How did you learn to become independent?

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College can be scary for some, probably....but to work and develop a love for work is imo the most mportant thing, and in the beginning never be afraid to work for free, especially if it is something you love....as a start I suggest doing volunteer work...or any kind of reasonable job, part time, for pay. When in high school I did babysitting and taught an arts and crafts class once a week on Saturday at a community center for a small salary, and also taught a similar class for free for underprivileged children at a neighborhood house. In my first year of college I also did all kinds of small jobs, one of which as a department store clerk was so hard and the pay so low I quit after two weeks, and one waitress job at a jazz club I was fired from because I was a lousy waitress, but I got to hear a very wonderful jazz pianist Bill Evans all night for a couple of nights....

Lol, well yes, every society ends up dying off at some time-- society/countries evolve and change with time just like animals. My point was that at their height their approach was successful for them. Different times/environments require different strategies.

Apply that to yourself. If you don't like the way your life is going, then apply a different strategy. "Success" isn't some term that's universal, what I find successful you might find distasteful and vice-versa. Find your own definition of "success" and put energy towards making it happen. If you feel you're successful or at least making progress towards it, then it doesn't really matter what other people's definition is because you'll feel good enough about yourself that their opinions won't amount to sh*t.

Very few people are as pessimistic as I am, my entire talk on evolution/sparta is pure pessimism-- it's all a brutal enterprise in my opinion. That being said, I still believe there's something out there for everyone to feel good about themselves. If you don't feel good about yourself you just haven't looked hard enough or in the right places or perhaps you're too stuck on finding someone else's opinion of success. You can obviously read, and you write in well formed complete sentences-- that's better than 50% of the population right there (no joke), so there's something to build on at the bare minimum. But I assume there's more to you than that, probably much much more, but you're just not used to giving yourself credit for it.

I've said it before but force-flight situations have a hundred ways of backfiring and I can't imagine not despising my family if they tried that on me, fine -- i'll become independent (or I will die), but now I'm going to hate you, and use my newly-found independence to cut you off from my life, forever.

Considering how brutal this world is, I can't imagine doing that to a child, and a parent never really see's their progeny as something other than a child -- they still want to see their babies as babies even when they're fully grown up.

To throw your baby out into the world to fend for themselves in such a manner tells me all that there is to know. Humans shouldn't treat their babies as something other than humans, we're not simple animals, what's the point of survival when you lose your humanity in the process? One's child should be defended, loved, and nurtured until they can find the path in their own time.

Perhaps finding the path means discovering it in your 20's, 30, or 40's, or perhaps they never do. There's a lot worse things than being dysfunctional in this world, like being DEAD, or abused by a world so ready to prey on your weakness.

Life can still have value even when you're dependent on others, a human in weakness is still a human.

Saving money is definitely useful, particularly in my case as I have poor organisational (executive functioning?) skills. I make sure to keep at least a few months worth of expenses in savings as short-term expenses and income do not often match.

Humans at their core are still animals. When pushed to our limits our basic nature and instincts are no different than a variety of other species. The nurture till ready premise works in 1st world countries (US, Britain, etc) that have an abundance of resources, but falls apart in third world countries (Ethiopia, Sudan, etc) that lack basic resources such as food and clean water.

Unfortunately, in such third world cultures it's not unheard of for a family to leave a disabled baby/young child out for exposure. If said family has other offspring to care for and extremely limited resources it makes sense to sacrifice the offspring that can't contribute to the survival of the family to increase the survival chances of the healthy offspring. Again, in these circumstances it's better to sacrifice one child than doom all the offspring.

Try putting yourself in their position. You and your spouse have let's say three children, but your water supply can only realistically support three people, not five. Furthermore you live on poor soil and it takes all five people to work the soil to pull out maybe enough food to keep four fully nourished.
Now you have a child that's disabled and can't contribute. Food/Water wise you still need to support five people, but you have one less worker and now you're only making enough food to support three people. What do you do? You can't leave, not without getting gunned down by a liberation militia down the road. Your neighbors can't help, they're just as pinched as you are. You can stretch out those resources for a few years, but you dramatically increase the chances of succumbing to malnutrition and eventually death. The most logical decision (an evolutionary instinct I might add) is to eliminate the disabled child and either move forward with only two offspring or replace the child assuming the female adult is still young enough to reproduce.

I'm not saying it's pretty or ideal, I'm saying at our basic level it's a fact of life. Living in rich countries shields us from that reality but that doesn't mean it never happens, merely that we don't see it happen up close and personal. Make no mistake, if first world countries went through a significant collapse (i.e. dark ages) we'd see the same decisions made here on a daily basis.

I'm 22 and at university, and I think University has gone some way to being independent (living away from home and having to do things like laundry, shopping, budgeting etc). I'm good with money and I don't overspend... in fact I often worry about money, and hate using my bank card to pay for stuff (don't know if this is to do with AS). I literally have to know how much I have in my account all the time and prefer paying for stuff with cash.....

Obviously I'm not completely independent, my parents still do a lot of things for me, and I don't have a job or anything like that, and I've never have to pay bills like electricity (university rents have included this!). But I do think university has helped to make me more independent (think its probably the same for NTS as well), and rely less on my parents.

xx

If you speak about living on your own, it is not so difficult. Living on your own means nobody disturbs you, which mean that you can plan things ahead and be reasonably confident that your arrangements won't be disrupted. The money and bills etc. things are not so bad (as long as you have a source of income, of course), they are the same every month and you can just plan your expenses. Just find someone who is used to living on his own in the same conditions you will and go through the list of everything you will have to pay, how much it will be, and how often. Take notes and make a chart or a spreadsheet to plan everything. And now most bills can be paid online or more or less automatically through direct debit or standing order so making payments is usually simple, you mostly have to monitor things and plan ahead.

Maintaining the home, cleaning, shopping etc. are also not so bad since, again, you can make plans and nobody will disrupt them. If you have trouble planning the required activities for your independant life, ask someone who know your difficulties and know how to live on its own to help you with that. Once you know how you will manage the everyday stuff the anxiety drops a lot.