I’m so scared for the future and it feels hopeless.
I’m afraid to talk to my friends and family about how bad my mental health is right now because I don’t want them to try to hospitalize me or something.
I just feel like I’ve already experienced the best moments in my life and all I have to look forward to is being a wage slave, debt, and dying alone.
I know that I need to have some kind of purpose to dedicate myself to but I don’t want to do anything. I get so drained from work that I spend all my time off playing video games or watching TV just to recharge so I can make it through the work week. It just feels like a pointless cycle where I work so I can afford treats to make it bearable to work.
My job isn’t even difficult, and it’s remote and pays really well. But it’s so pointless. It’s honestly sickening how much harder people work to actually benefit society for not even half as much. I’m aware that I’m extremely privileged in this regard, but that also makes me feel even more hopeless. If living is this uncomfortable for me, so many more people must feel even worse.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about how scary it will be to get old. My husband is a little older than me and doesn’t take great care of himself, so most likely he will die first. It’s very unlikely that we will have children, and also I think it’s gross to have kids just so you could have caretakers. My siblings are also older. I’m scared to be senile living alone or being abused in a nursing home. I guess it’s possible that we’ll all die a lot younger due to climate change.
I feel like the only things keeping me going are the fear of pain from dying and how my dogs and husband depend on me. I feel like if there was a button I could press to be instantly painlessly dead, I would push it (maybe I should move to Canada?).
I know that my problems are small compared to a lot of people here, and I’m sorry if this post comes across as insensitive. I feel like I just had to get these thoughts out of my head and I really love and appreciate this community. Thank you for listening.
please talk to a professional and not us jabronis. it's one thing to think about these things too much, but when you get to depression/anxiety/ideation then you need more help than anybody here could provide. i used to really go into a spiral thinking about death, but my personal relationship with death has been rough.
also people find love after death of a partner all the time, it happened with my mom(my dad died in his 40s and she was in her 30s) and an uncle(both were in their 60s when she died). even my grandpa had a girlfriend and he was in his 70s.
Playing video games or watching TV isn't something to be bummed about if you enjoy it. You deserve a break and a form of enjoyment even if it isn't necessarily productive.
one of the more classic signs of depression is losing interest in thing you used to love. of course, people can just get bored of what they were doing without depression but that doesnt seem to be what's going on here. OP seems to have a mix of depression and anxiety.
Can’t tell if this post is in character or not lol.
Elon Musk would encourage me to like video games, but he wouldn’t tell me I deserve a break.
I’ve been having a lot of the same thoughts about growing old lately. My husband is losing his hair, which I’ve been kinda freaking out about. I realized yesterday it’s because I’m struggling to deal with the fact that we are aging, and I’m afraid of what it will be like when we are elderly.
I don’t know how to make you feel better about any of those thoughts and feelings but you are not alone.
It's not insensitive at all, that's a normal reaction to things. If you can, try to do some time theft from your job and use the extra energy and time to create some kind of art. I was in a very similar situation, feeling like life was just a slog, and now I have a bunch of art that I look forward to making and I can feel proud of - it feels like as time goes forward, I have more to show off-- that's really important.
Firstly and most importantly: I'd highly, highly, highly recommend talking to somebody about this. I mean like your husband or a psychiatrist. Ideally, both. If you don't feel like reading this massive wall of text, I fully understand. If you take nothing else away from this, it is that you should not force yourself to handle this alone. Anyways,
I was diagnosed with major suicidal depression about 7 years ago, and reading this is like looking back through time for me. I'd get back from my classes (when I bothered to go to them), turn on my computer, and play video games. I didn't enjoy playing video games at the time. It felt like shit. So did literally everything, but that was the one that made time go by fastest. I wasn't interested, it wasn't fun, and I felt a ton of guilt because I knew I had other things to be doing. I ate like shit or not at all, didn't bother cleaning anything, and ended up eating cold ravioli out of the can a lot of the time simply because it required no prep and I wouldn't have to do any dishes. I frequently thought about how, soon, everything would come crashing down around me and it would only be my fault. The only reason I could think of not to end things was that my family would be torn up about it, and that it would be an ungrateful way to pay them back. I was fantasizing about the best way I could go, the way that would hurt the fewest people. I even made a few suicide attempts that I was lucky enough to survive. Through it all, I was constantly thinking stuff like "If I'm reacting like this to my incredibly comfortable and privileged life, imagine how hard it must be for everybody else. Imagine if you didn't have a family that loved you, imagine if you didn't have the money or grades to go to college, imagine if you actually had depression or something. You're a weak piece of shit for letting this get to you." Does any of this feel familiar to you, even if it's not exactly the same? It's not 1:1, but I think you're in a similar place to where I was. I managed to get out of that dark place, so let me tell you some of the things I learned.
First, recognize that you need help. I don't mean this in any sort of derogatory way. What you're dealing with is extremely difficult to deal with on your own. Do not worry about burdening or troubling other people with it, it's literally a life-and-death situation. Even if it wasn't, you do not deserve to suffer like you are. You are not suffering for being a bad person, that other people might have it worse does not make the pain you are feeling any less real, and it can be better.
Second, start small on reaching out. Depression does a lot of nasty stuff to your brain. More than just taking away your ability to feel happy, it's got a list of other symptoms that are a mile long. Most of them don't show up in everybody with depression, depression is still a very poorly understood illness. There's even thoughts that what we refer to as depression may be a whole host of similar but fundamentally different conditions. Anyways, among these are lots of things that lead to a decreased ability to get things done on your own. Less initiative and lower energy. Anxiety and apathy. These are things that make actually getting the help you need much harder, even once you recognize that you need it. So to start off with, you don't need to go through the hassle of finding a psychiatrist, scheduling an appointment, and all the annoying stuff that entails. Start with your husband or a relative. Open up to them about how you've been feeling and ask them for their help. They'll almost certainly want to do what they can. See if they'd be willing to help get you in the door of a psychiatrist. If they yes, leave it in their hands for a little while. Check in if it takes too long, and move on your own if you feel like they might not get around to it. Ultimately, a medical professional is your best bet on getting out of the situation you're in.
Third, tread water. Whatever measures your doctor ends up recommending, it'll take time to kick in. Whether through therapy or medication, change does not happen instantly and antidepressants are often trial-and-error. In my case, it even got worse before it got better. It took four different antidepressants before we found one that made a positive difference. That means that you'll need to stick it out until things get better. That's hard, I know how very hard that can feel, but it's so, so worth it. The biggest thing that helped me was thinking in the moment. I also thought a lot about what my life would be like when I was older. It overwhelmed and terrified me. You'll want to think about the far future because your brain is being an asshole to you and wants to think up the worst, most scary situations it can. It does so in the future because the farther you go into the future, the less set in stone things are. The way I found best to avoid that was narrowing my scope. Don't think about 10 years from now if you can't handle it. Think about the next year instead. If you can't handle that, think about the next month. Think about the next week. Think about today. Think about the next hour, the next 10 minutes. Handle however much you can handle and keep putting one foot in front of the other. Your goal at this point is to keep yourself afloat. On top of all this, keep talking to your loved ones about how you're feeling. Lean on them. If you're feeling particularly bad, let them cut you some slack. Any task is harder when you're trying to put up a brave face.
By age 19, I was convinced my life was over. All the good times were behind me and everything that was before me was pain, loneliness, and evil. I couldn't even conceive of going another year without eventually killing myself. By 21, I had felt happy, an actual, real, excited happiness for the first time in as long as I could remember. Not the usual relief of not having to worry about something, but a feeling that a good thing was happening. It was something that I could not have dreamed would happen before. Nothing had really changed for the better externally. To the contrary, my grades finally caught up with me, I had lost my scholarship, and was forced to drop out, leave the state, and move back in with my parents. But even still, I felt better. I felt like things were good. I think that you can get to a similar place, too. I want that for you very much and wish you nothing but luck.
Thank you, I really appreciate this comment.
Obviously, I know tons of people suffer from anxiety and depression and I can’t even fathom what it would feel like to not have anxiety. But it’s whatever the opposite is of isolating to know that someone else has such a similar manifestation of it.
I do see a psychiatrist. I’ve been on Welbutrin for years but at a very low dose. This year, we’ve upped a lot and also very recently added a low dose of Zoloft to try and manage my PMDD symptoms. I usually only get suicidal ideation the week or two before my cycle, but I just finished one, so this is a little out of the ordinary.
I was also seeing a great therapist before I moved to another state and haven’t spent a lot of time trying to find a new one. Which is also silly, because it’s much easier to find a therapist in my new state. I think I get some choice paralysis when I’m searching.
I’m scared to tell the people close to me because I’m afraid to take time off of work to address it. I’m the sole income earner, and even if I was able to get short term disability leave, my plan only pays 70% of my salary.
I am feeling a lot better than I was when I made this post though. I think I sent myself into a spiral by looking at home prices and also my elderly dog didn’t wake us up for breakfast so I had convinced myself that he was dead. Turns out he is fine and woke up when the other dogs started waking us up.
After finishing the post and crying a bit, I asked my husband to get fast food with me, and I think the combination of going outside and treats helped stabilize me.
I'm glad you're doing better. I totally get the thing about sending yourself into a spiral, especially the bit about your dog. I still do that to myself all the time. I don't know your circumstances well enough to tell you that you wouldn't need to take off work, and I won't pretend I understand your relationship dynamics, but I'd still encourage you to keep leaning on your husband where you feel comfortable doing so. Even if it is just going for fast food, love can be such a buoy in when it's hard to keep your head above water. Anyways, like I said, I'm glad you're in a better way now. Hang in there, I believe you can.
Find ways to engage with organizing, even the most meager of ways will give you that sense of purpose.
Copypasta that keeps me going and I hope you find some solace in it as well.
Without hope you are lost. Communism is at its heart based on faith: faith that there is an alternative to capitalism, that a better world is possible, that we might someday live without poverty and war, starvation and illiteracy, slavery and artlessness and depression and all the other symptoms of the parasitic infection that is capital.
When Kim Il-Sung watched his country decimated, half its buildings flattened by American bombs, did he lose hope? When Mao was facing down the dual threat of the Kuomintang and the Japanese imperialists, watching his brothers be put to the sword and his sisters sold off as comfort women, did he lose hope? When Fidel Castro was hiding in the jungle with less than a dozen guerillas, did he lose hope? No. Defeatism in the Cuban Revolutionary Army was punishable by death–and they in turn achieved the impossible.
Make no mistake, hope is the most potent weapon against capital that there is. Without it we are nothing. With it, we are everything. We are the indestructible heart of human liberation, steadily beating until the inevitable day that that hope spreads far beyond yourself, to places you never thought possible, to the creation of something so much larger than you that it dwarfs your most wild of communist dreams.
And this day is inevitable comrade, as long as you don’t let your hope dwindle. Feed it like the raging fire that it is; have faith, even when there is no evident reason to do so. Things may look hopeless in the US right now. That’s exactly how the bourgeoisie wants things to look. You lose hope, they win. You don’t, and they will lose. They will fold like paper tigers before the power of your hope. You let hope die and you let down not just yourself but the rest of your species, who are relying on you as one of the scant few to see past the propaganda of the imperialist core to lead them, hope in hand, to liberation.
Never give up hope.
