Discussion What therapists are supposed to do in my case?

[KLUF]

I cannot see any meaning in life. Classic story. I think, in its core, life has no purpose, it just emerged when the condtions were right. It's a vicious cycle - the things that were good at surviving contunued to survive and it went on and on and on.

My friend kept listening to me until she told me to go see a therapist (a psychotherapist I suppose) and that she doesn't want to listen to my "whining" anymore. She also doesn't see any meaning in life, but she's afraid of death, especially the unknown beyond, so she just focuses on the pleasures of life and carries on, advising me to follow her example.

However, for me, living for the sake of pleasure seems like... a hollow... life. Yes, it could be fun, but it feels like I'm burning like wood in fireplace if I try to focus on pleasures. I'd have to work very hard to get things I like to counter the existential crisis I'm coexisting with, and this work would outweigh the things I work for.
Even a simple job is not easy for me. You can call me lazy, but without purpose and meaning everything becomes bland and uninspiring.


So, main question, what could therapists do with those who don't have a purpose and don't see any meaning in life?

I'm afraid any therapist in this case will tell me to suck it up and continue existing. OR they'd tell me to find love, family, friends, a job I like.
Love burns me from inside and it feels like it destroys me. If I love I love too much.
So many (most) other people see me as nothing but asset in their plans.

This seems like normal way of life, but... then life has no charm, "it's just good business" for everyone. So we're just living on a giant stock exchange floating in space?

 

[EmbraceOfTheVoid]

They will pretty much spout the same drivel as your friend about focusing on the present moment. Life is full of suffering and finding small pockets of joy often requires a tremendous amount of effort like you said. If your only significant problem is a existential crisis though I'd highly advise against suicide. Many of the people on here never had the opportunity to experience what little good that life has offer; it'd be a waste to take it for granted. I'm going to throw a few quotes your way that are related to your questions.

Yes, most therapists must receive post-graduate education and certification. The education they receive is functionally like that of a priest; e.g. they are taught to view things through a very particular scope - whereas the priest is taught the lens of their particular religion, the therapist-to-be is taught the lens of contemporary psychology and its endless pathologies. Therapy in-and-of itself, is like a confessional in a church, the therapist is the priest and the patient the confessor. The patient confesses their worries and problems much like a would-be blasphemer would confess their "sins".

The sad thing is, "just put your head in the sand" is probably a pretty common response to the OPs concerns not only at mental health resources across the world, but from peers and colleagues; the patient lives in a world where being open about such things in the dehumanized, hyperindividualized public sphere typically only invites scrutiny and further alienation (likely from individuals who are just as alienated and scared as them), which increases their reliance on the therapist as much as it increases their sense of cognitive dissonance, as though they are caught between two realities in a depersonalized limbo. Of course, there's only the one reality as far as we know, but to this patient their inner world has become an enigma and its workings thoroughly mystified by an industry that portends one must go through many years of schooling and certification before they can make sense of the human mind; which is as absurd and circular claim to make as "God works in mysterious ways." - as if that explains why your toaster catching on fire this morning and the delay that caused made you miss your train commute derailing, killing everyone on board. Likewise, it is just as circular to tell someone they have a disease called "depression", which can only be treated by "trained professionals" - trained, of course, in "psychology", an invention of the human mind as much as the phrase "mental illness" with all it's implicit meanings. But the backbone of the entire practice is to be a truthclaim, much like any religion - they suppose "mental illness" to be as sacrosanct as religions hold their Gods; that is, as self-evident and infallible as a physicist would consider thermodynamics.

Perhaps it would be too radical to admit "depression" is an entirely normal reaction to a world in which one exists as a dehumanized, chronically hollowed-out wage slave whose life has been reduced to a series of empty, mindless labor and emptier consumption rituals, comforted only by addictive drugs pushed on them at every turn, and vacuous social ties of similarly hollowed out wageslaves who only know how to monologue and compete; who breathes, eats and shits microplastic, pollution and pesticides, and can't remember the last time they felt somebody actually cared if they lived or died. It'd be far too radical to admit we're living through the slow-motion collapse of the living super organism we call 'civilization' and every case of "depression" is like one little support column showing signs of giving out under the weight of a monstrosity that has become too bloated and labyrinthine for its own good. Then we'd be engaging in reality, giving the "illness" the scope it deserves, and psychology cares not for this.

The reality is, contemporary psychology functions much like a religion or a cult does, in that what one receives from it depends very much on what one puts into it - the power wielded by such organizations are directly correlate to belief of their followers. This is the power of placebo, confirmation bias, and magical thinking. If one considers their reaction to, say, climate change to be "abnormal", they merely have to walk into a therapist's office and their belief will be confirmed - their conscious experience will become a list of "symptoms" of "illness", for which they'll receive "medication". The words, the labels, the pills, they're all momentarily comforting, but none actually deal with the original problem any more than popping an Aspirin cures a raging influenza infection. That's because the entire "mental health industry" is palliative at best - worse yet, it serves at the behest of the state, which benefits massively from an industry that teaches individuals to view their life's problems through a scope that is not only decidedly apolitical but atomized as well.

Take an issue like climate change and this scope fails almost entirely - its sufficiently large-scale enough that the therapist's individualizing lens has no real answer to it. One who is trained in end-of-life therapy may have some more substantial answers that verge into decidedly philosophical territory, but most "by the book" therapists will preach willful ignorance; their role is not to create independent-thinking individuals, community leaders, politically-minded citizens or would-be revolutionaries, because they don't operate in this paradigm; an office vending machine is more communalistic than a therapist's office could ever claim to be. No, their role is to keep people complicit and complacent in the consume/work false dichotomy lifestyle for they are part of the very same paradigm, this being their work as much as preaching is a priests'. The "mental health" industry is obliged to meet the absurdity of the world it exists in and profits off of, and so existential terror becomes "eco-anxiety", another cutesy label which can be "treated" with the right combination of benzodiazepines and willful ignorance, just as a village witch doctor may have once treated "spiritual possession" with a concoction of ayahuasca and a ceremony. Now this ceremony only takes 45 minutes and $200 a week and a monthly trip to the pharmacy. Who ever said capitalism wasn't efficient?!

"Living happily" itself is a myth. Nobody on this floating rock is consistently "happy" every single day unless there is something seriously neurologically wrong with them that makes them that way. Life itself is inherently suffering - this isn't some edgy edict, it's the fundamental nature of the human condition; we are animals, and moreso social animals, which, not unlike elephants, zebras, dolphins, cows, or donkeys, are biologically wired and adapted to chasing short-term fulfillment, and avoiding pain and suffering - to the degree we experience and remember negative feelings and experiences far, far deeper and longer than we do positive experiences. This is the telltale sign of our inescapable animal nature - the hardwiring that makes suffering so inherently unavoidable, and pleasure seemingly so elusive.

Boiling the phenomena of NEETdom down to "mental health" is a reductionistic fairy tale that completely ignores the context of modern life in favor of hyperindividualizing the consequences of that context down to the individual and leaving it there. Speaking of context - the factors you mention are not as much of an immunological force as you imagine. Our society is one rife with celebrity suicides, who so many see as the "winners" of our silly game - they have money, prestige, recognition, fulfillment, endless fancy toys and achievements - and yet still cannot escape the call to the void - which, if anything, speaks to the fact we spend our lives chasing things that really do not make our lives all that worthwhile in the end. Sure, it's nice to be clock in to your 9-5 every day and pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you're doing the right thing like everyone else, but this is the life of an obedient somnambulant - one we are conditioned for in this society. You know the script - go to school, work until you're old, save and scrimp the whole way through, retire, and go rot in an old folks home using the money you've hoarded your whole life. This might be a fulfilling life for an inanimate machine part that cannot feel and is not alive, but for a social animal that needs environmental enrichment and belonging and meaning to feel any kind of consistent fulfilment, it is a slow death. This isn't to say NEETdom is some grand alternative - it is the final consequence of this meaningless life program - narcissized depression and almost total alienation, whereby one practically declares themselves dead to the outside world and escapes deeper and deeper inside themselves as a solace, until the crushing emptiness of isolation and loneliness destroys their ability to experience pleasure and often their will to live. This is typically because of the self-isolating shame that attaches itself to the status. As social animals, we need people in our lives to feel any degree of worthwhile. Interpersonal interaction injects our lives with a kind of meaning and fulfilment that all the technology, distractions and drugs cannot. Unemployment and NEETdom would not nearly be as bad if not for the immense social stigma, and if we could all expect to live in communities we felt a part of, or at the very least had friends who cared about us outside of our job title. Unfortunately, this is not the nature of our hyperindividualized, materialistic, and vain society whereby one increasingly derives their (narcissized) sense of self-worth and status from their ability to consume and brag about said consumption. Instead, we live in a time where over half of the population reports always feeling lonely and having few if any friends, 1/6 of us are on psychotropic drugs, and the suicide rate hasn't been this high in 30 years.

All the same - this doesn't make "successful" people failures. But it also doesn't make NEETs "failures", at least in any individual sense. The failure is society itself - in providing an insane sociocultural script that makes people incredibly sick; if I could call NEETdom anything, anything at all, I'd call it the canary in the coal mine for a society that is providing an age old lifescript that is no longer worthwhile, rewarding, or even meaningful in any sense - nor does it even guarantee the barest physical necessities for participation anymore; recall that wages have been stagnant for 40 years and we have wealth inequality levels that mimic those found prior to the Great Depression, what becomes all the more clear is that modern life is the new Great Depression. This is a dreadfully sick post-meaning society where mass shootings, panoptic surveillance, suicide, opiate abuse, loneliness, and alienation have become as commonplace as psychotropic drugs and psych diagnoses; which, if anything, says nothing more than that the very concept of "mental illness" is a desperate attempt by the system to hold on to it's collapsing validity by pointing at dissidents and shouting "they have some inherent biological illness that makes them this way!" As such, the realm of modern day psychology/psychiatry has become no more than another long arm of the corporatocratic, neoliberal police state, which has a part in allowing modern-day quality of life to continue it's decades long slow bleed to the sociopathic class - the wealthy and powerful.

We must think of NEETdom, depression, and a wide scope of psychological maladies as meaningful signals our bodies are sending us about the ways we conduct our lives nowadays, not as noise that is to be ignored and medicated away.

 

[GoodPersonEffed]

In your case, I don't think therapy will help. Your issue isn't about something in need of healing, it's about your point of view, which is about dissatisfaction, and perhaps also causes dissatisfaction. At the least, it seems your overall situation is unsustainable -- you need to move in some direction, but from your point of view, all directions and moves are pointless. It's not even so much about the goal, such as reaching a summit, but the desire to make the effort to try for the summit you may or may not reach. If you're not willing to make the journey, if you see no point in any summit, and you don't like where you are, what then? Maybe this paraphrase of Joseph Campbell provides a clue: "Change happens when the pain of not changing becomes greater than the pain of change."

I think people are hard-wired to find solutions to problems, that is, to ease discomfort. Your friend found her solution and comfort, but it doesn't work for you. Sometimes the solution and salve is a friend who will bitch along with you and you both feel satisfied that you're right, even if nothing gets resolved. Maybe you'll find philosophy, which, to me, is like religion without god. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus said going to philosophy is like going to the hospital. You may find philosophies that agree with you, you may find some that challenge you, you may find some you disagree with and piss you off -- all of this is good and, I think, necessary.

As for your friend, I hope you have other things to talk about, because it seems this subject is closed. It seems you are in need of support, or a hospital like philosophy. She cannot support you. If you seek a therapist, I'd recommend seeking one who deals with existential issues and who will promise to not try to "fix" you, but have philosophical discussions. Therapists are generally "fixers," though, and you clearly don't want to be fixed, and you don't have to be. I think you're just stuck, and none of the available paths work for or appeal to you. When the pain of not changing becomes too great, you may try one of those paths, or you can act sooner and start trying to forge your own path. It may be a lifelong issue; you may keep going, you may find worldly success, and you may still never be satisfied; if it is the latter, you will be in the company of some brilliant people, not that it brings any solace, because it may be your nature to be inconsolable (and it may not). I think people with such dispositions find some peace in self-acceptance -- they didn't choose to be that way, but it is how they are.

 

[lotus11]

Have you ever tried taking psychedelic drugs? Specifically perhaps ayahuasca. If not I would look into it if I were you. I have taken various drugs in the past but not for a very long time and never ayahuasca. I am considering it as an option myself. But for me, some drugs are probably the most powerful experience I've had. I wouldn't really recommend taking something like coke which is more for recreation. But a strong experience on a drug COULD possibly give you what you need, a change in outlook, a change in your energy, seeing existence in a way you never have before that you could never get from a therapist. If your not familiar with drugs please do a lot of research beforehand because all of them are totally different from one another, and some will be stronger than anything you have experienced.

 

[TAW122]

I think @GoodPersonEffed has made a good post about how therapists aren't likely to help your situation. To add to his point, I'd say to be careful of how you frame the 'life is meaningless' topic because some therapists and mental health professionals can see it as some sign of being mentally ill and from there, they could carry the convo into a risk assessment, thus asking the dreadful questions. "Are you suicidal?", "Are you planning on harming others/yourself?" "Do you have any means to harm others/yourself (e.g. weapons, pills, drugs, guns, etc.)?"

I'm saying this because I had at times (years ago when I saw a mental health professional - which was a waste of time for me), been asked such "risk assessment" like questions and been probed. I felt violated and offended that I was being probed and questioned, while my concerns and claims were being dismissed, invalidated, and being gaslighted for being who I am. While I may have dodged a bullet (metaphorically speaking), others may not be so fortunate. In short, I don't think they would be helpful for you, but if you ever go to one, never let your guard down and treat each encounter like it's an interrogation because what you say, could be used against you.

 

[bpdteacher]

I don't know if I am lucky to have found a good therapist, but she has helped me to see that you can hold both viewpoints of wanting to live and die at the same time. Both are options, both hold power and both are fundamentally your choice at any given moment, regarding suicide anyway.

I can see that suicide is a helpful option to be able to consider at all times because the ability to end my life is something I actually have control over. I'm OK with that for now.

 

[Emily123]

life has meaning if you give it meaning . it is like a piece of white paper . it depends on you how much beautiful is the painting that you are going to draw on it . When you listen/play a nice music it's the meaning of the life . when you watch a nice movie , read a good book or build a nice artwork ,it is the meaning of life . when you love some one and that person also loves you, it will give a true meaning to your life