I feel like I have been deteriorating for months. I haven’t wanted to do anything and talk to anyone. Even playing video games feels like more work than I’m willing to do. I don’t want to leave bed and just want to sleep permanently.
I’m lucky that I work from home and have a slow enough job that I can regularly shirk responsibility without anyone noticing. I’m also lucky that I still live with my parents and have some people around. But I can’t keep living like this. Despite having a full time job, I’m living like a NEET.
I’m already seeing a therapist and getting medication from a shrink. That doesn’t seem to be making a difference. Between support from professionals and family members and professionals, I’m getting more than enough help for most people to get back on their feet. Yet for some reason it’s not enough for me.
I can only conclude at this point that the reason I’m continuing to get worse is that I refuse to take personal responsibility. I know “personal responsibility” isn’t enough in most cases where systemic issues keep people down, but I’m ridiculously privileged, as in “has never faced anything resembling real hardship” privileged. The system is set up for shits like me to do well and I still can’t pick myself up. It doesn’t help that I have less self discipline than a teenage twitter anarchist who wants to abolish bedtime.
How do I get myself to stop being so lazy and do something? I’m tired of being little more than a parasitic slug.
Make some progress every day, no matter how small. Start writing a journal to figure things out. Keep it private, otherwise you’ll create pressures that won’t help.
What do you need to take personal responsibility for?
What do you want to achieve?
What do you want out of life?
What do you want out of the next week, month, six months, year, decade?
Don’t answer these questions here. You can give broad brush strokes if you wish, but this is personal. If you figure out want you want and where you want to go, you can work backwards and work out the steps you need to take to get there.
Edit:
What are your values?
Are you fulfilling your values? If not, which ones, in what part of your life, and why?
Log you’re average day. Hours sleeping, eating, at work, everything. You can also be more detailed with ‘at work’.
Now imagine how you want to spend your days, including with work stuff, and consider how this relates to and would fulfill your values.
You can do this in your mind, but on paper may be more helpful.
Work out how to get from your current to your ideal day-to-day. If you can align your life with your values you may be more motivated. This won’t solve everything, but it may help.
If there was a revolution this evening and the new communist state asked you tomorrow to help build the new world, would you be motivated to help? If so, I’m guessing you would (at least ideally) want to throw yourself in to this meaningful activity. If that’s the case, then it may help to identify meaningful activity that is possible to achieve before the revolution, and motivate you to work towards that activity.
Again, these are personal questions, so don’t share all the details with us!
Edit: simplified the comment.