my working life or lack thereof, a cautionary tale

[Aletheia]

I don't come accross well in an interview situation

Interviews not only terrify me, they irk me no end as well. They're such a silly way of screening applicants. All they do is demonstrate how well you interview, not how well you'd do the job.

And I'm sorry to hear you had such an awful week. Have things picked up any?

 

[Aletheia]

But the one's who matter most are thrilled to see how happy I am these days.

That's so lovely.

"Those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."

I admire (and envy) you for knowing who you want to be, and striking out towards being it.

When you are doing something that truly suits you, you can be proud of it no matter how much it pays.

I think if you can find something that truly suits you, then you are fulfilling your potential.

 

[tenuous~hold]

work is a 4-letter word to me these days. it's caused so many problems in the past. i almost always ended up hating my bosses, & i suppose most of the jobs as well. i am not a pro-authority type in the least, though i know you have to pretend to be to a certain point to get along in that world.

i don't work now. i'm pretty poor (no insurance either), but i get along. don't misinterpret that to mean anything is positive though. i can get through the summer fine (can get outside & do things - at least i don't have to stare at the walls, or the tv, or the computer screen)... but when winter draws near, it is a horrible thing. no, it's not simply SAD. i mean, it's sad, but it's not SAD.

i have zero ambition these days. unless i have something semi-fun planned, which is very very rare, it's hard to really do much of anything. i keep wondering how i'm going to cope living like this...till forever. i have no desire to go on & on in this way - but i have no escape.

i'm about in hermit mode now, & the unfortunate thing is that once you do that for awhile, it seems unnatural to intermingle, or gets way too stressful after a short while. you start not really needing people. for many months out of the year, i tend to do this again & again. i mean, it's not like this is the first year of almost total hibernation - not by a long shot.

i'm not able to "pull myself up by my bootstraps" - i'm not interested in therapy (which never helped - just let me know why i'm so screwed up). i don't want to take a pill (especially w/the side effects) just to want to be alive. there seems to be no answer, & i'm not really looking for one. if the past pretty much determines the future, then i'm f*cked.

anyway, aletheia - you're certainly not alone, & you don't have the worst case of non-working, non-ambition blues. but that doesn't really help that much, does it?

 

[bsammy]

^you sound like me..if i dont have anything i have to do, i dont even leave the house, i see no reason to.i am pretty much in hermit mode too right now and like you said, you start not needing people and thats when it gets scary.ive been like this for years..i seem to have little to no desire for relationships of any kind..i dislike my job and have only a few hobbies to past my down time..my life is an endless cycle of nothingness basically.

'feeling alive' is something that is foreign to me..how does one go about getting this feeling?

if i were you i wouldnt be so against medication..what do you have to lose??

but yes im more coping with living than actually living.been like this for a long time.i dont really know how to live life and enjoy it as sad as that sounds..i dont really enjoy intermingling or socializing so i dont know.

 

[Feathers]

A vocation is what I most envy in others.

Well, what annoys you most in the world? Or what do you wish would change most?

Plenty of ways to do something about it, even if anonymously and without contact to people.

Even at this forum (and elsewhere), people are helping each other...

 

[tenuous~hold]

if i were you i wouldnt be so against medication..what do you have to lose??.

most anti-depressants will make a weight-gaining-type person put on extra pounds, & there's no way i'm gonna take that chance. weight is one of the things that depresses me most in life, so it couldn't/wouldn't help. & the one kind that's not supposed to add weight just doesn't work for me.

i've tried different types before, with unpleasing results. not to mention, i have no insurance.

 

[OceanMist]

My situation is very similar, except that when I quit my engineering career 12 years ago it was because I wanted to quit. I hated it. And I've felt no shame or remorse about it... I'm just not career-oriented. Many people aren't.

But I agree that it has an isolating effect, because I couldn't really expect my school friends to understand why I didn't pursue a professional career like they did. I had one friend in particular, who I kept in touch with... I never really told him what it is that I "do". While he's been out managing construction projects and dealing with executive stress, I've been at home, mostly relaxing and taking it easy, dabbling in philosophical pursuits, working on a few minor renovation projects, making a bit of rental income... gardening, playing with my cats and dogs, walking around in the woods, salvaging old junk, tinkering with this and that, enjoying the sunshine, talking to people on the internet, learning about things that interest me, laughing with my sister, helping my mother with stuff, and a bunch of other day-to-day items that the passage of time has nicely blurred.

I have no resume and I don't care. Financially I'm ok, and my expenses are almost non-existent. Socially I'm a recluse, yes, but that's something I can work on, in my own time. And as for my school friend, well he's burnt out now from his high-pressure job. He's no longer the fun-loving person I once knew. I know that not all professionals end up like that, but I certainly would have. Looking at him is like looking at another version of myself, had I stayed in a job that I hated.

So you and I have this parallel in our lives, but we obviously feel very differently about it. Maybe we could try to figure out where the difference lies?

I love this perspective, and not enough people have it.

I believe it's because throughout many of our younger years, our parents and school (teachers and everything else involved with school) pound into our head that we have to get a career, that we have to "do something with our lives"(meaning to them, the most prestigious and socially acceptable job possible that pays high) or we'll wind up broke and alone.

Throughout all of school, they keep doing that. They keep trying to cement the concept that if you fail to find a career or complete school, you'll wind up broke and alone.

I think this leads many people on a path of too much stress and seriousness. Sure, a career is a good thing to have. But, they don't tell you about other parts of life. There is more to life than a career.

I admire your ability to think for yourself. That's what we should all do. I think a lot of society has this view that doctor=super success story, but janitor=loser. So, just because one person makes more money than the other the one with less money must be a loser? It's just f'd up, is what it is. Many people will place self-worth of a person on the size of their wallet.

What they forget about is the most important thing: Is that person happy? I wish our teachers and parents had put this above everything else, because that's what really matters.

I guess nobody ever really taught me this. I had to learn it myself. My parents still to this day are caught up with the whole career "success" thing. I'm a failure to them.

You know what? I could care less. They just don't understand the concept of life should be lived to achieve happiness, not a career success story.

 

[Aletheia]

Thank you, coyote, so much for sharing.

but, of course, day-to-day life got in the way of doing the things i really wanted to do

I know a number of people who want to write, but life always gets in the way. It's not so much that they don't have time as they don't have time to think.

when you're married, and someone else is depending on you, it's hard to shirk responsibility

For a long time my brother has wanted to do his doctorate and lecture in history and wear leather patches on his elbows and smoke a pipe.

But... wife, kids. Money.

and pretty soon you've forgotten what you had started out to do with your life

You can end up in a job, in a career, more or less accidentally, moulded by prevailing circumstance and the winds of chance. And then that's how people see you evermore.

so you throw it all away

What was it you threw it away for?

and pretend you don't have those dreams

::

 

[glesga24]

I went to college to study electronics, but couldn't cope with the social interactions, so I dropped out. I am constantly mad at myself for not being able to do what- as I see it- what people find so easy.

I am confident in the work I do when I do it, just not in a place with so many personalities.

At least you finished your course- and you should be proud of that. I might sound ignorant here but could you not try and get an on line job to try and boost your job confidence.

 

[coyote]

What was it you threw it away for?

love

and when that was gone....

i shucked the rest out of spite

 

[Aletheia]

I got to know (slightly) this guy in Te Anau who was not only ridiculously good looking, but ran his own successful sky diving business as well.

He had a wife, and a young daughter whom he adored, but he fell in love with another woman and left his wife for her. When the other woman subsequently left him, the bottom dropped out of his world. He said that he spent three days curled foetal on the floor of his kitchen.

(And because he appeared on the outside so successful, nobody would take his pain seriously, which is probably why he was talking to me.)

 

[bsammy]

^^^Karma is what happened to him..

 

[coyote]

I got to know (slightly) this guy in Te Anau who was not only ridiculously good looking, but ran his own successful sky diving business as well.

He had a wife, and a young daughter whom he adored, but he fell in love with another woman and left his wife for her. When the other woman subsequently left him, the bottom dropped out of his world. He said that he spent three days curled foetal on the floor of his kitchen.

(And because he appeared on the outside so successful, nobody would take his pain seriously, which is probably why he was talking to me.)

sounds remarkably familiar

and yes, karma IS a bitch

 

[Aletheia]

What devastated him was that he'd made this huge sacrifice, and then to have it come to nothing, to be left with nothing....

 

[coyote]

What devastated him was that he'd made this huge sacrifice, and then to have it come to nothing, to be left with nothing....

yeah, i got that same t-shirt

 

[MikeyC]

What devastated him was that he'd made this huge sacrifice, and then to have it come to nothing, to be left with nothing....

He would've had to have known that going in. It's very unfortunate that it didn't work out for him, but he essentially put all of his eggs in one basket and hoped that they didn't break on him. He will pick himself up but he's got some work to do.

I'm not castigating him. People take risks all the time. It just didn't work out this time and I'm sure he'll come out with more knowledge than before.

EDIT: Although his ex-wife would be hurting big time. She's another loser in this game.

 

[Aletheia]

no, it's not simply SAD. i mean, it's sad, but it's not SAD.

I think I do have SAD, which is ironic, because I prefer winter to summer. But every time I have fallen in love has been in the summer, and winters I hibernate. Doesn't help that the bad weather gives me yet one more reason not to leave the house.

i'm about in hermit mode now, & the unfortunate thing is that once you do that for awhile, it seems unnatural to intermingle

And the more you hermit, the more the few friends you do have drift away, until you're bereft of opportunities to mingle at all.

just to want to be alive

Yeah, this.

 

[tenuous~hold]

it's just gotten worse & worse over the years - the hermit thing. i read a wise line on this site awhile back & it went something like this: "how can you expect someone to want to hug you when you're telling the whole world to go away?" i had to read it a few times since i related to it, A LOT.

i am pretty damn tired of feeling like crap, & since it's been such a downward spiral into feeling so useless & hopeless, i am trying to (for once in my life) drag myself back up again.....

it's related to "the secret" but i should post something about that elsewhere. it might get lost in here & i think it's worth talking about separately.

 

[bsammy]

^^ive noticed that once you start to become a hermit, it slowly snowballs and just gets worse.you start withdrawing and old friends get tired of asking you to come out, at first you feel relieved to sink into your own head.then after years of hermitland, your old friends are long gone(who can blame them?), you have no new friends and if you are anything like me, it gets so bad that you cant even find a reason to leave the house unless to work or go to store to get food.when it comes to socializing, it gets much harder as well as you almost completely lose the desire to socialize(i almost dont even see the point anymore) and 2, you dont have much to talk about when you have a non-existent social life or life in general.

i cant remember the last time i felt 'alive' besides the rush i get from running sprints.thats not the feeling im looking for.

 

[Kiwong]

I guess I have developed into a hermit too. I've tried to re-connect with the world of people this last few years as a necessity to be able to be involved in my passions, which involves fitting in with a community of people drawn together by a shared interest.

It's been very hard, with a lot of pain involved, and I suspect it will continue to be like that. Relating to people is a roller coaster. With practice it gets easier. So am really only a part time hermit, and I really enjoy that part of my life.