TRIGGER WARNING!

Depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.

I apologize if this post comes off as immature or offensive. I’ll be pouring my emotions into it more than my thoughts. I also apologize for any bad English and text inconsistencies, I finished writing this at 3AM.

I’m rather young, currently 22. I’m finishing my computer science course in a year and have had minor work experience. I’m Brazilian and have a very comfortable life, comparable to a Western middle class person in most ways.

I hate everything that’s to do with the tech industry. I got into tech because of Linux and open source, and I love how Linux in my country is slowly becoming a way for people to extend computer lifespans and such, and how its main reason to exist is “to be good at what it does” rather than being profitable. Linux is what got me to read about leftism and later communism, so I thank the FOSS community for that.

My country is in the imperial periphery and there’s nothing to do here besides be a little developer pawn for banks and frontend (mainly websites and basic apps) companies, either that or get into any company’s IT department, which I’ve done and it’s hell (for me of course, plenty of people love it). Being in the imperial periphery, I also don’t have any nice career paths like becoming employed by a company doing something cool, like Valve, Huawei, Fairphone, Framework, and any others you guys might think. I do know they’re all capitalist/market oriented businesses, with Huawei being a coop and all, but I’ve given up on seeing a Brazilian revolution in my lifetime a while ago, and just wanted to make the world a bit less shit for people with at least my work being poured on some nice products that don’t treat the end user like crap.

The political party I’m a part of (UP) is currently tearing itself apart from the inside because one of the largest growing communist influencers in my country (Jones Manoel) is not from my party, so people are infuriated and are basically shutting doors and losing potential leftist allies because of pride and other dogmatic approaches to politics (like trostkyites tend to do in my country, even though my party is ML). There goes the biggest chance Brazil had of having an influential communist movement.

I don’t have a party with any momentum to be a part of, I don’t have any decent career paths to aspire for, and there’s basically nowhere to go because the US is a fascist hellhole, China doesn’t need Brazilians to do what Chinese people can, and Europe is slowly fading out of existence (as well as becoming a fascist hellhole in most places, as well as not needing Brazilians to do what Europeans also can).

I have been suffering with depression for the last two years, but I’ve been “not well” since I was a kid. I’ve always coped with anxiety and I’m neurodivergent (idk what it’s called in English but I have “high abilities and intellectual giftedness”, and am currently making tests to see if I also have ADHD, autism and the like).

I’m unsure about the rest of the world, but the Brazilian labor market doesn’t prefer people like me and as such many of them end up either super exploited because gifted people perform better in their specific areas of giftedness, or end up with no decent job because their specific areas are not profitable like in my case. No one is making money from developing user-end terminal programs and installing/maintaining desktop linux systems for people in their community and social circles, as well as being beta a tester for a few linux projects. These are things actual devs make as a hobby. Because of my condition (psychological and otherwise) as well as my lack of enthusiasm in other areas, my life in the future looks pretty crap, and mainly due to my condition, I can’t do anything that I’m not into without feeling like complete garbage. Working as an IT guy for a while got me feeling suicidal for the first time, and seeing internship programs and career paths in Brazil makes me want to die again. I looked into becoming a teacher, but teacher salaries in Brazil are a joke and I’d be just teaching future professionals that’d fall into the same place I’m in right now.

I’m not mentioning how socialism lost in the 20th century and how China is making baby steps towards a new way of running a society that’s only going to realize itself in 100 years because that’s probably my depression making me distort reality to fit my dopamine-deprived brain and you guys would destroy my silly arguments in a few sentences, but that’s how I currently view things in a nutshell.

Anyways…

I give up. Capitalism won (at least for the next decades), FOSS lost, I don’t have any decent career to aspire to, and I’ll probably kill myself next year. I just wish there was any minuscule thing I could do with the knowledge I have that’d give me some quality of life, monetarily so that I maintain some of my current lifestyle of course (I don’t want much, just enough to afford PCs and give family members some nice bday gifts), but also mentally. I want to use my skills to make my community a better place, to make some nice products that people would like to use for a long time, maybe “forever” even, like old soviet appliances. There’s no option like that for a filthy third world commie like me, in a crappy non industrial labor market with crappy salaries. Maybe the world wants people like me to go away, maybe it’s for the best so the market works better or whatever.

You guys have been amazing people these last two or so years I’ve been here. I thank you all for your replies on my posts, and for the posts you make (I don’t post here often, but I do lurk often). You’re amazing human beings, and I hope you reach your life goals so you don’t feel like me. You deserve everything the world has to offer.

Thank you for your time and attention. Have a great night (or day idk).