Venting thread that still excludes eddy (2)

[Viktor77]

Travis, I feel you, in a sense, though I am not diagnosed with depression so I won't claim to understand you on the same level. I'm going through an existential crisis. What am I doing with my life? Do I go for a PhD in a liberal arts field and waste 5 years of my life for what could amount to nothing much of value employment wise? Do I try to enter the job market on my MA? I'll likely prepare myself for both but then I have my husband to consider. Is it fair to him to move him across the country for me if I get accepted for a doctorate at a university better than Illinois, or I find a job as a lecturer or in a private school or company somewhere far away from home?

[Travis B.]

I did the mercenary thing and went straight into the Industry right after getting my bachelor's degree. The thing is, I did so because I had no chance of an academic career, having destroyed any possibility of such as an undergraduate. I wanted to go to grad school, but such was simply not possible at that point. At some level I still regret this. But in the end, going into the Industry turned out all right, with better pay, shorter hours, and less workload than would have been the case had I gone into graduate school, gone on to attempt to get a doctorate, ended up as a postdoc, and attempted to get one of the few academic positions. So in the end I feel like I made the right choice even had I been able to go into grad school and been able to go on from there.

[hwhatting]

My experience is similar to Travis's here. My choice was to take an industry job related to Business / Economics (one of my degrees), or to go for an academic career in historical linguistics (my other degree is in Slavistics). I chose the former in order to get a good salary; if I had chosen the second path, I'd been slaving for ages as some prof's assistant for little money and low job security (in Germany, such positions are mostly renewed - or not renewed, hence the risk -, annually or even semi-annually), until I'd perhaps got tenure after a decade or two. I'm generally happy with my choice, keeping up with developments in IE linguistics and looking forward to do that full-time in my retirement.

[jmcd]

Your choices seem quite disappointing. It seems like yous didn't choose what yous were most interested in doing.

[jal]

Your choices seem quite disappointing. It seems like yous didn't choose what yous were most interested in doing.

That's not called "disappointing", that's called "wise". Not everybody has the luxury of following their dreams - a steady income is way more useful in this world. Only doing what you are most interested in doing seems pretty... hedonistic to me.


JAL

[Travis B.]

Your choices seem quite disappointing. It seems like yous didn't choose what yous were most interested in doing.

It's called I didn't have a choice - and only lucked out that what I ended up doing turned out to be better than what I had wanted to do.

[hwhatting]

Your choices seem quite disappointing. It seems like yous didn't choose what yous were most interested in doing.

I don't regret my choice.

[Travis B.]

Part of what I regret is that I allowed college to be such an unmitigated disaster. I tell myself that if I had did not gone to bed at like 2-3 am every night - I had very poor sleeping habits which had developed in high school but no one to make sure I actually got up in the morning - I might have gone to more classes in the morning. I certainly had trouble waking up in time for classes before like 8:30 am. But the thing is that I missed many later classes too due to not being able to get myself up and out of the dorm room, despite being wide awake, due to being just too depressed to function. Or sometimes I went back to my dorm room to sleep after having gotten up and left, due to being too depressed to stand being awake. And I still blame myself for this. Somehow if I did things differently things would have been different. I know I shouldn't, but I do.

[Chagen]

So I vented to my friends in that discord chatroom I mentioned. It was like the vents in this thread I've been doing for a year now. Stuff about my depression and my social anxiety and my hopelessness.

And now I'm being savaged by this one guy in the chat. Not as in him insulting and bullying me. But he's tearing down all of my excuses and bluntly telling me that I have to change myself. In his own words:

I'll give you a hint buddy, almost everything in the grand scheme of the cosmos is utterly inconsequential. Almost everything one does in life will have no meaning or importance outside if their own genetic ties. You aren't wasting time in any other way weather you jack off like some pathetic loser or play games or read manga. You think what you do now isn't an utter waste of your life?

You need serious psychiatric help in order to deal with this. It is abundantly clear you will never get out of this alone.

I am not saying this angrily, I am saying this in a way to try to get you to act. Right now you have people in this chat who are willing to try to help you in the ways that they can.

You will kill yourself at some point if you don't escape this kind of crippling antisocial behavior.

And I don't give a shit about how you think of yourself, you are not ever deserving of that kind of pain or loneliness.

You do not deserve this kind of trouble in your life.

So you can act on it seriously and attempt to improve yourself with the baby steps of progess than rise from effort and sincere friends, or you can wait for the day you off yourself because you become too afraid to feed yourself.(edited)

Life is precious and you deserve every last second of it.

And I know he's completely right. But now I feel so ashamed and...I don't know how to go from here.

I want to tell him "thanks, but you're just another one in the line of people who've earnestly tried to help me, and I have failed them every time". I'm never going to get better. I wish these people would just ignore me and let me suffer, than dedicate valuable time in their lives trying to help a lost cause.

[jmcd]

Your choices seem quite disappointing. It seems like yous didn't choose what yous were most interested in doing.

That's not called "disappointing", that's called "wise". Not everybody has the luxury of following their dreams - a steady income is way more useful in this world. Only doing what you are most interested in doing seems pretty... hedonistic to me.


JAL

If 'what you are most interested in' referred to, say, a video game rather than an academic discipline, then sure that would be hedonist.

[Viktor77]

Your choices seem quite disappointing. It seems like yous didn't choose what yous were most interested in doing.

That's not called "disappointing", that's called "wise". Not everybody has the luxury of following their dreams - a steady income is way more useful in this world. Only doing what you are most interested in doing seems pretty... hedonistic to me.


JAL

This is how I'm beginning to feel. That's what my grandpa keeps telling me too, that I would be better to get a good steady job with my MA then continue to be in poverty for 5 more years as a grad student with the possibility of not much at the end of it except the rare possibility of getting a tenure job which is rather a far stretch in the humanities.

[hwhatting]

@Chagen: It's not about whether you fail others or not. It's about doing something for yourself.

[Axiem]

I wish these people would just ignore me and let me suffer, than dedicate valuable time in their lives trying to help a lost cause.

Certainly, time is valuable. But your time is also valuable. If I can expend say, an hour of my time and help you pull out of your depressive funk, giving you hours of time you otherwise wouldn't have had—isn't that trade-off worth it?

(Unfortunately, I don't have any good ideas about how to cure depression. While I frequently was depressed through high school and college, I'm not really sure what really was causing it. I half-heartedly attempted suicide once, and was a cutter for a couple of months later. I started having deeply depressive episodes less once I started building a more stable friend network in college, and then particularly once I graduated, got a full-time job, and finding a stable group of adult friends, and then got married. I don't really know if that was just that being in a life with more stable relationships with regular healthy meals and a (mostly) regular sleep schedule fixed some imbalance, or just my growing older changed something, or just a coincidence. As such, I wish I could recommend some magic cure like "Just eat regular meals and sleep regularly!", but I can't.)

[Travis B.]

So I vented to my friends in that discord chatroom I mentioned. It was like the vents in this thread I've been doing for a year now. Stuff about my depression and my social anxiety and my hopelessness.

And now I'm being savaged by this one guy in the chat. Not as in him insulting and bullying me. But he's tearing down all of my excuses and bluntly telling me that I have to change myself. In his own words:

I'll give you a hint buddy, almost everything in the grand scheme of the cosmos is utterly inconsequential. Almost everything one does in life will have no meaning or importance outside if their own genetic ties. You aren't wasting time in any other way weather you jack off like some pathetic loser or play games or read manga. You think what you do now isn't an utter waste of your life?

You need serious psychiatric help in order to deal with this. It is abundantly clear you will never get out of this alone.

I am not saying this angrily, I am saying this in a way to try to get you to act. Right now you have people in this chat who are willing to try to help you in the ways that they can.

You will kill yourself at some point if you don't escape this kind of crippling antisocial behavior.

And I don't give a shit about how you think of yourself, you are not ever deserving of that kind of pain or loneliness.

You do not deserve this kind of trouble in your life.

So you can act on it seriously and attempt to improve yourself with the baby steps of progess than rise from effort and sincere friends, or you can wait for the day you off yourself because you become too afraid to feed yourself.(edited)

Life is precious and you deserve every last second of it.

And I know he's completely right. But now I feel so ashamed and...I don't know how to go from here.

I want to tell him "thanks, but you're just another one in the line of people who've earnestly tried to help me, and I have failed them every time". I'm never going to get better. I wish these people would just ignore me and let me suffer, than dedicate valuable time in their lives trying to help a lost cause.

There typically aren't any easy solutions. One typically can't just get better through one's own effort alone, and it seems that the poster here claimed that one can. If things were this easy then depression wouldn't be such a problem. What you need here is a therapist, and not people claiming that if you would only pull yourself up by your bootstraps you wouldn't have any problems.

[jal]

There typically aren't any easy solutions. One typically can't just get better through one's own effort alone, and it seems that the poster here claimed that one can. If things were this easy then depression wouldn't be such a problem. What you need here is a therapist, and not people claiming that if you would only pull yourself up by your bootstraps you wouldn't have any problems.

Indeed. Though the guy seems to seriously care about Chagen, he's also painfully unaware of the inefficiency of such "strong talk". If only it were that easy...


JAL

[Axiem]

This appears to be a fairly reasonable article, relevant to the current discussion: http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandcult ... depression

[finlay]

So I vented to my friends in that discord chatroom I mentioned. It was like the vents in this thread I've been doing for a year now. Stuff about my depression and my social anxiety and my hopelessness.

And now I'm being savaged by this one guy in the chat. Not as in him insulting and bullying me. But he's tearing down all of my excuses and bluntly telling me that I have to change myself. In his own words:

I'll give you a hint buddy, almost everything in the grand scheme of the cosmos is utterly inconsequential. Almost everything one does in life will have no meaning or importance outside if their own genetic ties. You aren't wasting time in any other way weather you jack off like some pathetic loser or play games or read manga. You think what you do now isn't an utter waste of your life?

You need serious psychiatric help in order to deal with this. It is abundantly clear you will never get out of this alone.

I am not saying this angrily, I am saying this in a way to try to get you to act. Right now you have people in this chat who are willing to try to help you in the ways that they can.

You will kill yourself at some point if you don't escape this kind of crippling antisocial behavior.

And I don't give a shit about how you think of yourself, you are not ever deserving of that kind of pain or loneliness.

You do not deserve this kind of trouble in your life.

So you can act on it seriously and attempt to improve yourself with the baby steps of progess than rise from effort and sincere friends, or you can wait for the day you off yourself because you become too afraid to feed yourself.(edited)

Life is precious and you deserve every last second of it.

And I know he's completely right. But now I feel so ashamed and...I don't know how to go from here.

I want to tell him "thanks, but you're just another one in the line of people who've earnestly tried to help me, and I have failed them every time". I'm never going to get better. I wish these people would just ignore me and let me suffer, than dedicate valuable time in their lives trying to help a lost cause.

There typically aren't any easy solutions. One typically can't just get better through one's own effort alone, and it seems that the poster here claimed that one can. If things were this easy then depression wouldn't be such a problem. What you need here is a therapist, and not people claiming that if you would only pull yourself up by your bootstraps you wouldn't have any problems.

you mean, the guy that just said "You need serious psychiatric help in order to deal with this. It is abundantly clear you will never get out of this alone." ?? it sounds like we're reading different things

this is right, though. it's not a nice thing to hear and it's not necessarily a helpful way to say it, but it's right.

[Travis B.]

you mean, the guy that just said "You need serious psychiatric help in order to deal with this. It is abundantly clear you will never get out of this alone." ?? it sounds like we're reading different things

this is right, though. it's not a nice thing to hear and it's not necessarily a helpful way to say it, but it's right.

To be honest, I read it again, and it sounds completely different from how I read it before. What it says is right, after all.

Probably the best thing that happened to me in this regard was being pushed to go to the mental health services at my school by Liz when I told her I was very depressed and I was afraid I was bipolar in my second semester of school. While they themselves were not very effective, to be honest, they got being treated moving along (and tried out a range of meds), and eventually directed me to a psychiatrist who was more effective (because the mental health services were only meant to be temporary).

(If I had not been pushed I probably would not have gone in the first place. I do not tend to do stuff like this on my own when very depressed.)

[Herra Ratatoskr]

So today is the first anniversary of my Dad passing away from a heart attack and in that year it feels like my old life has been completely obliterated. Mum passed away from her own heart issues three months later (I suspect the stress of Dad set it off), necessitating my breaking the lease on my apartment and move home to take care of my teenage brother and sister. My parents' house was in really bad shape and they were underwater on their mortgage, so I had to find a new place for the three of us to live in our small hometown (I don't want to be changing schools with all the other changes going on).

While I was making a comfortable income at my job last year, it wasn't enough to cover the expenses of my newly found single parent-hood, so I had to hurriedly find a job that paid better. Thankfully I'm in a bit of a high demand field and was being underpaid at my old place, so better pay didn't take long. Unfortunately between the move and the change in employment my commute went from about 15 minutes to a little over an hour each way. Also, the new job was pretty high stress with long hours at the beginning (it's mellowed since about August). It's been a year now, but I'm just now feeling like I'm able to process some of the shock of everything, now that I'm not in the middle of a rolling crisis.

It's not all doom and gloom; I've started seeing someone for the first time in my life, and it's been good to have someone there for me when this deferred grief has started welling up, and I'm grateful every day that I stumbled into a career that allows me to keep my brother and sister fed, with a roof over their head, and with some sense of a "normal" home life again. Still, given the date I can't help but be in sort of a shit place right now. I'm also looking back and seeing how much of my old life (the freedom, the comparative lack of responsibilities, the number of possibilities that seemed open to me) all seem to be gone now. It's like in a small way I'm not just mourning for the life of my Mum and Dad, I'm also mourning for the life I also had.

And of course there are some other more minor issues popping up, like the fact that my current health insurance plan will not be renewed this year (I'm a contractor and so I'm on my own for finding coverage), and I can't seem to find a replacement plan that has the therapist I've been seeing in network. Meaning I'll be having to paying out of pocket for it, which means I'll be having to cut back on my sessions.

Welp, that's my venting for the day. I think I'm going to crawl back into bed for a while and just stare at my nightstand (or maybe I'll mix it up and stare at the ceiling). It feels like that's all I've got the energy for today.

[Travis B.]

All I can say is that really does suck. Hopefully it will get better with time, but that likely won't happen quickly.

[jmcd]

It's not a question of being wise. It's a question of giving up or living life on your own terms.

[Travis B.]

It's not a question of being wise. It's a question of giving up or living life on your own terms.

That assumes that you have a choice. Or at least a choice where one option does not greatly outweigh the other options.

In my case, the main areas where I have choice are minor things that have little consequence. But for big things I rarely have much of a choice.

[jmcd]

It's not a question of being wise. It's a question of giving up or living life on your own terms.

That assumes that you have a choice. Or at least a choice where one option does not greatly outweigh the other options.

In my case, the main areas where I have choice are minor things that have little consequence. But for big things I rarely have much of a choice.

Health problems and financial problems may encumber us. But we have more free will than we realise.

[Travis B.]

It's not a question of being wise. It's a question of giving up or living life on your own terms.

That assumes that you have a choice. Or at least a choice where one option does not greatly outweigh the other options.

In my case, the main areas where I have choice are minor things that have little consequence. But for big things I rarely have much of a choice.

Health problems and financial problems may encumber us. But we have more free will than we realise.

Most of the time when I do things it is because is what makes most sense in the immediate present, almost invariably quite opportunistically in the case of career decisions. Ultimately, the main choice career-wise I have made was to major in Computer Science and work in the field of software development; but even that was unquestionably the right thing for me to do at the time, with me having no thought of doing anything different - I had already known in elementary school that I would be doing this. Everything else ultimately followed from that, at least in part.

[Jonlang]

So this morning someone online decided to give me some abuse via social media about conlanging. Apparently conlanging is stupid, pointless and my conlang is too hard to pronounce anyway. The "too hard to pronounce" words they were referring to are /galn/ /gεln/, which cannot be hard for any English speaker, surely? This is the only time that anyone has done this to me, so I wonder how often it happens to more well-known, higher-profile conlangers with an online presence...