Existential/Quarter Life Crisis

[spinspin22]

These past few months I've gone through a pretty bad life crisis. I feel stuck, lost, and hopeless. I am questioning everything and it has gotten too a point where it is debilitating and taking away from every other aspect of my life. Everything is falling apart and I feel hopeless. Reality seems so scary right now. And I don't know what to do other then rant about my problems and hope someone can at least offer some guidance or perspective.

[Originally, this post was a long a** rant that I spent about 15 mins just writing. It was messy and very chaotic, so I took the paint points of the rant and made a bullet-point summary.]

Homeschooling Trauma
No social life / friends
Bad social anxiety
Cheating throughout online school, and forgetting the things I did learn and fear of lack of essential and necessary education before entering college.
Life is bleak and others pity me
FOMO on teenage / HS experiences

Existential Crisis Based on Nihilism
Fear of death
Fear of wasted time / further wasting time and not spending it correctly, not making use of every moment. And not knowing how or why to even spend it correctly.
My existence feels futile and mundane but also confusing without meaning, it all feels meaningless
Fear of dying without knowing everything there is too know about everything
Feeling insignificant and useless in a literal and existential way
Afraid I cannot go back to how I was mentally and physically with these realizations. I feel doomed. I can't continue with regular life anymore, I keep thinking about how it all doesn't matter and how I won't possibly solve all these issues and that I'm just living a distraction. It's all a distraction. All cope. I feel paralyzed. And how can I live knowing how *** up our world is.

Mental Health
Feeling of depression and suicide.
Chronic and debilitating procrastination that has ruined every aspect of life, caused me too go days without doing school work or even basic tasks like showering, and has put me behind in school, my previous goals, basic *** like attending college orientations, changing clothes, sleeping and life in general.
Overeating and excessive weight gain
Extreme insecurities regarding physical appearance (looks, acne, weight, height), have fallen into the "blackpill" rabbit hole and it's made me very depressed.
Loneliness: virgin, friendless, loveless
Cases of ghosting from perceived friends that have happened in more then one instance
Negative experiences with therapy and doubts about its practical, ethical, and scientific legitimacy.
The realization my loved ones may also be struggling just as bad as me

Life Crisis Regarding Future (School, Career, Finances, Personal)
Fear of going too college because of social anxiety and it being a repeat of high-school loneliness and suffering.
Insecurities involving the prestige and price of school as well as major choice not being a good fit, being too hard, and useless
Unsure if college is right for me and feel like I am going in blind
The desire too play college soccer but the reality of not being recruited and me not realistically making my team due to skill issues, development issues, and the fact my school is a high level team and I barely played in HS.
Hopelessness when it comes too dreams I've had as a kid (soccer, music, content creation, entrepreneurship) shattering against reality and never coming true. The realization of probability / determinism / luck / insane skill I may not posses in regards too hopes and dreams / unfairness of capitalist system has killed my hope. I will die never accomplish these and any sliver of hope is delusion. But, I cannot live with this notion. It hurts to realize not everything is possible.
Fear of being average and never accomplishing remarkable feats.
Fears of being doomed to wage slavery and being poor for the rest of my life just like I am now. Afraid I won't be able to provide for my family and / or follow passions and be a failure in life like I already am.
Finding self improvement, goals, and even continuing life itself futile and so confusing with all this hopelessness and uncontrollable factors that seem to not favor me. This is causing me too feel stuck and unsure what my "next steps" are, I'm just living day by day and I am clueless. I want answers.

 

[Zegers]

There's no answers

 

[Celerity]

I have dealt with the insecurities you describe here, and I still struggle with them but to a far lesser degree than I used to. The #1 thing that has helped me is truly realizing the extent to which many (if not most) people have screwed up badly in life and are still likable, respectable people with decent lives. I cultivated this understanding mostly by accident just living life, but I can suggest that group therapy can speed this up. I went to free ACoA (Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families) meetings. It is a very different experience compared to traditional talk therapy. The key is to meet many people and listen to them talk about their life struggles with a sympathetic ear. Giving another person support is not just intrinsically rewarding, but you also feel so much less alone. I found out that I had a lot more in common with other people than I had expected as a loner.

You say you are poor and fear becoming a wage slave. Do you work retail? One of the few advantages of shitty service jobs is your exposure to many different kinds of people with very different life backgrounds and trajectories. You can learn a lot from people about the nature of life and yourself by simply talking to them and paying attention. When I did this, I realized that my life choices, though regrettable, were not as cataclysmic as I had dreamed up and that other reasonable people in similar situations also screwed up in many of the same ways. In other words, I wasn't a weirdo fuckup who had ruined their lives beyond repair. I was just another human being trying to do the best they could with what they had. Even if the intensity of my emotions sometimes fell outside the norm, the anxieties I was reacting to were perfectly normal, and often the people who put up the bravest faces were the ones with the longest list of problems (because they didn't acknowledge them!).

When I look at your list, I see feelings of hopelessness, sure, but the biggest thing that stands out to me is the severe lack of self-esteem. The procrastination also stems from this, and your only only form of self-motivation appears to be extreme self-criticism, which as your bitter unhappiness reveals, is not sustainable. HealthyGamerGG on YouTube recently posted a video about toxic sources of motivation that jive well with what I have learned about it. I could never imagine a life working without that inner voice constantly belittling me, but I was able to adopt some of the ideas he discussed (again, unfortunately by accident/trail & error), and now I can work just as hard without having to resort to the punishing inner critic. As an aside, relying so strongly on the inner critic for motivation also makes it very hard to take necessary risks in life because you are so afraid of making mistakes. This pattern of avoidance can become very crippling as you put off major decisions or impulsively decide upon a bad plan of action to keep anxiety and self-hatred at bay.



I have not watched this one yet, but this just showed up in my newsfeed, and it might interest you considering what you have said here.

 

[The anhedonic one]

W

These past few months I've gone through a pretty bad life crisis. I feel stuck, lost, and hopeless. I am questioning everything and it has gotten too a point where it is debilitating and taking away from every other aspect of my life. Everything is falling apart and I feel hopeless. Reality seems so scary right now. And I don't know what to do other then rant about my problems and hope someone can at least offer some guidance or perspective.

[Originally, this post was a long a** rant that I spent about 15 mins just writing. It was messy and very chaotic, so I took the paint points of the rant and made a bullet-point summary.]

Homeschooling Trauma
No social life / friends
Bad social anxiety
Cheating throughout online school, and forgetting the things I did learn and fear of lack of essential and necessary education before entering college.
Life is bleak and others pity me
FOMO on teenage / HS experiences

Existential Crisis Based on Nihilism
Fear of death
Fear of wasted time / further wasting time and not spending it correctly, not making use of every moment. And not knowing how or why to even spend it correctly.
My existence feels futile and mundane but also confusing without meaning, it all feels meaningless
Fear of dying without knowing everything there is too know about everything
Feeling insignificant and useless in a literal and existential way
Afraid I cannot go back to how I was mentally and physically with these realizations. I feel doomed. I can't continue with regular life anymore, I keep thinking about how it all doesn't matter and how I won't possibly solve all these issues and that I'm just living a distraction. It's all a distraction. All cope. I feel paralyzed. And how can I live knowing how *** up our world is.

Mental Health
Feeling of depression and suicide.
Chronic and debilitating procrastination that has ruined every aspect of life, caused me too go days without doing school work or even basic tasks like showering, and has put me behind in school, my previous goals, basic *** like attending college orientations, changing clothes, sleeping and life in general.
Overeating and excessive weight gain
Extreme insecurities regarding physical appearance (looks, acne, weight, height), have fallen into the "blackpill" rabbit hole and it's made me very depressed.
Loneliness: virgin, friendless, loveless
Cases of ghosting from perceived friends that have happened in more then one instance
Negative experiences with therapy and doubts about its practical, ethical, and scientific legitimacy.
The realization my loved ones may also be struggling just as bad as me

Life Crisis Regarding Future (School, Career, Finances, Personal)
Fear of going too college because of social anxiety and it being a repeat of high-school loneliness and suffering.
Insecurities involving the prestige and price of school as well as major choice not being a good fit, being too hard, and useless
Unsure if college is right for me and feel like I am going in blind
The desire too play college soccer but the reality of not being recruited and me not realistically making my team due to skill issues, development issues, and the fact my school is a high level team and I barely played in HS.
Hopelessness when it comes too dreams I've had as a kid (soccer, music, content creation, entrepreneurship) shattering against reality and never coming true. The realization of probability / determinism / luck / insane skill I may not posses in regards too hopes and dreams / unfairness of capitalist system has killed my hope. I will die never accomplish these and any sliver of hope is delusion. But, I cannot live with this notion. It hurts to realize not everything is possible.
Fear of being average and never accomplishing remarkable feats.
Fears of being doomed to wage slavery and being poor for the rest of my life just like I am now. Afraid I won't be able to provide for my family and / or follow passions and be a failure in life like I already am.
Finding self improvement, goals, and even continuing life itself futile and so confusing with all this hopelessness and uncontrollable factors that seem to not favor me. This is causing me too feel stuck and unsure what my "next steps" are, I'm just living day by day and I am clueless. I want answers.

Welcome to the forum, so sorry this dreadful world has brought you here.
This is an excellent post, and I can relate to a great deal of what you are saying here.
Life is truly frightening, utterly confusing, and downright weird most of the time.
I really don't want to exist anymore, nor have ever wanted to in the first place.

 

[Illidan77]

Err.. I would recommend to try not to think too much and too far..
mindfulness or physical exercise or internet/sosmed/electronic detox or moderation..
probably play soccer just for fun.. hang with a friend.. random chit chat with anybody.. walk aimlessly..

If needed, you can talk to therapist about your anxiety.
And being average is okay (instead of bad/horrible)

Sorry if it's not helping. But wishing you the best