I don’t mean like how happy you are today. I mean overall, are you satisfied with everything you are up until this point? For me, for an example, I have a decent job that keeps my head just above water. I have a loving family that I see every couple months or weeks. I have the freedom to do what I want, when I want. But, overall, I’m sort of lonely and exhausted from constantly working. So, on a scale of 1 to 10, I’m about a 6.
I lead a very nice, comfortable life. I wouldn’t change hardly anything. But I suffer from depression, always have and yes, I do therapy and meds. I’m waiting for this to be over.
my life is pretty great. I love it.
What i don’t love, however, is inviting people into my life only for them to tell me how crappy it is because it’s not the life they want. I don’t really socialize anymore because I am so sick of people telling me how wrong my life is because I don’t enjoy what they enjoy or want what they want. fore example, i drive a 10 year old hatchback, and almost everyone new I meet, when they learn this, lectures me no how I should drive a ‘better’ car, and it should be a BMW SUV or something like that, and all it is them projecting their desires onto me. and if i dare say something like ‘I’m good with what I have’ I get a lecture about how I must be mentally ill or stupid. How could I possible be happy with my ‘crap’ car? my job, my home, my dog, etc.
I used to have lots of friends, but the past 5-10 years it’s dwindled to like 3 people. Because I shut people like this out of my life once they start talking to me like this. And it’s prevented me from making any new friends. I am so SICK of inviting people over to my place only to get this full on lecture about how ‘offended’ they are I don’t live in a million dollar luxury apartment, because my place is ‘shithole’ if it doesn’t have $5000 luxury appliances or something stupid like that.
I keep trying to meet new people, keep trying to date, etc, but this is the massive roadblock I keep running into. I am so sick of it and it makes me unhappy, so I basically don’t socialize much anymore. Because I like being happy and not interacting with twats who think I need a therapist if my salary isn’t 500K.
Not at all
If reincarnation real , want choice in the matter , be reborn as “living” doll thing can still like move around and shit but experiences neither (life|death)
Just want to exist effortlessly
On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m at a 2.3.
I’m probably older than most here, in my late 40s. Haven’t had a date or even had the guts to ask anyone for 20 years. I have hobbies but I’ve reached the limit for what I can justify putting in to the financially and over time the enjoyment of them has dropped.
Overall I’m dissatisfied with almost everything about my professional life. At work I’m surrounded by (at best) unthinking people and at worst, out-and-out [rule 6 no US politics] - one of whom I’m (very closely) related to. I cannot find a suitable replacement (or an even worse, but happier in life) job to replace it with. My workplace refuses to provide me with health insurance and thanks to the [rule 6 no us politics] and their cronies I’ve lost access to the healthcare I’ve had in previous years, (ACA) because the cost through it has more than quadrupled. Haven’t had dental coverage for my entire adult life, and they’re bad. At this point if I COULD afford to go to the dentist I already know the response. “They’ve got to go, we’ll fit you for dentures” is the answer I’d hear.
Now on the weekends, or days off? I can forget about enough of the week to feel like more of a 5 to 7. I’m lonely but can do what I want, when I want, like OP said. Admittedly I have a fairly ok amount of money, a moderate amount of savings, and relative financial freedom, but a year or more unemployed and I’d be back to poverty.
My real life friends from school either left me behind, had kids and I can’t relate to their lives, (not that it would matter, they have no time) or moved away, went bonkers, [rule 6 no us politics, but you know] and in some cases have died. The best friends I have, (A whopping 2 of them) I have never met in real life. One half-way across the country and one 2/3 of the way across the country. (US)
At this point I’m considering asking one of those 2 friends if I can leave this all behind, cram all the most important possestions I have in to the car, and pay them rent for a while, to just leave all of this behind.I have no idea what they’d say if I asked.
If I had been asked this fifteen years ago, I’d have said 0/10. I was a time bomb. I quite literally wanted to die and take everyone with me. I was in a marriage with a spouse who was emotionally, physically, and sexually abusive. We had two kids I couldn’t summon the ability to be a good father to because my mental health was in the toilet. I had the career I thought I had always wanted but I dreaded going to work because I was surrounded by hostility by absolutely everyone I served. And I was not earning enough to make any of this bearable. I slogged through my waking hours filled with a rage and hate that was getting harder and harder to keep bottled up.
Eventually I did implode, and it was extremely ugly, and I ended up involuntarily institutionalized for a couple years. Spouse made it all about her and managed to convince everyone in her circle that she was the hero and I was the villain and turned everyone against me, including my kids.
I was in pretty intense therapy for a few years, and during that time I learned a lot not only about myself, but about the people in my life, and what they actually were. I put that knowledge to work once I was in a position to put my life back together.
Today I have a new home, new job, and new friends and family connections that include almost no one from my past. The hardest part is living with the regret of the damage I did to people who didn’t deserve it at the time. But today I have a new son, and while I wish I could have made my relationship with his mom work, at least we still get along and coparent well. New job is demanding of my time but I’m good at it, am respected by my coworkers, and enjoy the work. I give it a solid 7/10 and improving slowly. But man I low-crawled though Hell to get here.
0/10 - Cancer surgery in 11 days.
Don’t know if it helps, but having had cancer, it’s not the worst thing out there.
I’d rank years of dialysis higher, for example.
Death of a loved one too, easily.
With the cancer, you either know you’ll die fast and even get an estimate. But other stuff just slowly kills you and robs you of years of opportunity you can never get back, and you don’t know if you might die next month, next week, or next year.
Getting a chance to know you’re dying is a luxury, by few realize it. Heck even the foresight of it the possibility is. But the long term stuff? The slow, unsure deaths? That’s… Well, like I said, I don’t know if it helps, but I’ll say it could be much, much, much worse. Consider you’ll have time to prepare at least. It’s not much, it’s still a shit situation. Don’t know if you had the chemo yet and yeah, that’s pretty shit. But maybe realizing you have preparation time and a pretty black and white outcome can raise that 0 to a 1 or 2.
Chemo depends on the results of the surgery. Right now, it’s stage 2 which is resolved with surgery. If it gets into the lymph nodes, that bumps it to stage 3 and requires chemo.
So they pull the entire sigmoid colon and the related lymph nodes and send it all off for biopsy.
You should ask if maybe it’s best to do a round or two anyway as a preventative measure of they think it’s possible for it to hang around after the surgery. Better than waiting around for it to get worse, and while chemo is shitty 2 rounds max should be extremely tolerable.
Only thing though, is that if you do plan on having kids at any point in the future, you should look into reproductive freezing before starting chemo; especially if you’re already in your late 20s or beyond. They don’t necessarily tell you that - I luckily found out that’s important the night before my first chemo was planned.
Then again, you might also be in the USA where that might not be an affordable option.
Maybe not affordable and I wonder to if it’s like an anti-biotic. Once you start, you commit to the entire treatment.
We’ll see what the docs say once, you know, I get gutted like a fish. 😉 I already got cracked open like a lobster for the open heart surgery, what’s one more?
We need a bone cracked club shirt too lol
My wife says I’m not allowed to buy her the fun shirts:
so I have to settle:
Hopefully it all goes well! How would you rate it if it’s a successful procedure and you recover completely ?
Hard to say, recovery is going to be a bitch because, get this… 12 days after my diagnosis, 1 day before the CT Scan and 2 days before meeting the surgeon, my wife felt a numbness and tingling in her legs, tried to stand up and fell to the floor.
An infection she had been fighting in her foot moved to her spine and tried to paralyze her(!) She had emergency surgery on her spine that night, a lower leg amputation a few days later, and has now been in the hospital… (checks math) 14 days.
So there’s a real possibility we’ll both be hospitalized at the same time or, best case, in surgical recovery at the same time. She can’t come home until she completes rehab for the nerve damage and amputation.
Well fuck that’s a brutally rough patch
Oh man, what can I even say. What a difficult situation to be in, I feel for you both. Hopefully your wife and you recover well and quickly. Damn. 😔🙏
I see the clippy
O7 hope all goes well because we can’t afford to lose soldiers
Honestly? The last few years have been like a slow motion Trainwreck. My wife developed serious chronic health issues a few years ago and I’ve been unemployed for almost a year and a half. We’ve gone from being in a very good financial position to being virtually bankrupt. It has not been a good time.
I’ve gone through very similar experiences, I actually never pulled out and ended up basically losing everything. Started over a few years back.
I mean, it all fucking sucks but I think after actually facing the worst-cases and living through it, you feel far less anxious about a lot of the smaller stuff.
But if I could recommend one thing, it would be consider looking into therapy ahead of time and making time for it. Being a caregiver and having the full responsibility on your shoulders to make things work is more than traumatic, it can destroy you. PTSD is a constant presence in my life and it doesn’t work like media portrays it, it’s just a constant, gnawing anxiety and despair that doesn’t go away even when things are fine. Your brain keeps looking for reasons for the feelings and throws you all kinds of narratives that you have to manually address and squash down every day or it will spiral in your mind and get worse and worse. Not fun. Would not recommend.
I’ve been seriously thinking I need to go back to therapy. Thanks for the motivation!
Sorry to hear that.
I wish you the best for years to come.
You might want to consider meditation, it helps a lot with dealing with difficult situations.
You can try Anapana in the beginning and Vipassana later, but really any meditation will help.
The key is to start small, maybe 2-3 minutes and gradually extend it.
Try not to stress about it and test which technique works best for you.
Ping me if you want to talk some more about this or anything else ;-)
I’ll finish a game that I’ve lost to be sportsmanlike, and that’s where I’m at in general
Probably about a 7. I need more time, space, and security and there are some choices that I made that were correct but cost me things I did value, but overall I have a happy marriage, good friends, a nice community, a decent career that I haven’t fucked up too badly, and I don’t think I’ve really fucked up in any of the major important choices in my life.
2024 was a particularly difficult year for me, and even then I was satisfied with a lot of my life, just struggling against it being difficult at the time.
When I have a permanent job and ideally own a small house or condo it’ll probably bump up a point or two
3 or 4. Used to be around 1 last year.
There was a wave of bad events and bad decisions screwed up my life and career. I see some signs of improvement but not enough to say it has passed.
Can elaborate if anyone is interested
Elaborate only if you want.
But I’m rooting for your success homie.
Thanks kind stranger! I appreciate it
4/10 - I am lucky to have the things I have, but my motivation is nonexistent, everything feels pointless and empty and I only watch as the world decays more day by day. Our next generation probably has either a nuclear end or an AI dystopia to inherit.
I’d like a refund.
7/10. Good job, good family. Just frustrating that it took a lot of stress and worry to get here, especially financially. Finally doing well but all of that is tempered by saving as much as possible due to basically having been poor up until about a decade ago, so even though we’re doing ok it’s kinda hard to enjoy because all of it goes to catching up for not having money for so long. Really sobering to understand that most people will never have the chance to “catch up.”
Probably 5/10
Good job, shit love life, decent family life, good friends, the rest of the world is fucked to no end
