I did a complete 180 about my life. I feel numb and empty

Bump? Just tell me what am I doing wrong

>>17650464

Guy in same boat here, I know exactly what you are doing wrong. Give me a sec to post it all up.

File: the_riddle_of_steel_by_urban_barbarian.jpg (178KB, 786x1017px) Image search: [Google]

178KB, 786x1017px

>>17650509

I was a bit facetious in my last post, I am not in the same boat as you but know what you are going through.

1.) you live up to the expectations of others.
2.) You have no life experience.
3.) you refuse to see reality for what it is and instead you live by what your idea of it is.
4.) You live according to your feelings and emotions rather than toward an objective goal.
5.) You have no sense of self because you have not had any real hardship.

1. You live according to the expectations of others. You assume to know what people want from you and you fail to live up to those standards. Now, having standards is a good thing to have, but you go at it from a place where you want to receive outward recognition of your efforts, not inward satisfaction. Basically, you only have standards in place because you want to be appreciated by those around you. This is a dangerous mindset to have and ultimately forms your depression because if you had life experience from 2.) you would realize that everybody only cares about themselves and no one cares about you, especially if you are a man. For women, its different (especially if you are an attractive woman). You also come to some uncomfortable truths when you have life experience.

2.) you have no life experience. This is not the bullshit YOLO life experience, or the travel "life experience" where you go to countries americanized with slightly different flavored MCDonalds, or doing drugs or any surface veneer life experience that shallow people use as justification for being shallow. This is actual life experience born from trial and error. You cannot accurately base your success and failures because you do not have the life experience to know what was difficult to achieve and what merely was somewhat challenging. Your lack of life experience also shows in the fact you look for material goods to fill the void you have from a lack of accomplishment.

File: Caesar, pain and patience.jpg (107KB, 584x405px) Image search: [Google]

107KB, 584x405px

>>17650546

3.) There is an objective measurement for success and failure in all aspects of society. Acquirement of resources and education, physical, mental and emotional strength and competency, high degree of status, physical attractiveness. Everyone and every society holds these things as important, the only difference is how it is achieved/perceived. High status in the US is being a movie star, while in Saudi Arabia it is being in a high religious position. The methods are different, the outcome the same. You feel like shit because you know you are not achieving in any of these realms whatsoever. You are trying to solve your feelings of inferiority by attacking the symptom and not the cause, like treating skin cancer by tanning instead of going through chemo. You are attacking the symptom and not the cause. It will make you uncomfortable, you will consistently fuck up and be wrong, but if you continue to see reality for what it is rather than what you perceive it to be/assume it to be eventually you will start coming out on top.

4.) You live according to your feelings and emotions. Emotions and feelings are fickle shits. You could feel like shit the entire day simply because you stubbed your toe waking up when if it happened at the end of the night of a good day it wouldn't matter. What you must understand fully and foremost is that you are in control of your emotions, your emotions are not in control of you. If your emotions are in control of you, you are weak and deserve to be mocked. If you are feeling sad, lonely, depressed, it is because you have, consciously or subconsciously, decided to feel this way because something in your life is not right. Either choose to feel something different, correct the mindset, or both. You are ultimately in control of how you respond to life's challenges and, with a large degree of preparation and foresight, are in control of what happens around you. Do not take that for granted.

File: Control yourself and control life.jpg (113KB, 468x714px) Image search: [Google]

113KB, 468x714px

>>17650546
>>17650571

5.) no sense of self

A person does not find themselves, a person creates themselves. This is a lightbulb moment that I had achieved in my early twenties. People who go on trying to find themselves are people who never really tried to create themselves and are saddened by the fact that they have nothing in their lives to show for it.

So the biggest question is who do you want to be?

Do you want to be a rich and powerful executive, straddling the world and wielding power like a child tossing candy?

Do you want to be strong and stoic, a paragon of manliness to all those around you? Both, neither?

You have a choice to be whoever you want to be. The only problem is making that choice everyday, sacrificing for that choice everyday, never letting up, and committing 100% to who you want to be. Everybody has an idea, a goal, or a dream, but nobody every truly sacrifices for it. They would rather spend an hour shitposting online, watching Luke Cage, or drinking then spending ten minutes getting to their dream. Because they use their dreams like a drug, an opiate, to delude themselves that they may one day reach it while everyday they sink further and further into shit.

So start living and sacrificing 100% for what you want to be, and you will find more fulfillment and happiness than any 70k sportscar can give you. But remember, your goal is sacrosanct. It must come before everything, even yourself. it must be an idea, not a person. It must be something pure.

>>17650612

That is all, if you have any questions let me know.

>>17650617
I can't answer you right now because I'm at work but this by far the best advice I have ever seen on 4chan. I'll get back to you in 3 hours

File: Definition of hell.jpg (38KB, 1280x800px) Image search: [Google]

38KB, 1280x800px

>>17650638

Now we are in a dangerous spot. Because this is something that will constantly and consistently play out. You have your answer, you feel that you accomplished something, and in the next few days you will forget about it and go right back to where you started.

The phrase never letting your victories defeat you is something that should be drilled into your goddamn head.

Your problem is not fucking solved, do not think it for a moment. Just because you know an answer does not mean you are applying an answer. You must apply this fucking answer, starting today. It will make you uncomfortable. START APPLYING IT. if you don't you will wind up back where you started, hating yourself and your life.

>>17650677
Not op but everything you said applies as well to me in various ways.

The biggest being the fact that observing a realization is not the same as applying it to your life and putting it into action. Thanks for giving some kick ass referential advise

>>17650617
>If you have any questions let me know
Not OP, but I have some.

You contradict yourself by saying you should only do things according to who you personally aspire to be, yet you also state there is an objective measurement for success that is held by society, and that ignoring that objectivity would be "refusing to see reality for what it is and living by what your idea of it is".

What if I truly don't know who I want to be? How can I become the person I want to be if I don't have a clear idea what that is? What if that's the reason I'm depressed, is because I just don't know what I want. Sure, I could pick and choose some random goal to work towards, but I would still be just as clueless and empty in the end, because that's not who I want to be, right?

So how do I figure out what it is that I want (because I have "no sense of self"), and once I do that, how do I know that what I want is a worthy thing to want?

>>17650732

There is no contradiction. Man is a social animal. Objective success by societal standards listed above aid in the feeling of accomplishment. One of the senses of accomplishment was physical, mental, emotional strength and competency. Mental competency and education. You could be a fucking amazing concert pianist, best guitar player in the world, etc.

also, you can choose to live life according to what you think is best, but this may mean being shunned by society. So if your goal in life is to be a drug addict trying all the different drugs in the world, mooching off people and being an emotional wreck don't expect to be welcomed by society at large. Moreover, if you do what i just stated and expect people to give you accolades because of it you are being delusional. Look at this thread >>17650307 for an example. He wanted success with the opposite sex, achieved what he figured to be the ideal for the opposite sex, and was frustrated because he wasn't achieving that success. There objectively is something women are attracted to, the reality, and there was what he believed to be attractive to women, what he believed it to be or the delusion. And this difference is what caused the frustration.


>Sure, I could pick and choose some random goal to work towards, but I would still be just as clueless and empty in the end, because that's not who I want to be, right?

Yes, that is the definition of life experience. Goddamn risk and failure. Risk and Failure. Stop being a goddamn fearful child and make a choice. You will fail. YOU WILL FAIL. That is a given. You cannot escape it. What matters is how long you struggle and try until you find success. And you won't be empty, you will know more about who you are since you know that this is something you don't like. You are not only defined by your likes but your dislikes, what you enjoy and what you don't enjoy. You create yourself not only by your success but also by your failures.

>>17650732
>What if I truly don't know who I want to be? How can I become the person I want to be if I don't have a clear idea what that is? What if that's the reason I'm depressed, is because I just don't know what I want. Sure, I could pick and choose some random goal to work towards, but I would still be just as clueless and empty in the end, because that's not who I want to be, right?
I have this issue too. I have an idea for a possible second career, and am considering going to school for it; but other than that, and other than being there for the people I care about, I don't really have a sense of who *I* want to be. I just know I don't like who I've turned into.

>>17650546
>>17650571
>>17650612
this is all excellent advice, good enough that it stings. a lot. I feel like I have spent pretty much all of my 20s and 30s trying to live by something like this, and looking back I wonder if I'm just not good at it or if I was half-assing it. I constantly questioned myself if I was doing due diligence in self-improvement or half-assing it, and figured that if I was periodically auditing myself like that, it probably meant I was doing ok. but here I am staring middle age in the face and still feeling like I turned out like shit. I wanted to be reliable and accountable and strong, and I'm just not.

I made financial mistakes and excuses for myself with $10 here and $50 there telling myself it wouldn't matter, and ended up in a ridiculous amount of debt over ~20 years. I'm starting to wonder if I did that with my soul too.

I know what I gotta do, it just really sucks is all. trying to do it when a bunch of other things in life suck is damn near impossible. luckily I am in a position where the amount of suck in my life is minimal.

so OP, I will add that the best way to take this guy's advice is to cut out all the unnecessary suckage in your life. all of it. you know what it is.

File: Batman impossible.jpg (199KB, 1024x793px)

199KB, 1024x793px

>>17650813

The one question you need to ask is this.

What is more important? Every time you make a decision, ask yourself this question.

What is more important, this 5 dollar hamburger or what i want to be?

What is more important, sleeping in for an hour or studying that extra hour to be who i want to be?

Another piece of advice. You will hit a fucking wall. You will come to a point where you are failing every day, you will feel like shit, and you will want to give up. You will break down in tears and seriously consider going down to the gun store and eating a lead biscuit because of the distance between what your goal is and what you want to be. You will face it everyday and it will fucking torture you. It will make you break down it tears if you are doing it right. At that point you need to remind yourself why you are doing it. Take a break if you need to, do whatever you need to do.

Some personal life experience: Up until last november, I was working 110+ hour weeks and working out anywhere from 1 hour to 2 hours a day. I had to go to the hospital because i started collapsing and the doctors told me I needed to take a break because I was pushing myself so hard my body was breaking down and i was going to have a heart attack. I was 26 years old at the time. I was doing it for about 3 years. And I took a few months to relax, brought my work schedule down to roughly 80 hours a week, and stopped working out. And after about 3+ years, i am finally starting to see some results.

It will take a fucking while. recent studies show that it takes at least 3 months to ingrain a habit, and 10,000 hours to get good at any skill. Be fully ready and prepared for what you are getting into.

>>17650842
>Another piece of advice. You will hit a fucking wall. You will come to a point where you are failing every day, you will feel like shit, and you will want to give up. You will break down in tears and seriously consider going down to the gun store and eating a lead biscuit because of the distance between what your goal is and what you want to be. You will face it everyday and it will fucking torture you. It will make you break down it tears if you are doing it right. At that point you need to remind yourself why you are doing it. Take a break if you need to, do whatever you need to do.
been doing that the last couple years, it's why I'm on disability now. I think my brain did an emergency shutdown. thank goodness I finally got depressionbux so I got a little room to figure shit out without worrying so much about bills.

and yeah you are very right and I do make those decisions. I think my problem is that a) I'm not conscious enough of those decisions and b) I have trouble figuring out how much to let myself slide. I did find out early on that there is such a thing as being single-minded about your goals to the point where you have a stick up your ass, or that you burn yourself out by never giving yourself a break. but when I took the stick out of my ass and tried to give myself a break, maybe I gave myself too much. but at the same time it was too little too late? maybe? now I think I'm too comfy and I gotta correct for it again. it's gonna suck. I got a support group though, so I think that'll help.

>80 hours a week
shit, last job I had, if I worked more than 42-43 hours a week, I'd get sick. literally I'd come down with whatever was going around, or I'd just get a blinding migraine. idk how you do it but my hat is off to you. everybody's got their limit I guess.

thank you for your encouragement and for the kick in the ass. glad I clicked on this thread.

File: Erwin Rommel.jpg (129KB, 1000x673px) Image search: [Google]

129KB, 1000x673px

>>17650857
>and yeah you are very right and I do make those decisions. I think my problem is that a) I'm not conscious enough of those decisions and b) I have trouble figuring out how much to let myself slide. I did find out early on that there is such a thing as being single-minded about your goals to the point where you have a stick up your ass, or that you burn yourself out by never giving yourself a break. but when I took the stick out of my ass and tried to give myself a break, maybe I gave myself too much. but at the same time it was too little too late? maybe? now I think I'm too comfy and I gotta correct for it again. it's gonna suck. I got a support group though, so I think that'll help.

Same here. You can and will be surprised how far you can go when you do not accept failure. Though i admit i did push myself too hard. Have you ever watched Gattaca? Great film and is a good example of what this thread is about. Also Training Day (especially for points 1-4).

>>17650842
What is it that you want/are doing that you're working over a hundred hours every week for, and why do you want this thing so badly?

You say that life is just risk and failure, trial and error, a guessing game, but I doubt that you chose to work towards this by saying "Yeah, sure, I'll give this thing a shot and see how it goes. It's not better than anything else" You obviously MUST have had a very strong desire for it, like you NEEDED it, and you couldn't LIVE unless you worked towards it and sacrificed everything to achieve it.

In addition, what experience led you to conclude "this is what I value and this is what is definitively most important to me". I'm asking because we're clearly at a misunderstanding here, as I've never felt this way about anything. What would the solution be? Just try things on; if the hat fits, wear it?

File: Cecil Rhodes.jpg (73KB, 500x375px) Image search: [Google]

73KB, 500x375px

>>17650907

Personally, I grew up poor.

Very poor. My father was an alcoholic that beat me regularly to the point where i couldn't sleep some nights due to the pain. At one point I thought I was permanently paralyzed because i couldn't move for 20 minutes. (I think i was five at the time, though i don't remember much from my childhood). He drowned my brother (he managed to get revived though). Hardship and suffering are nothing new to me. The only problem is I have latent PTSD from going through all of that that I have yet to resolve, and some anger problems/problems lying (though i manage to control them very well, no outbursts).

I also had to steal food from other people when growing up to get enough to eat. Among other things. I've had friends die from drug overdoses/ been raped, I saw my first dead body around six when a car ran a stopsign and tore a kids leg off when he was riding a bike. Been bullied, ostracized, set on fire, etc.

I personally made the choice that I would never allow myself as an adult to go through the things I did when growing up. And i decided that the best way to go about it was to become physically competent, martially competent, and financially unassailable. Because while people can betray you, you can lose your favorite things in life, your car can blow up, your wife can cheat on you, your kids can die, etc. But if you can rely on you, If you know without a shadow of a doubt that you can rely on yourself when things get tough you can get through anything. And i know, without a shadow of a doubt, that working 110+ hours and working out 2 hours a day wasn't my limit.

>>17650340
You should create. Video games, music, animation, books, finance them all.

A cat caffee or a garden ladybug caffee
A night time comfy park zone in your backyard.
A private school with a completely different system of education.
Bitcoin trading.
E-bay selling.
Buying a social media account and drifting popularity towards something.
Be extroverted and educated.
Find yourself a qt 3.14 spunky girlfriend and have children.

File: Romans on sloth.png (731KB, 742x428px) Image search: [Google]

731KB, 742x428px

>>17650907

Did not answer your second portion.

And you grow to feel this way about something as you grow more competent in the area that you have chosen. It's not usually an AHA! EUREKA moment. Its a lot of little things done that add up to a big thing. I ask you to try out several different things because you will find something that you are competent. When you start working at it you find yourself becoming really good at it, and that will encourage you to sacrifice more and be better at it.

Its a positive feedback loop that will have massive setbacks.

I am arguing you to do this because you don't want to go through what i did in order to find out what's most important to/for me. If it sounds a little disjointed that's because my starting position and yours were vastly different.

Of course, you could go through what i did for a month and then when your facing starvation and pain you can find out what's most important to you, though many people do not have the stomach for it.

bumping this thread to receive any more questions from any anons, and to keep it alive for OP.

>>17651074
OP here.

>You live up to the expectations of others
I don't know, I want my parents to be proud of me and be a good role model for my brother. Is that bad that I try to live up to that?

>You have no life experience
I don't have much because between 15 to 21, I was almost a NEET. Since, I have started firefighting school, I learned everything in accelerated. But I don't understand, I have tried to do many kind of activities to GET life experiences. Like the sports car, race bike and other things.

>you refuse to see reality for what it is and instead you live by what your idea of it is

What did you mean by symptoms? What reality? That I was a former loser and trying to salvage my life? Is it bad that I want to live how I think I want? I always wanted to be a race driver but I am rationnal enough to know that it is a complete waste of time and money.

>You live according to your feelings and emotions

I am in control of my emotions but not my impulses. But you are right.

> no sense of self

Well I have a general goal to do good for mankind. But I also want to become filthy rich, be a professionnal driver or an astronaut. Which all of them are unatainable goals. How to lower them?

>>17650612
Not OP, but bump and thanks for this. Felt empty with an old mindset but this made things clearer.

File: Disciplines medieval.jpg (1MB, 936x1603px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 936x1603px

>>17651161

>You live up to the expectations of others

It is not a bad thing to make others proud of you. The problem is that you are making this your core reason for your self-esteem. That, that is wrong. Best analogy that I can come up with is that you are focusing on the cherry rather than the sundae. You are focusing on external reward rather than internal satisfaction.

>You have no life experience

Again, life experience is trying and failing to move toward a SPECIFIC GOAL. You are using life experience wrong here.

>This is not the bullshit YOLO life experience, or the travel "life experience" where you go to countries americanized with slightly different flavored MCDonalds, or doing drugs or any surface veneer life experience that shallow people use as justification for being shallow.

You are confusing shallow experience for substance. Why did you buy that sports bike, the car? It was impulse buying that was shallow life experience. The firefighting thing was good because you tried an experience to fulfill yourself, evaluated it, found it wanting and not what you wanted, and moved on to something else. And even then the firefighting thing I am hesitant to call good because it sounds like you did not have a specific goal you were working toward.

>That I was a former loser and trying to salvage my life? Is it bad that I want to live how I think I want? I always wanted to be a race driver but I am rational enough to know that it is a complete waste of time and money.

You were a former loser trying to salvage your life. that is reality. Now, who fucking told you that its not possible to be a multi-millionaire race car driver? I never fucking said that your goal had to be "rational". Most often, Rationality is an excuse used by the timid to explain their failure. Your goal is to be a race car driver. That means that you have to, everyday, work toward that Goal. Every single fucking day. Because you have two fucking choices from here on in.

File: persistence calvin coolidge.jpg (467KB, 1473x984px)

467KB, 1473x984px

>>17651213

Your two choices are:

waking up every day, for the rest of your life, feeling like a failure for never even trying

OR.

Trying every single waking moment of your life to achieve your goal. I do not promise that you will reach it, but i do promise it is infinitely better than this slow goddamn death you call a life.

And everyday you must make that choice. Every Day. Because you will wind up at 80 feeling like a failure with thousands of regrets because you did the rational thing, or you can either wake up at 80 either a success, or someone who can look back at his life and think goddamn I gave everything i had to make it work. And make sure you live your life like its the last goddamn day you can achieve your goal and do everything possible to make it work.

File: Tacitus.png (126KB, 896x297px)

126KB, 896x297px

>>17651161

And finally, the only thing you need to use rationality for is how to achieve your dream/goal.

For example, you are too poor to to afford a race car.

You need money to get a race car.

How do you get money.


Break down your goal into rational, tangible, concrete steps you can take every single day to work towards, and give yourself a time limit when you need to accomplish it.

>>17651213
>>17651228
>>17651235
This makes a lot more sense. I understand a bit more. I have to have a specific goal in order to progress to the next level

File: Rollins.png (683KB, 1000x1298px) Image search: [Google]

683KB, 1000x1298px

>>17651264

The final piece of advice i have to give you sounds irrational, even insane.

You have to subsume yourself and make your goal paramount, of prime importance in your life. Hunger, sleep, pain, sadness, loneliness. If it doesn't move you toward your goal get rid of it. This doesn't mean be a dick. This doesn't mean chop off a limb to save a finger. It means that you will have to suffer several temporary uncomfortable situations before you can realize your goal.

And it will take years. Depending on the amount of effort, maybe even a decade. It will take 3,650 days, or 87,600 hours, or 5.25 million minutes, or perhaps even more. It will take battling through sadness, pain, depression, anxiety. It will take sacrificing and potentially losing friends, love interests, sleep. It will hurt. It will feel like you are chewing glass everyday.

You have to ask yourself how far you are willing to go and how much you are willing to give. And please, for the love of god, don't have ass it. What's worse than never trying and trying and failing is that bottomless pit called half-assing that will make you regret your life. In the morning ask yourself is it worth it and in the evening ask yourself did you do enough? The answer to both must always be yes. If not in the morning, the answer is always yes. IN the evening, the answer must be yes or else you don't sleep until you did enough.

For the love of god, make sure you are ready to do this. It requires a degree of insanity that is not rational. Please be ready before you commit.

That anon is right to talk about goals.

But what if your goal is just not possible? For example, I always wanted to join the military. Even as a kid, I already knew what I wanted and prepared for that. During my puberty, each morning I trained while my peers drunkedly walked home. Right after I hit the age, I enlisted. But no, our military was not recruiting during that times. And for the next five years, it did not open it's gates.

Without any goal, depressed, I hardly moved on and started looking for some new goal. I did not find any. I knew what I wanted but there was no way of reaching it. Two years back I snapped and went to the France to join French Foreign Legion. I did it, I got in and was happy. Dream coming true. Did preselection, did selection, succesfully finish my basic. And then I had to leave because of health issues. The kind of health issues which wouldn't matter in regular army, but not in the legion. So I went back.

But guess what. To serve in foreign army is a criminal offense here. I got out luckily with two-year probation and some financial penalty. Paid my dues and right before my probation ended, our army opened it's gates again. I was one of the first to enlist.

But guess what. Our military does not accept anyone with criminal record.

And that's it, I'm out of my options there. How am I supposed to follow that goal? There is no way.

>>17651299

I am assuming that you are in a European Country? Have you tried talking to your local representative? Maybe he can give you a waiver.

>>17651304
I'm and I tried. With no avail, "criminal offences" like this are never erased from your criminal records. You are actually acknowledged as a "liability" to the safety of state.

>>17651311
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_militaries_that_recruit_foreigners

what about here?

>>17651320

I think that your best bet may be the US. Since you type english well and I am assuming French/maybe another language, this reference:

Additionally, under the Military Accessions Vital to National Interest program, skilled foreigners such as translators may be recruited as needed, along with, as of September 2014 illegal immigrants with clean records and who have graduated high school if they were brought to the United States as children.

Also, the fact that you were able to pass FFL recruitment and basic means you might have a pretty good shot.

>>17651320
>>17651332

Yeah, I was seriously thinking about the US, that is a good advice. I'm not sure about the "clean records" part, which as far as I know applies even to MAVNI you mentioned. But I'll do the research. I fear only one thing, that is the age limit. Will do the research though.

Thanks guys.

>>17651344

If anything else, you might have to go PMC. Good luck to you.