I’m trying to be better but I’m terrible some days and better others, my willpower day-to-day isn’t at all consistent enough to help. I’m always depressed and tired, even when I take my meds and get good sleep.
I love to imagine myself as I would be if I had the willpower and energy to tackle each day. What it would be like to be able to make friends as an adult without having anyone from college, highschool, or childhood. What it would be like if I could go about my day with confidence in my own ability, knowing I can back it up. What it would be like to live in my skin without wanting to scream all the time even when I’m happy. What it would be like if I was enough for myself.
What it would be like if I was just good enough to be okay. I wish I could be okay
How about ya’ll?
I know many people are like me in one way or another, and asking if there are is kind of pointless, but I just want to hear from people like me. I don’t want to be alone.
But I also know that these things are literally mostly the fault of the banal dystopia wearing down our will to live every day. As well as that despite all this shit you still believe in us, in the potential of humanity, is an act of love so pure that one who feels it cannot be evil. I will not accept your self hatred, you are a good person, just one thats been worn to pieces trying to pull them back together.
deleted my matrix account and lemmygrad account on a fit of breakdown, it is hard carrying yourself forward every single second, and every 100 seconds I start tearing up. I go to uni, attend 2 hour classes everyday, eat, buy food for the night, come back. I sometimes game, its CS2, which means its a comfort game, which I’ve been playing since 2017, but I don’t have fun, because again, I’m all by myself. It is sometimes fun hearing the voice chat in casual and people are shitposting, or when a person does something funny in game while trying to clutch. Wish I was a part of that though, something more than just my own individual presence. I think I’m going back to 2019 again, where I was confused and alone, trying to deal with shit I did in childhood and adolescence that I couldn’t bring myself to forgive. It’s like Marx said, first as tragedy, then as a farce. I struggle going to social events, I think everyone I’ve managed to hold up a conversation to now hates me. the queer club is pretty apolitical, which sucks. Dm’ing people and then moving on to hanging out irl is what suits best for me, I’ve tried doing that with that club, but sadly resulted in no replies or ultimately me getting ghosted. I wish there was an ounce of spark I could see in others irl, who want to talk to me. I refuse therapy and medicines, I can’t deal with support anymore that relies on the very superstructure that is directly affecting my material reality. My partners are separated between two countries in the imperial core, and it is really hard dealing with the individual loneliness/suicidality, and the collective part of getting depressed about the shit that goes on everywhere.
take care of yourself though, you’re doing a great job, and I’m proud of you. I believe in you. Sending love <3
glad to hear from you comrade, thought you left fully, wishing the best
i just want to apologize to you for being a snarky dickhead about being a trot to you earlier, not sure if you remember it but yeah im sorry
also i am not a trot anymore
Absolutely no hard feelings comrade! I was the one being snarky in that exchange, anyway. Much love to you.
Also very neat!
I’ve pretty much given up on having normal social relationships. I find sometimes it’s helpful to set aside a little bit of time (an hour a day at a fixed point) just to get things done (without a computer). Even if I’m not doing much I at least feel like I’m accomplishing something.
Don’t totally give up, I feel similarly, but I’ve realized if I make a conscious effort to greet people, be around acquaintances without headphones, try to help people, and interject in conversations etc that can help. People can be boring and post pandemic zoomer relationships can be hard, but you gotta try.
On the second part, I know I need to set aside more time without my phone. I should really get on that, considering how much time I waste procrastinating. Btw, anyone in this thread who sleeps in the same room as their phone, try not to. It’s very distracting and can promote bad habits preventing positive activities like reading.
Getting a schedule down is always good, i should get on that.
sole downvoter be like “schedules are authoritarian”
Sole downvoter just mass downvoted OP on her post about being burnt out. In fact, looking at her history, she seems to have a “friend” always giving her some dedicated appreciation by hitting the wrong arrow on most of her comments and posts, lol. I take that as a way to feel massive vindication for being able to attract someone for so long. I’m kinda jelly; OP is apparently pretty based.
I felt the exact same way, but it turned out that I had untreated ADHD which was destroying my life and made me horrifically depressed, lethargic, and despondent. I got medication for and have never felt better.
I devoted my time to my partner, helping at the local homeless shelter, drug clinic, and animal shelter. If I see my actions preforming immediate good changes in my world around me, that brightens my day to no extent. Do you know how incredible it is to have tens of dogs rush you when you go into their playpen at a shelter? Do you know how wholesome it is to help an elderly homeless man acquire housing and rehabilitation, and he considers you a good friend? Its incredible.
I also spend time on my hobbies instead of endlessly scrolling on my phone. Most importantly, I let myself be ignorant sometimes. The world will keep spinning without you, and if you hyperfocus on the horrific aspects of society all the time, it will destroy you. Take time to disconnect and refresh yourself, then jump back into the fray.
Essentially, LESS THINKING MORE DOING. Also if you are able to, please see a psychiatrist and therapist, this is at best something that can be helped with some therapy, or at worst you have some sort of underlying issue that is hurting you, like ADHD In my case. If you are as unmotivated and fatigued as you say, you are either extremely burnt out and need help, or you might also have a neurological condition that is handicapping you silently. A good therapist will also be able to help guide you through the mental roadblocks you’re facing regarding things like the friendships and feeling like you can’t be ok.
At the end of it all, we are here for you! We’re in your corner and we believe in you! You can do it! I’ve always loved seeing your posts here and you seem like a thoughtful, caring, and insightful person who has so much to offer the world! If you were to go about making them in your life, those are aspects that true friends will cherish.
How about ya’ll?
I exist in both planes, burdened by my past and suicidal ideation while living in the present, which materially is great.
I think im on the otherside of the issues you are facing now; I did the work, seperated myself from the toxic enviroment and have found myself, at least on a personal level in a happy place; but the weight of the past crushes me some days and others feels light as a feather.
Im ok, il always be alright; its a struggle.
Sending love and support, you’re doing so well comrade!
Thank you <3
I feel similarly with a lack of energy and willpower. I’m constantly procrastinating and waiting to do school work on my own time. I’m constantly on my phone even though I Intend to read and do other stuff. These are both largely caused by the school system not valuing people’s sleep, but there is a bit I can do to get better like reducing procrastination. I know it’s a bit of a bandaid in this society, but getting out to nature and mindfulness can help. Remember it’s habit, not willpower that allows people to continuously do what they want themselves to do. Habits take time to build up. I realized recently that it is possible to gradually increase being social if you just intend to and take small opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise.
Amen to school not valuing sleep.
Rant incoming...
I was taking 12 credits of advanced (not really) programming classes during my last semester of college (online). I had to quit my job to be able to do the work, and I was still pulling all-nighters nearly every day. I told my C++ professor that taking 12 credits, the minimum required to be full-time, shouldn’t require me to lose so much sleep, especially when I am not working. He said that I shouldn’t be taking 4 advanced courses in a semester and should have went part-time or taken a couple of lower level classes (yeah, so I can waste more time and lose more money, and I had no choice but to take these classes because the way I had to do my schedule for each semester to be able to satisfy prerequisites), even though it was a community college and the courses were Advanced C++, Java, Python, and Data Structures (which in retrospect those courses would be pretty basic compared to university level courses). So much content was repeated, and I had relearn git 4 times even though it was treated as an afterthought and should have been its own course. The issue was that there was an overabundance of work in each class that could have been reduced while still providing the same quality of learning (which was dogshit). So many assignments had contradictory instructions. Most of the online courses were very poorly thrown together in Blackboard, which is a very clunky interface that is not easy to navigate. I wish colleges used an online tool with a better interface, something similar to Coursera. I hated one professor so much because she was the laziest one I ever had, and unfortunately she was the only one doing Data Structures, which means I had to deal with her twice (the first class was C#, and she made me just hate the language because of her shitty course). She gave an assignment with no lesson, and I had to go figure out what the lesson was about without any help. After an assignment was done, she refused to give feedback on where I made mistakes because she considered it cheating. What’s the point of doing college if I just have to teach myself anyways? For the last and more difficult data structures we had to learn, we were given very little instruction, and I was lucky to get away with just refactoring examples I found online and in books to make it look like I wasn’t cheating. I mentioned this to a student during graduation, and apparently that’s what she expected students to do when he went to her office for help. Someday, I am going to need to go back and relearn these data structures because I barely learned them and wasn’t given enough time and help to study them during the course.
The professors were often working in another job and doing online courses part-time, and various others were retired or were just really shit in the industry, so often we were taught bad practices in programming. My C++ instructor even suggested that it was a good idea to write down in a text document of a project of all the changes people did…in a git repository…which is the entire point of the VCS, ffs. One student ended up ranting in the discussion forum about it, and the professor didn’t say anything. Sadly, this was one of my better professors.
Often professors would take feedback from students, and the only way they would try to resolve issues is by creating more assignments and more help groups that no student has time to attend. I believe most courses could have been reworked to be less language specific (like data structures) and focus on teaching important courses in a language agnostic manner. Then for language specific features, those courses could still reduce their workload greatly by improving the examples for assignments and still reducing the amount of work required. I spent most of the time trying to research the lessons on my own, decipher the confusing instructions provided by the professors (sometimes needing to accept that a solution was not possible or just something really stupid or really stretching the actual meaning of the instructions and receive a lower grade for the assignment), arguing with professors, and just doing a bunch of fluff work for overly massive assignments for a simple topic. Any feedback students give for specific issues almost never gets applied, so the students in the following semester get to deal with the same issues.
I mean, I guess in the end it wouldn’t matter, since the degree you get is only going to get you a job below what you studied for, if you’re lucky. Having a two-year degree in (essentially) Computer Science just gives me a shitty IT contract job, and that was difficult to acquire alone. All the all-nighters I pulled, all the car accidents I nearly missed due to lack of sleep, and all the years of my life lost amounted to this, ugh.
And the sad thing is, I see this pattern with every college, even ASU, which declares itself as a prestigious school, meanwhile they can’t even get the time right for my enrollment coach appointment. The level of incompetence in every college is utterly astounding. I have read many ASU online class horror stories and complaints on reddit, and the same can be said for other colleges. At least I am more prepared for the online college bullshit.
If you want to go the self-education route, bursts in laughter and cries, good luck. If you’re lucky to get a job through self-education, you’re still treated like a third class citizen when you try to work for other companies like AMD, which flat out does not accept anyone without a degree regardless of experience. You want to move to another country? Good luck doing so without a degree, let alone without a doctorate’s degree or a shitton of money. As much as I rather self-educate myself in Electrical Engineering using better materials I can find online or through highly recommended books and various other materials, it’s safer for me to still do college (as long as I get enough scholarships and hopefully my mom’s settlement will be able to cover the rest, which is sad that such funds have to pay for basic but exorbitant human necessities (school, housing, etc.)).
Our educational system in Amerikkka, from our elementary schools to our most prestigious colleges, is an absolute joke with no respect or regard to their students’ well being.
Just to echo you:
My university uses Blackboard and we all hate it. Staff also hates it, but nothing has changed after years of feedback given through unofficial channels like unit or teaching feedback forums.
Upper management and whatever company that is taking our tuition money to implement this bloated, JavaScript-ridden platform just to embed some text, documents and videos don’t represent the main members of the institution. It’s also a prestigious university but management is pure incompetence.
Getting a job and building a career in tech is difficult. I think it sucks. I come from a science background and probably one of the nerdier computer people in my circles but I flat out refuse to sell my soul, sleep and time to tech companies here in the imperial core. I went through 6 months of an insomniac episode when I was finishing high school, it’s traumatic thinking about putting myself through that again.
Take care of yourself. I hope you sleep better these days.
Sadly, I get little sleep still because I am burdened with work (which I drive 35+ min one way each day), many projects that lead to more rabbit holes, and many DIY projects I need to do because I am too poor to pay for convenience or have no options if I don’t want my privacy invaded and wallet abused by a shitty company. My wife does a trucking job and is gone M-F, so I have to take care of a lot of work during the weekdays, and she cooks for our meals for the week on Sunday. I also assist with her in the weekend chores, including laundry, vacuuming, etc. One of my 3 SSDs in my encrypted, contiguous LVM volume group failed (I wish I did a RAID setup like my home partition of 6 hard drives), so I am having to redo all of the work I completed on my Gentoo desktop on my laptop, having to relearn and remember the few years of work I lost. I am so exhausted when I get home, and I tend to have to fit all of my projects in the weekend if and when I am not helping PSL or doing errands with my wife. I have projects that still have not been completed in years that could have been completed in a week if I was not working. It took me 2-3 months to install an air conditioner this year (and by then summer was almost over, and the heat is probably why my SSD failed (my watercooled system didn’t have enough airflow to cool the DIMM.2 slot)) because it took a lot of money and time to acquire tools and materials to cut a piece of wood to mount the air conditioner on (so it did not lean toward the building and leak and create a bunch of mold like the previous air conditioner last year, which was a massive project to clean up). I am burned out, and the work never ends with barely any light, if at all, at the end of the tunnel.
Another rant incoming...
Meanwhile I am so exhausted that I have been coming to work late, which is getting progressively worse, and luckily I have not been fired yet, even as I take frequent and long bathroom breaks from likely having IBS induced by my anxiety and desire to take a breath. My job is a nightmare to work for. Every higher IT department (Patching, Security, etc.), is ludicrously incompetent. We have no test environment here, we just treat production as our test environment, so we have a shitload of tickets that tech support (my team) are extremely overburdened with often due to the higher up teams constantly breaking things. Meanwhile I have to program many scripts in PowerShell because I am the only one that can really do it, and I have to balance tickets (about 50 in my queue alone, with many high urgency ones that I can’t get around to doing for months at a time), image laptops for the entire team (I regret taking this job because I essentially became one of the most screwed over after the ticket mandate), create scripts for our new software deployment and migration projects (because the original IT decided to use a “localhost” domain for the AD controller, which is what they were directly told not to do in college), recreate scripts because higher IT teams are incredibly stuck-up and act like they are so smart that they can’t accept a well-crafted script from a lowly IT contractor like me (meanwhile we were using scripts that were literally broken because a dumbass IT manager doesn’t know how to do a switch statement in PowerShell), etc. Patching and their infinite intellect are always scaring the CTO (who actually doesn’t really have any IT experience, she was a franchise manager of an ice cream shop and only worked at a finance company as a project manager of a team remotely related to IT) into worrying about every security issue and non-issue, and make wonderful decisions like deleting all older Microsoft Visual C++ dependencies, which I said from the start was a terrible idea, and was vindicated when employees’ softphones and other software stopped working. I emailed them a Microsoft docs article showing that while newer Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables have backwards compatibility with older versions, it was not guaranteed for anything older than 2015, which was most of the redistributables we had. The company always chooses the shittiest software that they get tricked into buying by shell companies, and the software is completely and utterly slow and tends to conflict with each other. Security uses Carbon Black to block any software by hash, and Patching refuses to ignore the protected vlan where I image computers, which tends to fuck me over so much when I am trying to image computers. Nobody will admit their mistakes and will not hold themselves accountable. You have to pull miracles every day to get anything done, and get paid $22 an hour as a contractor and pay $400 in insurance every month and have no guarantee to get a permanent position or even an extended contract, during a job market with 100s of tech workers (especially due to all of the tech layoffs) trying to get a job, with many in the market likely being scams or non-existent/available to entry-level IT. IT is extremely understaffed, 1 IT person per 200 employees, with most users being very incompetent, the higher IT teams even more so, and we are just running more trains into a larger trainwreck and creating more fires. When we were half our size, management still claimed we were overstaffed. Now my team has to get 500 and increasing tickets done by the end of the year. Everyone is doing the jobs of 3+ people, and there’s no separation of duties whatsoever. We just keep hiring more employees and no IT at all besides developer jobs and senior level positions. I believe a third of the company is contractors, and it took 4 years for one member in my team to get a full time job, and he was about to quit. The turnover rate is so high, and because of my contributions and skills, I am probably not being fired for being late because they cannot afford to lose me.
The job sounds really stressful :( By the look of it at least you won’t lose the job but I hope you’re getting paid and compensated proportionally for all that hard work and tight deadlines.
The world likes to rush doesn’t it. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed I wished things would go at half speed for a bit so I can catch up. The lack of sleep is probably the most ubiquitous symptom of a human life under capitalism. I hope you can find a better job that respects your health more, or a compromise with medication. I don’t like medicating all that much as it’s often a result of atomizing individuals into having this or that disease or condition. But I’d love to see comrades overcoming the struggle with whatever material means they’re able to access.
In a better world, if your personal desktop breaks you’d be able to take a break and figure it out. I hope you get your nice Gentoo installation back eventually.
Also, make backups of your /etc and dotfiles. I have just a single LVM encrypted drive and never touched RAID, everything important textwise is managed with git and hosted on 3 mirrors. My homelab just runs with separate ext4 drives and I make backups on one of them. I run backup scripts every Sunday because that’s when I have time.
relearn those data structures
I don’t know how much it would help you, but I have the materials for a data structures course if that helps at all.
Here’s the course GitHub, which contains code samples and material lectured over: https://github.com/mhahsler/CS2341
Here’s some additional PDF materials with some diagrams (this is a one-time link because I don’t know how to share it): https://file.io/06klFfvbuimD
You’re so awesome, thank you.
Based comrade, I need this too tbh.
If porky wants me to be a coder so badly, I’ll just learn to code.
New one time link for you: https://file.io/2N6Z07ha2oTH
It’s especially insane considering youth need more sleep.
I dont have the mental energy right now to respond appropriately. Sending you so much love though friend; I hope you find peace & healing🤍🤍
mood, sending love right back!
This is based on nothing besides the fact that I recognise your username and I get the vibe that you’re in that 16-25yo bracket.
With that in mind and from what you’ve said here, which is admittedly very little info, I would recommend considering the possibility that you may be neurodivergent (specifically of the ADHD/autistic/AuDHD varieties.)
It’s just a wild hunch so I’m not going to go into the why of it but it’s just worth thinking about and especially trying a screening test or two over.
Im not self-doxxing but dw i am not a minor
Im diagnosed autistic and adhd, but that was a good deduction. I have trouble figuring out if others are the same. I think thats also another symptom.
I wish I could be normal
I know the desire to feel normal, but I also take pride in my disability and neurodivergence, and you should, too. Love yourself, comrade.
I posted a link to a video about Autistic burnout here around a month ago. It was somewhat of a revelation of why I felt like I was becoming weaker in my abilities. I knew I was AuDHD since I was diagnosed very young, but this was information that explained more about what I am going through recently.
so autistic burnout is worse somehow? I think im just lazy or something.
It’s not laziness if you are struggling. Take care of yourself, comrade. I know it’s very hard, but I believe we will get to a better state someday. (I know, I am being very optimisitic, but you know, pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will.)
A good sentiment comrade, and very true.
Please, someone share tips for getting shit together as a person.
Not to derail from OP but my life is in shambles, I have no friends. My degree is useless, rents are sky high and I’m working for next to free and I’m reliant on either employer provided housing or I’m stuck in my parent’s basement. I’m stuck in Texas and probably my best bet to finding friends at all is to go back to college for a STEM degree and look for a community somewhere.
College is a pretty sure fire way to make friends; as someone who recently moved to a city post-grad and who knew 0 people here, and as somone who managed to establish a large social circle within a year il give you what worked for me;
- joined a reddit city wide discord
- added every single remotely leftist person who expressed a cool opinion to a private server (hey friend im inviting leftists to a private space)
- met up with them irl
it helps if you all have a common shared interest (this can be ideology, but also for me stuff like cooking, music, film, writing) you do really need to do a lot of the legwork and active stuff to get to this point but it does pay off.
As for employment/living; best bet is good education while keeping costs as low as possible then moving somewhere that offers both a job and not an insane amount of hours per week to live/function.
If your parents are cool. Move back in yo! There is no shame in it. In some cultures is pretty normal. Then your not dependent on a job paying you squat. Use the safety net of your parents basement. A decent job to work towards is ‘project manager’ it’s mostly just coordinating with a team and a client. If there is something you like hobby wise, there are meet up groups for it where you can find friends. Go to a gig, talk to people in the crowd. Ask them what other gigs they can recommend and go there and see them again. If you are a shy person. Download VRchat(you don’t need vr for it) and practice talking with people there. The great thing about it is you can always just log off and disappear.
Good luck human!
Yeah, as a project manager (cut teeth as UK 16-19 teacher then an ops manager), highly recommend - as you get further along you’ll need to do more important and more responsible things (manage the budget, take more ownership etc) but it’s basically just working out what needs doing, making sure everyone knows what they need to do, keeping the plan updated and highlight risks/issues to higher ups. And run the contract meetings.
Don’t get me wrong, it does require thoughtfulness, awareness/worldliness and confidence. But god it’s an easy way to pump your salary up without having specific university-level training!
Really good if you’re a jack of all trades with broad interests and experiences
There’s lots of helpful advice here already so I’m just gonna add this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juIsRg6z41k
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
