New Years depressing me, need to talk...

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Was awake late last night, thinking. I keep having these nasty pangs of sadness. The years keep going by and I feel like my life is being wasted away. I feel like I've missed out on my youth. I'm going to be 32 and I still feel like a teenager deep inside.

I'm not sure I'll ever be able to make it my own doing the 9-5 job thing with my depression and sleep problems. Being on my own working a job like that always wears me down bit by bit until I start feeling suicidal. On the other hand I can't stand living with my parents. They're supportive of me and everything, but at the same time there's something empty inside me that can't be satisfied.

My dad in particular bothers me, the fact that he's the opposite of me in so many ways, I just can't handle it. I can't stand that I feel like he's the only model for how I feel like I should be. Not sure how to describe it, he spends an inordinate amount of time and personal stress/intensity on practical matters that I find tedious. It bothers me so much that it has a demotivating effect on me. He's also kind of self-centered in the way that he doesn't try and involve me and gets carried away doing things for me that I never asked for and find unnecessary.

I don't know what else to say, other than the fact that being around me parents constantly has been making me more depressed than ever. These feelings are awful because I can't express them without causing hard feelings. I just feel so lost. I think it's my own intelligence and internal emotionality that gets to me. I feel like I have a lot to say and express but never the opportunity or verbal capacity or will to do it. I'm really at a point where I need more people to share my life with but I'm always feeling awkward and unsure.

I just need to hear if anyone can relate to what's going on with me. It's hard for me to articulate all these feelings in their truest reality though.

Hi, one short-term thing might be working for H&R Block. pass the test and basically get the job. Lasts to about Feb 7, then busy time is over and then you can book a successful season. Plus, kind of this delicious anti-corporate aspect in that the company wants you to technically but not really reveal negatives of bank products, and when you matter-of-factly tell your clients, I think you're doing a good thing. (fired one year out of 4, I'll take my chances, $9 an hour)

I'm 48 years old. I've been a copy center manager, a furniture store manager, unofficial manager on other occasions. I taught high school math one year, not enormously successful but did finish the year. Since Oct. 2008, I have been living with my retired parents. So for three plus years now. After being on my own from 1982-84 and again from 1985-2008, with some financial help with parents. Living back with them, damn difficult at times. My Dad is a tasker. Always trying to perfectionize things and overdo, and manage other people, not so cool.

In down times of your life, what about just getting any positive going, and not being too particular about which positive. And then of course medium step by medium step (one of my mantras, which may be extremely obvious to other people)

political activism?
community theater?

A general practitioner once told my mother, depression can start out situational and become biochem, and that makes sense to me. And person see a regular doctor like internist or family practitioner or a psychiatrist. Esp since medication like Zoloft or Cymbalta is trial and error anyway (and I mean that in respectable sense). Might work great for some people, hardly do a thing for others. Just that human biochem is complex and tends to be different for different people. Sometimes also important to phase down from a medication in stages even if it doesn't seem to be working.

And if we can get live Asperger's / Autism Spectrum going in different cities, get useful stuff done and have fun social outings.

PS In some ways, I still feel like a teenager. I mean, I could wake up and go to my 10th grade classes. I've even spent some time writing down schedules and extracirriculars I wish I would have done. Would like to have given myself a chance to make run at pre-med and medical school.

It's the boredom and feeling like my life is being wasted away that's getting to me. And then I don't want to hear from anyone that boredom is good, at least I'm not living in fear of being left to starve on the street, or dying of some disease. Unless you want to make me suicidal. I don't think I can take it anymore. I need to experience more than this. I'm ingrained to be on the cautious site but at the same time there's another force that might eventually push me over the other end if I can no longer handle the mundane nothingness of my life anymore. "social outings" have no meaning for me when the people who go to them bore me to tears and I've lost the will to talk to anyone. Also, politics does nothing but get me pissed off.

f**k, I'd like to do something dangerous. I'm always up for storm chasing. If I got hit by lightning I'd die happy. Being out in a boat in the middle of a Hurricane would also be great.

i pm-ed you

I lived in Vegas for two years and played poker on the side. I really think some of my Aspie traits worked to my advantage. Still wicked upswings and downswings as inherent part of the game. I broke even which I have come to view as a success.

Is there a rock gym near your house? Maybe get started with one or two private lessons. People into rock climbing are more likely to be interested in stuff, other than the insular thing of merely being popular.

The question ultimately is, what do you want to do with your life? You say you feel like you have wasted a good portion of it, and feel like you have made no progress, but progression toward what? Decide on a goal, and focus yourself toward achieving that goal. Don't concern yourself with your age and what society says you should be at at that age, worry about your goal, and what progress you have made toward achieving it.

To tell the truth I hate that question. Long term goals don't really interest me at all. I have an MS degree and am looking to possibly go on for my PhD, yet when people ask what I want to do after that I have no idea. I've always wanted to be a scientist but I can't very well do research that doesn't interest me just for the sake of getting paid. That's my biggest fear, having no motivation.


I don't feel like I've made no progress. I'm just bored with my life and don't think I can fix that feeling no matter how much I drug myself up on various psych medications. "Bored" is a bit of an understatement though. What I have is a deep void.

You may be perceiving academia largely correctly. And what you're feeling may be a healthy reaction.

What if you make it an Either-Or? Either academia or a profession like medicine, law, architecture, etc.?

I doubt I'd be interested in those. Architecture is interesting but it's a bit late in the game for that.

What I'm fairly good at is programming. Of course if I'm overqualified for just any old programming / development job. My MS is in atmospheric science so any job I get would probably be weather/climate related.

I feel it's really the non-career aspect of my life that seems empty though. I can't just go through life going to a job where I plug away at something for 8 hours and then go home and sit alone. It's always when I reach a point where I get bored with work that everything falls apart because I have no other life to fall back on. In graduate school I only did things with my one friend maybe once every couple months. That's just not enough. Living alone kills me. After a certain point I don't even feel motivated to cook, shop, do laundry, or pay the bills. It always gets to the point where I feel like I'm just dragging myself. It's just awful. I've also been on anti-depressants and medications up the wazoo and nothing really works (and I rely on my parents to pay for my medical expenses, I'd be completely f****d on my own).

Okay, so maybe you'd like to just flat out meet some other people who are smart. Or, to put it a different way, other people who are creative, interested in intellectual things, and not so much into the one-dimensional thing of focusing on popularity and social hierarchy.

Now, I would ask if you could take another look at and perhaps dance the topic of political activism. For example, you could kind of help bring environmentalists up to speed. (I think there's abundant evidence for global warming, climate change, and increase of extremes. That <some, many> Republicans and other deniers are victims of ideology. And that there's a Swedish or Norwegian guy who studied global warming about a hundred years ago, so it's not just so recent canard on the part of liberals. See, that little detail could get people thinking). And the coin of the realm for effective activism seems to be to ever so slightly understate the case (or else people feel they're being played, and it can be almost a knee jerk reaction in this regard)

Or, a local hiking club?

Or, something intellectual that's off your main topic but still interesting to you?

marshall, while I'm probably insulating myself better in certain ways I definitely feel a bit of that. Currently I am living at home, my friends have mostly left town or even state, and my 32nd was back in mid November.

I think the toughest thing probably is that feeling that the gap between my current age and middle-age will be slowly closing and all the life hallmarks and goalposts that I'm supposed to be hitting but not; all of that is completely out of my control. I look for the most optimal path that I can possibly obtain and quite often still forced to accept that it seems suboptimal in a lot of ways. As that feeling like I'll just fade out indefinitely single (which - TBH - I know lots of people who are living proof that being non-single can be much worse) or the feeling that I won't find any place to hitch or dock the drives I had through childhood to figure out the world, get smarter, faster, better at things, etc. or as things just keep running into genetic limits that come up faster than where I can really get benefit - I start going to a place more where, sometimes I kind of do feel when I look at my room or when I look at what I do with my time that I'm almost reverting back to living like a teenager. I suppose when you've given it your all and find out that your all will get you exactly what you have and not a lot more, its difficult not to get like this and I think as human beings we only have so much endurance to run at things for the sake of running at them.

What seems to be helping a little at least is burying myself in goals. Also, truthfully, when I can't read anymore, practice martial arts anymore, or try to make any more beats (the later seems to be going from my biggest lifetime interest to a think of the past), there's nothing wrong with playing a good videogame. While time has value and people are best off trying to right the things that they feel dissatisfied with in their lives; when a person's out of means and tapped out on energy or motivation they're a lot better playing games or doing something along those lines than picking over problems on loop in a vain hope that the hundredth or hundred and first time thinking about it will yield a new answer.

Aside from that I don't know what answers I really have for myself let alone the next person. My best thought going forward is I'll keep my eyes peeled for any opportunities that come my way and be prepared to identify them immediately and jump on them (whether its a new interest, a great networking opportunity, you name it) all the while making sure I stay as calm and as sane/level as I can when said opportunities come - no matter how much mental junk food I may need to snack on along the way. Without proper opportunity to sink our teeth into we just have these circular destructive dialogs internally and there's nothing to be drawn from them aside from reinstating what we already knew years ago anyway - so keeping the self-critic disciplined at times when we're stuck coasting, IMO, is as paramount as being proactive when there's a break in the terrain.

^you sound like a moog twin

Heh, he might be doing a little better in the hair department but yeah - I can see what you're saying.

who needs hair when nifty inventions such as hats are among us

True. I'm sure one of these days I'll find one or two that I properly look like me in.