Hi /adv/
Today I would like to share something very personal. This is a problem of mine that has manifested itself in the last few years, and this is seriously hurting my emotional life. Let us go back in time to 2013. (I am 18 btw)
2013 started my last year in high school. Everything was perfect. I had my first actual girlfriend and me and my friends had some of the best moments in our lives. The last semester was golden, and I was so happy for what the future might hold for all of us. We felt limitless. We were the most badass squad you could ever imagine. We were always playing around, weather it was climbing up on rooftops to smoke weed or pulling pranks on random people. Well, 2014 rolled around and high school was ending. I enrolled in community college because I'm a lazy fuck, and some of my friends chose college instead. High school then ended and we had a fun summer. Then it was fall time, and school started again. I met with my friends from high school less and less, and I got some new friends but something was missing. These new friends couldn't entertain me as much as my old friends did and we didn't have nearly as much fun together. I did see people from my high school, but not that often.
Fast forward to 2017. I see my old friends maybe 3-5 times a year now. And so much has changed, and not in a good way. Some have become very succesful people. They are wealthy and famous, and now shun all of us who aren't. Won't even say hi if bumped into. Many have become shut-ins and depressed people who can't work or study and are pretty much disabled for the rest of their lives, and some of them will most likely commit suicide. The rest have had their occasional weed smoking perverted into heavy drug use or alcoholism and are also depressed in addition to being completely braindead and unable to even hold a slightly more complex conversation.
CONT.
What do I do now? These friends were my best friends who I shared everything with, and now most of them are dying or just refuse to hang out. It feels like my late childhood has been ruined and everything has just gone downhill after high school ended. What do I do or how do I learn to live with it, when the people around me are so fucked up?
>>18060068
Friends are products of a set of circumstances. Since circumstances change, it is reasonable that friends would too. If they refuse to hang out, they either need a lot of help or just don't want to be friends. Either way, you will not be able to change it by yourself. You can't force it.
You have to move on, for your sake. Stay open to them, but don't let them use you, and don't try to force a relationship that is missing whatever it was that created it.
Your late childhood isn't ruined, it's just gone, no longer here. Don't live in the past.
>>18060079
I get where you're coming from my man. I have distanced myself from the drug addicted ones, since they're the most unbarable nowadays. But strangely, they also happened to be my best friends out of all of the friends from high school.
Since everything started to go downhill, I have gotten much more motivation to keep my life in order. But I can't lose the feeling that I desperately try to uphold my standard of living in a dying society. Not only have my high school friends regressed to mental illnesses and drug addictions, but so have many other people who I know from my hometown.
My life will go on and I will become moderately succesful, but it's hard seeing your peers dying.
>>18060125
I can imagine. It's easy to get into sort of a depressed state when the problem is right there in your face all the time too. Travel around a bit, get some more context - not all of society is dying, and you're proof of it.
>>18060141
Interestingly enough, I did travel last year for that exact reason. When I was very young, without going too much into detail, I lived in many places around Europe (I'm from northern Europe)
I visited these places, and what I found was that most of them have fallen into disrepair and are now crime-ridden hellholes. Not only that, but even the whole countries were not doing good (strict police control due to the refugee crisis and economic failure) I tried to escape this place, but when I arrived to my "safe havens" they were worse off than my hometown.