I apologize if this is too broad/doomer-y for this comm, but I feel like I need to post it somewhere other than a general megathread where it gets buried.
So to keep it brief, over the past year I feel like I’ve crossed an event horizon. What I mean is that, like the event horizon of a black hole, I’ve reached a point where I’m being dragged toward oblivion with no hope of escape. I’ve been chronically depressed for much of my life, but never to this extent where I’ve had genuinely episodes of what I guess you could call derealization? I feel like I’m watching a movie of my life. There are moments where I feel lightheaded and like nothing around me is real. It almost alternates between this pseudo-Buddhist detachment and terrifying existential dread about some true nature of existence or whatever.
For a while, I could keep the negativity at bay with exercise or hobbies or whatever. I was actually sort of content for a while in 2022. But during this past year, nothing, and I mean N-O-T-H-I-N-G helps. Going for a walk? Still feel miserable. Drawing? I just cannot draw anything. Exercise? Bored and tired the whole time. Games? Boring. Reading? Pointless. Hang out with friends? Boring, and they probably all hate me anyway. I constantly have this nagging feeling that I should be doing Something Else…but I have absolutely no idea what could possibly satisfy this need. Because nothing feels remotely good anymore. I cannot really convey through words just how maddeningly frustrating this is for me.
I also fucking despise my job, and I think it’s a big reason for all this. It’s a dumb supervisor job at a grocery store department, so it’s not like it’s actually hard, but it’s so exhausting. Like needlessly so. I’m tired of waking up at 4AM everyday to get there at 5. I hate most of my coworkers. I loathe our customers. But it’s full time and got decent enough benefits (which I really need to keep) so I’m apprehensive about finding anything else. I’ve thought about going back to school (I have a general studies associate’s, as I had originally planned to transfer elsewhere before covid happened and derailed everything), but I have no clue what to do.
So long story short, I’m just burned the fuck out from everything in my life (there’s other stuff too, but this post is long enough). And it’s at the point where I don’t even know where to start to fix things, because all the usual tricks don’t seem to work anymore. I almost want to pull a Bilbo Baggins and just ghost everyone and go far away.
The job is eroding your inner peace and polluting your mental hygiene. You spend your waking hours there, bored and annoyed, and so the attrition of the minutia is wearing down on your psyche in quiet despair; your escapisms, your tangible and social anesthetics, and consumer experiences aren’t filling the void and acting as painkiller.
I’d suggest to look for another job that matches the pay, but in a different career or field; youve diagnosed yourself as burned out and if you could afford a break, I’d say to pursue that. It’s time to put one foot out the door and start exploring your options while you maintain that job.
If you can’t find professional fulfillment, then you can find emotional, spiritual, and physical fulfillment. Your professional aspirations and labors should fuel the latter. But your job isn’t doing that for you. So, if you can, you should go back to university and find a career that can do that. If it isn’t a dream job then it should be a job where you can make a comfortable living that isn’t dependent on networking but merely enhances career prospects.
It seems you’re in a state of despair over a life unfulfilled, so make goals on how to fix them.
Tangible, material, reachable goals of how you could process and pursue your true self in measurable ways.
Yeah you worded it perfectly.
This is what I hope to do but I just…don’t know what to do. Like at this point I’ve given up on ever having a “dream job” primarily because I have no dreams. So I do want to go back for just some decent career. But then this creates in me a different kind of existential fear, where I persist in different forms of mediocrity forever. Plus I’m 25 now, and I know people go back to school all the time, but I can’t escape this notion that it’s still pathetic and pointless.
Whatever though, I guess my short-term goal right now is to make a plan for what I want to do when I go back, ideally this coming fall. I had hoped to go back this spring, but I just never figured anything out (I think this is one of the immediate causes of my recent despair, I feel like a fuck-up for not committing to it). Maybe everything will sort itself out from there.
Not knowing what to do is completely fair and what a lot of students, returning or new, people who want a fresh start, or “hot couch people” find themselves in.
If you don’t know what to do, then take a career that is about making money. Finance, technology, accounting, et cetera.
(I had a friend that had a similar existential crisis and he just went into filmmaking and media, if I can provide an additional alternative/creative career path)
There are a lot of people who don’t equate their job as purpose, but a means to an end for that purpose.
The job serves as part foundation for having a community, family, friends but also as means for recreation and leisure and finding meaning/inner peace.
That’s still great. Life-changing events and decisions should be weighed with much thought and preparation anyway.