My husband is a NEET and I’m very fortunate that my career pays enough that we don’t need him to contribute financially. He’s tried out a variety of careers and I’ve supported them, but inevitably he runs into some difficulty and quits within a few months.
I really don’t care that he doesn’t work and actually prefer it that way because my anxiety is very bad and I don’t have a lot of capacity for self-care.
Both of our families think it’s a problem that he doesn’t work, and obviously society looks down on it. My husband just told me that he has trouble sleeping because he can’t stop beating himself up when he’s alone with his thoughts.
Our arrangement has been that he cooks 6 meals a week (we eat 1 meal for both lunch and dinner) and we’ve tried implementing a cleaning schedule so it doesn’t get out of control, but he’s been too depressed to do pretty much any cleaning and wants to do delivery at least every other day. I’ll admit that I really don’t pull my weight with household chores, so I really don’t push these issues a lot because I can’t demand he do something that I’m not willing to do.
He spends all day playing video games, which is what I do in the weekends so I don’t think it’s like horrible, but it’s hard to get him to prioritize responsibilities over his game.
I want to be supportive, I don’t expect him to be a servant, I want him to contribute a fair amount to the state of the apartment and meals and I feel like it’s not possible for him right now because his self-esteem is so low. I also just want him to not feel ashamed of our situation even though I know it’s difficult because people are very judgmental about it.
I’ve asked him to talk to a therapist, but outside of that, what do you guys do to feel good about yourselves in a world that makes it so difficult?
I'm a stay-at-home dad. My wife has a decent job at the moment and someone needs to take care of our kids to keep them from dying of covid since they're also too young to be vaccinated. They're also not, like, that young, though, so they don't actually need constant supervision. They basically just need someone to keep them alive and possibly to homeschool them again if it's too dangerous to send them back to school in the fall. So I'm not a NEET, technically, but I'm not that far away from being one.
Anyway, point being, if it weren't for artistic pursuits and exercise, I don't even know if I would be alive at this point. I know that a lot of people are mentally and physically sick, that a lot of people suffer under capitalism in many different ways, but I just don't know how people can live in this world without some kind of purpose or goal, I guess. If it were just me, my regular daily life, and video games...I don't know how I could survive.
I used to be a g*mer but I just found myself drifting away from video games in college because (I think) my social and artistic lives were both becoming so much more interesting to me. During this endless fucking pandemic it's a lot harder to socialize or even to summon the will to cultivate new hobbies. I honestly don't know what to do about your situation. I would go easy on yourself and your husband. Just to survive all this fucking shit is a feat in itself. Based on what you've said, it also seems like a good idea to keep pushing him to see a therapist. I keep posting this link to Lacanians here because I found my therapist here and she's been pretty helpful thus far:
https://www.lacanonline.com/find-a-lacanian-psychoanalyst/
Almost all she does is listen while I blab about whatever is on my mind. And something seemingly so simple really does kind of chill me out and help keep me more focused, at least when I'm not posting here. I started seeing her in the first place because I made a deal about it with my dad—I would see a therapist if he unsubscribed from the NYT and the Washington Post. Maybe you could make some kind of deal with your husband to get him to see a therapist?