Apathy

Bump. I can't be the only one with this problem.

Yeah I'm the same I lost interest in all my hobbies, I can't watch anime/movies anymore and I barely have any motivation to do anything. My life feels so empty and pointless, I haven't felt real emotions for a long time.

I don't know if my brain is broken or if it's just me being a trash-person. Over time everything has just became meh. I'm starting to wonder why am I even still bothering with things because I know whatever I do won't make me happy. I sit and aimlessly fuck around on my computer and hate myself for being like this but I can't motivate myself to change or do anything else. I started to just smoke pot daily because it makes it all more bearable if I'm high, but people frown on that because then I just seem like a pothead.

>>36947471
>I sit and aimlessly fuck around on my computer
Yup, I do this too. Haven't enjoyed playing a video game in years but I often pick them up to waste time, and then quit after realizing I should be having fun with it. Nowadays I usually turn it on, get past the title screen, and immediately turn it off. There's just nothing there.

>>36947537
>Nowadays I usually turn it on, get past the title screen, and immediately turn it off.
I've gotten to the stage where I cycle through all of my games like this and then just shut my computer off and lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Maybe go pet my cats and cry like a crazy person because being sad is all I have left emotionally.

I've been experiencing apathy, anhedonia and abulia to a greater or lesser degree over the past 10 years. I'm diagnosed with recurrent MDD.

>everything is dull and tasteless
>can't appreciate beauty, music is only white noise
>nothing is interesting
>no motivation because nothing is worth bothering with
>no enjoyment
>just killing time

Eventually, abulia kicks in and I can't even waste time nor look after myself. It's only severely incapacitating during MDD episodes, though.

You might have dysthymia or something else (mental or physical). Even though apathy alone is bearable, it can lead to stagnation and derail your life, and you won't ever care.

It fucking sucks. It's hard to get out of bed. Buying groceries, brushing my teeth, or taking a bath seem like accomplishments. I've lost all passion, my degree doesn't interest me anymore but I just keep doing it because otherwise what the fuck would I do? It's a wake up, go to college, study, sleep life every single fucking day. No real human interaction on a daily basis. I used to be able to shake off loneliness by reading, playing vidya, etc. But it just doesn't cut it anymore. Something needs to change or I'm gonna kill myself. But then again, no will or energy to change. Back to square 1. And so it goes.

>>36948441
>it can lead to stagnation and derail your life, and you won't ever care.
I already feel this a bit. I measure the consequences of things that I do to make sure they don't go totally off the rails, but I don't study for exams anymore. It's really hard to commit to these things when there is no foreseeable enjoyment in it.

Can Dysthymia really last for 2-3 years and just go away? Is there any way to narrow it down to what I may have?

>>36948673
Interesting, I haven't felt lonely in many years. It sucks how these diseases manage to divide us instead of bring us closer.

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>>36946650
Over the years, I have been losing interest in all the things I used to like doing. For example, I used to like video games but now they're just a pain in the ass. I used to like programming and I was damn good at it too but now it's just a chore to me. I think I'm going to kill myself before I lose my entire personality. I would at least like to die as me, not just an empty shell that looks like me.

>>36946650
im gonna guess you're an upper middle class white kid. i have the same problem. i've had no struggle, urgency, or "journey' in life. everything has been handed to me. even girls were handed to me because im an attractive guy.

you need to manufacture a crisis

https://pushingrubberdownhill.com/2016/05/09/you-need-to-create-your-own-crisis/

>>36948781
26 year old here. here's some "urgency" for you.

if you major in something worthless, or even STEM, and just do nothing (no internships, etc) you're not gonna get a respectable job. everyday you're gonna go to some job where you're filled with shame from the moment you clock in to the moment you clock out.

that's where im at right now. and i have to pay off my student loans. its feasible, but still sucks ass.

>>36948877
This isn't ennui, I promise you. Almost every single pleasurable state I have ever experienced has vanished in the state of a few years, and I have closely observed them passing for the last one. The latest one is coffee, but before that, it was the comfort from lying down in a hot shower. Before that, it was music, and then the comfort one gets from the sound of falling rain, and before that, enjoyment from visual novels. There is no location on Earth right now I can imagine myself having a "good time" in. I wouldn't say my life sucks - it's literally empty, a void. I've taken risks and spoken to girls, and even when it has gone well, I felt nothing inside.

>>36948951
At one point, I thought working in a grocery store might be a comfy way to spend adulthood without a lot of pressure on you. Turns out it's just boring, no one respects you, and you make shit pay.

>>36946650
basically yeah. apathy has allowed me to consider many more options for my life that i wouldn't have considered before. i just don't give a shit (in a good way)

>>36948781
Dysthymia is chronic. Its duration ranges from 2 years to decades. It doesn't usually just go away without pharmacological treatment and/or psychotherapy. It might be the cause if there aren't any psychological/medical/situational ("external" problems) explanations for your condition.

Chronic/recurrent MDD is also a possibility but it's more severe and episodical (2 weeks to 6 months episode and then remission, then another episode) whereas dysthymia is a bit milder yet persistent and ressembles a flat line. Some MDD patients never fully recover between episodes, though, which looks like dysthymia. They also can co-exist.

>>36949601
Interesting. Mine hasn't been episodic, but a linear downward-sloping line, so perhaps that's a good thing and it's more likely to be Dysthymia.

Do you know if it can be effectively treated with antidepressants?

>>36949789
With medication it usually gets better enough to make you functional and productive. The thing is not every drug works equally fine for every patient and this can be bothersome.

The downward-sloping line seems a bit more severe than textbook dysthymia, though.

A decent psychiatrist would rule out medical (especially endocrine) problems first just in case, but I know this isn't the usual approach.

>>36950010
I'm mostly functional, I just feel totally neutral/bored at all times. I used to feel pretty happy, which rules out a lot of serious disorders like SPD. But this one really doesn't make sense.

Guess I'll start by looking for a decent psychiatrist. The ones at well-reputed colleges are usually good, right?

>>36950080
Yes.

It makes you more functional because it increases your motivation (because then you'd be interested/involved in things, so an activity wouldn't be pointless meh effort anymore).

Anhedonia (inability to experience enjoyment/pleasure) also gets better (not "everything is boring, dull and insipid" anymore) but it takes more time (a few to several months) and the process is often rather slow.

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>>36946650
That sounds more like depression than apathy imo.

I mean "apathy" is always open to interpretation but most people always associate negative connotations.


I used to care SO much about politics and social issues. I used to write blogs and go too protests and argue with other political retards online and do all that shit. I was absolutely miserable.

Now I am absolutely apathetic towards political & social issues and I have never been happier. I just don't care.


I don't mean in that "NO I SAID I DON'T CARE GET OUT MY ROOM MOM!!!!!!!!!1" meme sense, but just in a genuine "haha cool story bro" sense.

>>36950297
Makes sense. Having interest is a huge part in experiencing pleasure, so boosting one should help a lot in getting the other. I'll give it a try now, thanks man.

>>36950352
It can be used in both ways. Medically , it's a symptom where you lose the ability to care about anything. It's cool for a while, but eventually you become detached from the world and are miserable.

>>36950352
>>36946650

Al though I do relate to the video games & music thing. Those were always two of my greatest joy but in recent years they weren't giving as much pleasure as they used to.

Less is more.


I had close 160GB of music on my old ipod and would always be skipping every other song halfway through. This wasn't counting my hundreds of CDs and 300+GB of music that I had stored away because I wasn't listening to it at the time.

Then one day I had the happy accident of dropping my old ipod on the ground one last time and it stopped working for good.

I then had to instead use my phone as a music player since I have no money for a modern iPod but my phone only has 16GB of memory, including all the pre-installed bloatware apps. In total I now only have 4.56 GB of music on my phone.

I enjoy every single song that I have on my phone now. I don't skip a single one.


It's the same thing with video games. I spend more time outside now just going for walk and jogs and bike rides and when I get home I appreciate video games more, rather than burning the entire day away in front of them.


Also, for music, the fact that we can download pretty much anything for free definitely takes away value from the songs. When CDs were still the main medium and I would buy one at a time often just based on the cover art alone, I would listen to every single song and enjoy them even if the album wasn't what I expected and not that good.

The era of instant gratification on the internet does more harm than good.

>>36950352
Apathy is also a psychiatric symptom, the difference being that it's generalized and has a negative impact on the patient's life as a whole, even if he doesn't really care (which in the end makes it even worse).

I'm a medfag who turned into a NEET because of this and other depressive symptoms (recurrent MDD), so I know how shitty this condition can be.

The colloquial meaning certainly doesn't apply to anon's apathy.

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>>36950764
There's definitely some truth to that. The zeitgeist of the social media era seems to be trading long-term fulfilling pleasures with cheap, short-term ones that leave you wondering where your youth went. This is the main reason why I don't get upset at what has happened - If I could still enjoy stupid Youtube videos and wile away the afternoon on that, I'd waste my youth too like lots of others on this site.

This site's become a parody of itself to the point that I wonder if a few people won't just say fuck it and try something else. It's good that that's working for you.

>>36950919
oh you can go even earlier than that. Social Media is just making very obvious what was always wrong with the internet.

You can go back to the days of World of Warcraft and Myspace and Napster & Kazaa.

I'm so fucking glad I'm old enough and that my parents were technologically illiterate enough so that I didn't have the internet while growing up.

The internet is virtually everything that has ever been made and recorded in one form or another whether it's books or porn or movies or porn or TV shows or porn or music or porn or video games or porn or comic books & mange or porn, etc. it goes as back as recorded human history and is updated every single day.


It would be nearly impossible for no one to get burnt out on the option paralysis and constant-overstimulation.

Grandpa alert, but back in my day if you wanted a video game you had to save your allowance so that you could rent it from the corner store for a weekend or get excellent grades so that you could maybe get it for Christmas or your birthday. Even fi it was a shitty video game you were happy to have one at all. Porn didn't exist, it was this mysterious thing behind a closed door of the video rental place. Just looking at swimsuit catalogs was enough to get you rock hard.

These days kids(and 20 year olds) can download an entire video game for the time that it takes them to beat off to whatever porn fetish they're already desensitized to, and they feel no joy in it.

>>36951220
It's kind of sad that a perfectly healthy person in a first-world country will likely be totally burnt out on wonder by the time they're an adult. I think it was depressing for a lot of young adults who grew up in the 2000s to realize that they're not special, and some kid on the internet is certainly better than them.

>>36951369
>think it was depressing for a lot of young adults who grew up in the 2000s to realize that they're not special, and some kid on the internet is certainly better than them.

That happens to just about everyone from every generation though, especially in the context of their job/career.

>>36951501
But certainly to a stronger degree now than ever.

>>36951519
I doubt it. Generally speaking. If anything social media lets kids and young adults feel more important about themselves with how many upvotes or likes or retweets or comments or views or (You)s they get.

>that feel when so much burnout that you literally feel physically ill all the time, feverish, and having to do basic things is physically painful

>>36951736
same, its not uncommon for me to go two or three days without eating because I can't conjure the energy to even feed myself.

>>36946650
Yes and no. In general yes. But I love my oneitis so much that I'm forced to care about the world I hate and from which I hide, because she lives in it. Most of the time I manage not to think about her, but in my moments of weakness I feel like I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders.

For example in general I despise modern western civilization, most western/white people are stupid, naive, materialistic, hedonistic, nihilistic, hopeless, smug, annoying etc. they ruined my life. But I'm FORCED to hate muslims and care about islamization of Europe because of how they treat women. So every time I hear about muslim rapes I think "in the future it can be her" and I want to fucking genocide them.

And when it comes to women issues I'm downright schizophrenic because of her. On one hand I despise feminism and even hate many women because of how they act and I think they deserve a lot of suffering because of how much suffering they cause. But at the same time she's a woman, and she's practically a goddess for me. so...