okay this might turn into a series of posts or something but I really feel like I need some advice here/really feel the need to share my thoughts (that have been brooding for some time):

im going to try to keep this somewhat short: I'm in my mid-twenties, have been doing my masters in something-something-media-studies for the last three years. I've lived in a shitty place with shitty roommates for that entire time, have a small job at the university that barely pays half of my rent and have lived off of government student grants/loans since then, which have now run out.

I don't know what to do with my life, or rather I know what I would want to do with my life but it seems basically impossible: I want to live together with other people I like who don't just feel like short-term acquaintances born out of necessity. I want to commit to living together with people for at least a few years and try to build something together with them. Create a nice shared space, share food, music, books, films and experiences. Make some art. Work just as much as I have to. Cook together and pool our resources together.

I think some people live like that. I dunno. I basically lived like sorta that for a few years during covid, when I did the latter half of my bachelors in another city when I moved in with a few people studying the same bachelors as me. But now we've all moved and live in different cities and meet up maybe once a year. I love these friends with all my heart but my life with them feels like a complete fluke that I just lucked into (and even then I often felt like I wanted more from our friendship than they did).

I know I really need to find new roommates and a new place to live but the city I am in has one of the worst housing markets in this country and doing the whole "roommate casting" thing just to get rejected again and again is just such a fucking mindnumbing chore (not to mention just how worse the sites to even find roommates have gotten, how many more people cling to their still-cheap apartments and how many of the actual nice apartments probably don't even show up on those sites but just get shuffled around in-between friendgroups)

I don't know what my problem is. I feel like I just don't have the face (or don't wear the clothes, don't speak the right slang) to attract the right kind of people. I guess maybe I kinda look like a chud or a nerd (which I certainly used to be in highschool but have very much tried to distance myself from). I try to be a social person, talkative and passionate, considerate and all that and I can manage to do that a fair amount of time, but it doesn't get me anywhere.

It feels like everyone already has their own friend group and their own thing going on and it feels impossible to get closer to anybody. Everyone is terribly busy and most people just seem to be terribly uninterested in getting together, there are no places to hang out, everything is terribly expensive, etc. etc. (this capitalism thing sure does fucking suck)

There's so many posts online about how dating/getting to know people gets exponentially more difficult when you are in your thirties, how many people are just basically on their own, how many people have nobody besides their spouses or whatever. I feel like I need to do something now, because I sure as hell can't live this lonely life for the rest of my short time on this wonderful planet earth.

I feel like I'm an "extroverted" person born into an "introverted" life. I wish I had a somewhat large friend group and always had someone to hang out with on any given evening. I just want to do the things I'm already doing but share them with more people (and also have a little bit of certainty in life).

I don't know, if anyone has any advice or wants to share their experiences/sentiments I'd be glad to read any replies from you cool people.

Also if anyone can tell me if therapy helps with this (maybe even group therapy or something), or whether therapy gives you the energy to do the mindumbing shit capitalism asks of you for just the tiniest bit of happiness or if antidepressants help you radiate a warm happiness that makes other people want to be around you I'd be very happy to know about that too.

Thanks to all of you for always being there and hope you people have an as reasonably nice day as one can have in this genocidal capitalist imperialist patriarchal hellscape we all live in!

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    4 months ago

    Therapy helps in the sense that it gives you tools to better understand and describe why you're in pain, what events originally started this pain, and how to describe the pain. Sometimes it can help alleviate the pain, but it is not in and of itself a cure. It's mostly a tool for better understanding your circumstances. It won't change the circumstances by itself.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        4 months ago

        yeah... A lot of people have that reaction when they realize that therapy isn't actually a "cure" for the underlying problems. I had a breakdown the lasted two days when I finally figured out that the therapists never intended to "cure" me or take any concrete steps to actually fix any of these problems. The industry seems content to let people think that they're medical professionals whose job is to cure a disease and that's really not the case. Whether this is perfidy that merits a drastic response or simply professionals being too up their own asses to communicate with the lay public is a matter of personal opinion.