There's nothing left I enjoy. I try to wring some amount of enjoyment out the things that I used to, but I simply can't anymore. That doesn't stop me from continuing to try in the delusional hope that I'll somehow start enjoying them again, but realistically I know that that's just not going to happen.
Damn, it almost hurt to read that. This sums up exactly what my situation has been for so long now. In my case, I've also been hanging onto this laughably delusional hope that someday I'll just get up and all the things I used to enjoy, will somehow magically do so again. And yet, of course, it never happens. Every rational part of me knows that it never will, but I just keep on naively expecting it to occur regardless. If it weren't for anhedonia kneecapping my relatively stable life as a hermit, then I truly feel that I wouldn't much mind everything else. The loneliness, the depression, the anxiety. All these things would still plague me, but if anhedonia weren't hanging around my neck like a fucking 10 tonne mill stone forcing me flat to the ground, then at least, day to day, things would be a lot more manageable for me.
15 years ago I still struggled with everything I do now, but the main difference was that I could still distract myself away from it. Video games in particular were my go-to mind killer. They kept me satisfied and mesmerized, until slowly, one piece at a time time, the whole thing was ripped away from me. Life wouldn't even allow me what little I had. Those few solitary hobbies that served to make my existence somewhat bearable. In this sense, anhedonia was the final 'coup de grace' to knock me spiraling downwards into pits of misery that dwarfed everything that came before. Nothing to dull the pain anymore. Nothing for me to do, but endure.
I still partake in these hobbies to an extent, but they'll never be what they used to be. For all intents and purposes, escapism is now lost to me forever. Before I could play a game and dull the pain, but now it does almost nothing. Everything feels futile and useless. I sit there and, for the most part, I feel just as awful as I always do. Everything's boring and tedious. It kills the time, but that's all it does. There was once a time where a video game was all I ever needed. I've waited nearly 8 years that to somehow be the case again, instead of the tiresome hassle it mutated into on account of the anhedonia.
TL:DR; Anhedonia destroyed and defiled everything that made my pitiful life even remotely bearable and it might as well be the devil incarnate.
I keep trying to do the things "normal" people enjoy and I am left feeling awful at each attempt. Not a lot of smiles in my life.
Yep, same here. Tried exercising; that didn't work. Tried writing; that didn't work. Tried shifting my attention elsewhere to other random things, and what do you know; that didn't work either. Fucking hate how full of shit most normals are. They confuse anhedonia with just being "bored". They can't understand that just "doing something else" doesn't address the core problem at all. Anhedonia literally destroys your capacity to feel satisfaction in anything.
Be that as it may, I want to comment on what a fucking sham exercise is. "Oh it'll make you feel better and release feel good endorphins!".
BULL. FUCKING. SHIT. Never once have I felt better after working out. Never once have I actually looked forward to doing it. It's just as much a struggle for me to do as anything else. Without a decent life worth living, it means
NOTHING! This is precisely what normals take for granted. Their lives are rich with possibilities and worthwhile reasons to justify the actions they undertake. Their efforts are acknowledged and rewarded with praise and adulation from those around them. Even if they aren't, it still means something to someone, or otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. And what do I have to justify the effort? Oh yeah, that's right.
NOTHING! It's like a multi-millionaire advising someone barely able to make ends meet, to just take a quick trip to a deluxe resort in the Maldives to relax and unwind. Normals people are just
THAT fucking out of touch with themselves and, by extension, reality itself.
