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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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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Disclaimer: The original journal pages is 12 pages long and I am still writing it, it will probably reach 30-40 pages and it is not written in English. This post is a summary of my experiences and previous writings, put together with the help of ChatGPT and subsequently edited by me. I apologize in advance for any lingering ChatGPTese. The experiences, feelings, and questions are entirely my own; I just used AI to translate and help me to organize my thoughts into something more coherent and readable.
TEXT:
I've been writing in these Wellness Threads almost since the beginning when we were on SSC. About five years ago, I stopped posting because I decided that I needed to change my life and cut my Internet usage almost to zero. I don't even remember my original username. Well, five years have passed. I'm now 31, and I'm back because, despite all my promises to myself, very little has fundamentally changed.
I spent most of my twenties as something resembling a hikikomori, basically missing out every single social milestone that makes your 20s the building blocks of your life. Between the ages of 19 and 29, I essentially withdrew from society. I occasionally attended university, passed exams, and maintained a minimum level of contact with the outside world. But I had no meaningful social life, no romantic experiences, no independence, and very little to show for those ten years. A 31 y.o. virgin with no friends and no story. An incel, in modern lingo. Most of my time was spent at home, consuming entertainment, overeating, browsing the Internet, and promising myself that tomorrow would be the day I finally changed. Obviously that day never actually came.
I don't want to pretend that absolutely nothing has happened since I last posted here. I got my first job at 29 (always a great shame, I try to always disengage when we talk about our past lives with colleagues) working as a seasonal hotel receptionist in a 4 star hotel during the summer season. In the meantime, I've continued studying marine engineering. I've managed to save some money. For the first time in years, I was regularly interacting with people, fulfilling responsibilities, and participating in something resembling ordinary adult life. These are genuine improvements, and I recognize that. But they haven't translated into the kind of transformation I was hoping for. Especially, the more I keep going, the more I feel the pull to look back and despair.
When I'm not working, I tend to fall back into the same habits: spending hours browsing the Internet, watching television, eating junk food, neglecting my physical health, procrastinating on my studies, and fantasizing about the person I could become, this is when I do not think of suicide, obviously. I make ambitious plans, follow them for a day or two, and then abandon them. Sometimes I spend weeks or months doing practically nothing. I'm still overweight, still living with my parents, still lacking the discipline and consistency to pursue my goals. Still planning my suicide.
The worst part is the loneliness. I've never had what I would consider a genuine, lasting friendship. Since childhood, I've consistently found myself on the periphery of other people's lives. I've had classmates, acquaintances, colleagues, and people I genuinely cared about, but those relationships rarely survived the circumstances that brought us together. I've always felt like an extra in other people's stories. For a brief period, I thought things might finally be changing. Two colleagues seemed to take a genuine interest in me. We spent time together outside work, and they even took me out on my thirtieth birthday. It was the first time in years that I felt someone might actually want me in their life. A few weeks later, however, those relationships began to collapse, and eventually both stopped speaking to me. I still don't fully understand what happened.
That experience devastated me more than I would have expected. For a moment, I had caught a glimpse of the life I'd always wanted, only to lose it again.
I'm also gay, have never been in a relationship, and am still a virgin at 31. My relationship with my appearance and sexuality is complicated by years of shame, body-image problems, and social isolation. Let's just say that if there was a conversion pill I would have gladly taken it in my 20s. I struggle to imagine anyone finding me attractive, let alone wanting to build a life with me. When I look in the mirror I just feel extreme shame and disgust. I dissociate and sometime I vividly imagine myself as a more attractive version of myself.
However, what hurts even more than my current circumstances is the knowledge of everything I've missed. I cannot stop thinking about my adolescence and twenties. The friendships I never formed, the parties I never attended, the relationships I never experienced, the adventures I never had, the memories I never created. I watch people my age discussing their lives, their partners, their old friends, their youthful mistakes, and I experience an almost unbearable combination of envy, grief, and regret. The lack of a story
I know the standard response: "You're only 31. You still have plenty of time." I cannot accept that. Not intellectually, nor emotionally. I don't simply want to have new experiences at 31. I want to have had those experiences at 16, 20, and 25, because I believe they would have helped me become a different person today. I feel as though I've missed the formative experiences necessary to develop a normal adult personality. I cannot go back and give my younger self the life he deserved. And I don't know how to mourn something I never had.
As I said before, I also struggle with severe self-criticism, anxiety, and depressive thoughts. I seriously contemplated suicide, including making plans for my thirtieth birthday: I wanted for the date fo my birth and death to coincide.
The frustrating thing is that I still have ambitions. Very large ones, in fact.
I want to finish my engineering degree with excellent grades, become genuinely competent in a technical profession, achieve financial independence, and perhaps eventually build my own business. I want to become physically fit, attractive, well-dressed, knowledgeable, cultured, and socially confident. I want close friendships, intimacy, meaningful experiences, and the feeling that I'm an active participant in my own life rather than someone watching it pass by.
I have relatively few material obstacles at the moment. I'm not working year-round, I live with my parents, I have some savings, and I have a great deal of free time. On paper, I have an excellent opportunity to rebuild my life.
And yet I cannot seem to make myself do it. I've tried the usual advice about starting small, setting achievable goals, and gradually building habits. I understand the reasoning behind it. My difficulty is that I repeatedly abandon even modest commitments, and once I miss a day, the whole structure seems to collapse. At the same time, I have an almost pathological need to excel. I don't simply want to become an average functioning adult. I want to make something exceptional of myself, partly because I feel an overwhelming need to compensate for the years I've wasted. Consequently, anything less than a complete transformation feels inadequate, which probably contributes to my paralysis.
So I'm returning to this thread to ask for advice, particularly from people who have experienced something similar or have managed to recover from prolonged stagnation, isolation, or depression.
I have a few questions, fully knowing that the answers will not change anything, I've already tried. I just feel so alone that I think I will snap, so a parasocial Internet connection seems like the less worst deal:
How do you reconcile yourself to irretrievably lost time? Is it possible to grieve an unlived youth without allowing that grief to poison whatever future remains? In my experience that is not possible.
How does someone with almost no social experience build genuine friendships and intimacy in his thirties? In my case I do not think it is possible, I've never had friends even as a child. Why would I make friends at almost 32, while other people are building families and getting on with their career.
I'm not expecting anyone here to solve my problems, nor am I looking for reassurance that everything will somehow work out. I know it will not. I've spent enough years reassuring myself that tomorrow will be different.
I disappeared from these threads for three years because I wanted to come back as someone who had finally turned his life around. Instead, I'm back asking essentially the same questions.
If you are not inherently wired for friendship/romance, then you haven't "missed" or "lost" anything. As a person in a vaguely similar position, I regret wasting effort on trying to make friends (1 2 3). I should have never bothered, but I keep failing to learn my lesson. (Is this an appropriate place to use the "⁎taps the sign⁎" meme? I don't really like it, but maybe that's because I don't properly understand it.)
There are a hundred different solo hobbies from which a person can derive enjoyment. (Even for a person suffering from depression severe enough to prevent him from performing those hobbies, passive pseudo-hobbies may be worth living for.)
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