I've lived as a NEET for many, many years and I hate it, and always have. I find it miserable, monotonous, boring, and lonely, however, I know that you (or others who have experienced it) may feel differently, it's just my personal experience and feeling of it. I really would love to be busy and doing things - when I dream about my ideal life, I'm not just sitting in my room, I'm established and achieving things, and happy about it. But I can't seem to muster any passion or will to do anything. It's not clear if there's even a path that exists that ends with me actually being happy.
I'm studying atm, because it reached a point where things became desperate and I felt like I had to choose to do something, because I had spent so many years doing absolutely nothing and spending 24 hours a day in my bedroom, going insane. But studying hasn't made my life feel any more worthwhile, and I only really chose to do it for prestige/financial reasons anyway. The problem is that it seems like without a degree, the available jobs are pretty much just retail, care home, or warehouse, none of which I like the sound of very much (I know there are other things but these three seem to come up the most, by far). I would maybe be ok with warehouse work but I worry about the physical demands/costs of it. I don't drive either so I can't do any driving jobs, and that also limits what jobs I can even apply for based on location. And now it even seems that degrees aren't very valuable and you need even more to "impress the employer" (god I hate that phrase, makes me feel like a circus animal or something). Though there's no alternative, the competition of job hunting is still disgusting to me. I applied and interviewed a few times for several positions but I've had a really shitty experience every time, I get violently anxious and never really pass the interview stage.
It's bizarre in a way, but the very fact that one must work or else they suffer, is something that offends me on a really deep level. I find something tyrannical about the fundamental narrative of life of "you can't get x unless you do y" which is a result of the cause-effect nature of reality, and for some reason I can't seem to reconcile with it, emotionally. All in all, I'm just tired of not knowing where I need to go or what exactly I need to do that will finally make this existence feel like a blessing instead of a curse. I have neither the energy nor the courage to try out people's recommendations for a better life, and it feel like at this point I'm just so full of resentment that I don't even want to try. I often hear that "you have to just persist and keep trying" and I think this is absolutely true but I just don't get motivated by it. When I fail in anything I get really upset, and that is disastrous, because failure is inevitable in this life. To live happily it seems you must be perfectly content with failure, which I'm not. I will hold a grudge about a failure for years or even decades after it happened. The whole concept of effort and reward is just so fucked up in my head in a way I can't even put fully into words.
Why didn't happiness come to me? Why am I always told/is it truly the case that I have to toil away for it? These are questions I so badly want answered, yet I'll almost certainly die with them being unanswered.
