

In summary, I guess you try to balance "Wholesome desires" for or about the future; combined with "liberation" in the present.

I have been motivated to behave "appropriately", where "appropriate behaviour" can be understood as "behaviour taught to children" -- for example, having a temper tantrum in a parking lot is "inappropriate behaviour"; whereas washing the food containers after eating a meal is "appropriate behaviour".

There are further definitions of "appropriate behaviour" for adults -- keeping laws -- but a lot of freedom too (e.g. to be or not to be a recluse, to practice this or to practice that).

But maybe "avoiding inappropriate behaviour" is a way to satisfy both desires: a way towards liberation, and, towards worldly situations. For all that the N8P is prescriptive (e.g. "right view, right effort"), the suttas are proscriptive too (e.g. "don't break the precepts, uproot the poisons, avoid the hindrances, abandon the fetters") -- I guess a lot of my desires have been proscriptive.

My recent questions on this site (e.g. here and here) have been wondering what to put in place of that negativity.

I'm not sure how anatta informs your view, is "the filter for most of your experiences".

If someone asked me now whether it was "just out of compassion instead of out of real feelings of friendship", I guess I'd answer something based on Dhamma (since the Dhamma has so much to say about compassion) -- maybe something like, "Relationships! They can be complicated, can't they. Perhaps you're right that compassion isn't real friendship, but I think it's a real part of friendship -- I think "compassion" is wanting someone to be happy, and wanting to avoid ever hurting someone -- and ideally that might go both ways in a relationship, both people feel that. There are other aspects to friendship too -- admiring someone for their virtues, generosity, self-sufficiency, their skills in interacting with people, bravery, kindness."

In terms of relationships, it's not all about "me" or "my loneliness" -- a more, kind of, objective question might be something like, "am I hurting this person? is this relationship beneficial or is it harmful?"

To get back to talking about compassion then, you might say, "There's more to a relationship than compassion, but harmlessness is a minimum. I don't want to say, 'I'm doing more good than harm': I need a relationship where I'm not hurting you at all."

You mentioned loneliness and isolation. I don't understand those words, possibly (if I project onto them from my own experience), they disappear when you stop thinking, "there is an 'I' who is isolated" (i.e. a self-view), and "I wish had a relationship" (i.e. a craving). I suppose I have a Theory of mind and therefore don't believe that I'm alone (instead, the Dalai Lama said once, "I'm not special, I'm like everyone else; seeing yourself as 'special' is a prison.").

As for, "Some of them seem to think that I'm becoming something like a robot. I don't think that's the case.", maybe there's less conflict if you don't contradict people.

So "Yes I space out a bit sometimes" might be an appropriate reply, might it? My teachers' report card called me dans la lune when I first started grade school, so that's easy for me to accept, that people might see that. And if they (friends) really want to talk about mental health and so on, then maybe that's no bad thing, an important topic, worth listening, conversing.

I guess my view of having an enlightened friend is that, "That's good -- mudita and metta. And yet, enlightened isn't meant to be (shouldn't be, ideally isn't) a handicap or an incapacity." Still there's a reason, I guess, why some people leave home, calling it a "dusty path" and so on, and (I don't know) perhaps that reason is to escape the social obligations which other people try to impose.

Kalyāṇamittādivaggo: Good companionship and others

Zen teachers would say: Don't live a half-hearten life, and the wise praise 3 things: rendering help for ones parents, generosity, renouncing. Once the things done in right order, it would be a lot of self-cheating and the defilement kitchen, not to seek simply the way out. Actually there are less real obligations and the most compassionate gift for this world, for one self and all others, is to become being at least on the straight way to an Arahat. The world is already full of "Bodhisatvas" and soon there will be no more place for all of them...

So it's all about the question if one likes to get ride of ones "body-debts" or cheat one further on one of the many desired Ahara-hat-path laid out by Mara.

The younger the better, since an old tree is even harder to bend and handicaps for a full holly life can arise tomorrow.

(like always not given for trade, exchange, stacks for the world but for release and so most possible not for everyone)

One of my friends asked me if I talk to her just out of compassion instead of out of real feelings of friendship. That question really freaked me out, especially because it seems to be pointing to some truth

Indeed. Insightful or intuitive question by the lady

One part of me wants to keep going along this Path, because all of the peace it has brought to me. The other part is not so sure if is ready to lose its bonds, relationships and wordly goals and ties, feelings which can be ascribed to still being in love with Samsara, and still having ignorant tendencies.

Worldly friends generally will not abandon you when you live a more isolated life. They like to reassure themselves you are not crazy when you occasionally turn up to one of their social events & act reasonably normally. This said, yes, a genuine Dhamma life in ordinary society is very isolated. It can be more isolated than living in a monastery (because in the monastery there may be some like-minded persons).