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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   648 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 19, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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  • 28
  • CS degree (not a good dev)
  • never had a job
  • low 7 figures saved up (grinded online from age 12 with minimal spending)
  • have social anxiety (moderate, but can be severe in certain situations)
  • still live with parents
  • no nearby close friends, everyone scattered around the globe
  • have never been in a serious relationship. Longest one was 3 months - 2 months long distance, 1 in person. Been completely bitchless for the past 3 years.

That’s me. I recently got injured and was forced to be sedentary and homebound for months. That put me in deep depression and some sort of quarter life crisis. I’ve realized I’ve been living a pretty shitty life ruled by social anxiety. Sitting home all the time, turning down experiences, friendships and relationships left and right, while lying to myself about doing it not because of my condition, but because ‘I’m grinding.’ Now I’m feeling I’ve missed out on so much of my youth. I fucking regret it, but it’s not helpful to lament about the past because I can’t change shit, and at least instead of being a useless slob I did something with my time. Now what the hell do I do now? I’m thinking of going all in on treating the root cause of the problem - my social anxiety. Therapy (CBT), although I’m not too hopeful on its helpfulness, some light meds/supplements (no SSRIs, Propranolol, Selank, vitamins), exercise. And of course exposure therapy. Not sure how to go about it - get some type of public facing job, volunteer or maybe solo travel and live in hostels? Once that’s unfucked, I will move onto other things like my (non-existent) career and relationships. Any advice, thoughts, input on my plan?

Try The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. You already did the hard part; you have enough money that you can afford retire and live in a low cost of living area indefinitely, and you are still young. The question now is, what do you fill the rest of your life with? Strongly advise against getting a career; even if it's something you are truly passionate about, nothing kills passion like the demands of a job.

From Chapter 4, System Reset:

What Do You Want? A Better Question, First of All

Most people will never know what they want. I don’t know what I want. If you ask me what I want to do in the next five months for language learning, on the other hand, I do know. It’s a matter of specificity. “What do you want?” is too imprecise to produce a meaningful and actionable answer. Forget about it.

“What are your goals?” is similarly fated for confusion and guesswork. To rephrase the question, we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

Let’s assume we have 10 goals and we achieve them—what is the desired outcome that makes all the effort worthwhile? The most common response is what I also would have suggested five years ago: happiness. I no longer believe this is a good answer. Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse. There is a more precise alternative that reflects what I believe the actual objective is.

Bear with me. What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness? No. Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness. Crying out of happiness is a perfect illustration of this. The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is—here’s the clincher—boredom.

Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all. When people suggest you follow your “passion” or your “bliss,” I propose that they are, in fact, referring to the same singular concept: excitement.

This brings us full circle. The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”

I've actually read this book a long time ago when I was right out of highschool, and it was probably one of the reasons, aside from having social anxiety and avoiding any additional social pressure like potential job interviews and so on, why I continued pursuing doing my own thing. And I completely agree with what he says in this excerpt. I genuinely enjoyed what I was doing. It's probably why I've lasted so long head down, minimum social interactions, just focusing on increasing my bank account. Problem is it's not that exciting to me anymore. I've had an imaginary $ target in my head. As I keep getting closer to it, I'm realizing literally nothing will change in my life once I reach it. I can already afford 80% of things I'd possibly want at this exact moment. I'm realizing I want recognition, I want to be an expert at something. I think I can coast by for a few years by finding excitement in simple things like learning new skills (riding a motorcycle is already on the list) or doing stuff like skydiving, but I imagine it all gets old fast. I still have to fix my main issue before I worry about any of this though. Maybe while I'm in the process of doing so, I'll find excitement in something sustainable that can last many years and thoughts of having a career will dissipate, but I'm not there yet.

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