man who needs therapy discovers he may need therapy
Then discovers he can’t afford therapy
just so you know, it’s a lot more affordable than you might think, and many therapists offer reduced rates for people on low incomes
The best therapy is to just go in the forest and fight a bear. It’ll put some hair on your chest and it’ll put things in perspective.
you can do both
I doubt fighting a bear would have helped me overcome my trauma from being abused as a kid tbh
I don’t know. Ever win a fight? I felt like the gorilla god king of the block for like a week after beating up someone who attacked me. It was better then cocaine
I’m sorry that happened to you and I’m glad you found the support and care that you needed now please go fight a bear.
you gotta touch the butt that’s the trick
Yeah but now you’ve got someone to make happy.
Anon is on the hedonic treadmill
yea
We lost the cultural appreciation for selflessness and duty. Caring for loved ones is hard work at times. Stressful. Maybe even thankless at times. But it’s incredibly fulfilling. That meaning is often worth more than the fleeting feeling of happiness we primarily seek out in the modern world. Giving to others is important for our psyche. Not in the abstract, like donating to a far-away charity, but in helping someone in your life. Children are a timeless way to find meaning in life. Yes it’s hard work, but damn do they put everything into perspective. If you don’t want kids, volunteer. Meet your neighbours and see if you can help them somehow. Pick up trash in your community. Run for local office.
Anon seeks meaning in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.
The key to happiness is having zero expectations. Seeking it in others is probably one of the worst places to look.
Lonliness is a significant driver of depression in modern society. Finding community and relationships can absolutely help. In fact friends and partners are generally the first people we need to talk to about our feelings.
Honestly, having good friends is super important, especially friends that you can have fun with on a compatible level. I have had over half a decade with no friends that I could do anything fun with, More like situationfriendships. Luckily I now have a friend that I can have consistent fun with, and we both have never felt better. Fun is so important in life, especially with other people.
So, how do I find them? I’m not in school and it’s not like I live in a capital city. I also want to keep my privacy so online services asking for pictures and full names is a no go too. Finding friends online is hard too, since I don’t use discord or the other mainstream apps. Not to mention my social and general anxiety.
I guess how I found my friend was really complicated and a bit of an adventure. But what I would do was go to a local casual sporting event (street dodgeball) in my city, albeit sketchy but cool. Didn’t even have to talk. I also had really bad social anxiety. Being able to talk to homeless people on a regular basis for me made it a lot easier to talk to people who make 6 figures.
I would say if you can find a card/tabletop game shop that you can hangout there for free would be a good place. In a place like that, a lot of people are in the same boat. Pushing through the entry barrier is the hardest part, and it does not always work out. But when it does work, then you can carry on from there. Also see if the shop has some events you can attend. (I’m also a paranoid person, to the point that I think the store music is trying to get me)
Maybe also look for local sporting events. It doesn’t even have to be super intense or clean or dirty.
What helped my social anxiety is my friend said that muggers look for people who don’t look people in the eye or have confidence or smile. So, when I walk by people, I look them in the eye and smile. So now instead of feeling powerless and a social outcast, now I get to see them as wrong and muggable. You will have to power through it first. And then you will eventually get a person smiling back, or even starting a conversation. You’ll be suprised how different other people are and how they think of the world.
Anyway, thank you for coming to my TedEx Talk!
Its rare to find a friend who will try new things. Super great to just say, “lets do this thing!” and them to emphatically agree 😁 I used to have no choice but to do those things alone.
The key to happiness is having zero expectations.
Nope. Can’t agree with you. I don’t understand life, so I never know what to expect. Everyday I wake up and wonder what fresh new hell will await me in the headlines of the news, as the president continues to amaze me, and leave me in awe in all the new and creative ways he finds to globally embarass our whole country, and bring with it a new form of torture for all it’s citizens.
The REAL secret to happyness is to have your butthole licked while riding a jetski, and eating an ice cream sunday.
The key to happiness is having zero expectations.
I disagree. Zero expectations leads to rotting if you’re down already. As I understand it, zero expectations almost equals zero trust.
Zero expectations leads to rotting if you’re down already.
“Expectations” are different from “goals”. One of the easiest paths to chronic unhappiness is to treat happiness as an expectation.
Happiness is fundamentally transitory and unsuitable for a goal, although setting up the circumstances for it to occur regularly isn’t a bad idea. Being at peace, satisfied, not bored, and others relevant to you are much more consistent and achievable, and you only need to rely on yourself to do so (happiness is often circumstantial).
Happiness is fundamentally transitory and unsuitable for a goal
Oh, yeah, sorry, I didn’t mean to imply “don’t treat happiness as an expectation; treat it as a goal!”, because like you said, it’s fundamentally incompatible with what a goal is. I like to consider the SMART criteria, and even though it fails all of them (except ‘T’ if you insist you have a deadline to be happy), it fails ‘A’ the hardest, because a goal as such is literally defined by how it’s oriented toward taking an action. Even if you think your goal is “I will be happy by doing X today”, then – as long as you think you can do X and have a plan – what you actually have is the goal “I will do X today” with the faulty, tacked-on expectation of “and that will make me feel happy”.
Call me pedantic, but that’s not zero expectations. I 100% agree on the happiness expectations to depression pipeline, but zero expectations to me is expecting a ROI of 0, that is expecting any effort to be wasteful.
expectations / reality
The key to happiness is having zero expectations.
anon rediscovers stoicism
anon rediscovers stoicism
Don’t slap a western coat of paint onto older teachings.
One has the right to perform their expected duty,
But not to the right to the fruits of action;
One should not consider oneself as the doer of the action,
Nor should one attach oneself to inaction.- Bhagavad Gita 2 : 47
According to Wikipedia, the bhagavad gita was written around 200 BC, whereas stoicism originated in 400 BC. Admittedly, this was just the result of some very cursory research, the Buddhist philosophy could go back further than the writing itself, but it seems to me like they independently arise around the same time (that being around 200 years difference, lol) but you really need to be careful saying stuff like that. I’ve made the same mistake dozens of times where I confidently state something, only for it to be disproven by a minute of googling.
The Bhagavad Gita is a synthesis work of even older teachings going back a thousand years before it was written in that book.
Depression a motherfucker
Truly. Hopefully this post judges people towards treatment; people want you, they want you to be better, they want to share their love with you.
Me: terminally paranoid
Uhhhhhh, people want to share their love with me??? No. That sounds suspicious as hell. It’s a trap. What’s their endgame? I know they aren’t after me lucky charms, because that cereal is disgusting, so I never buy it.
Still…these “people” sound demented in the head.
I have a friend who is depressed but I sadly feel like I can’t say or do anything to help, even his meds don’t seem to help much
As someone who has treatment-resistant depression: keep inviting your friend. Keep asking them for help when it makes sense to do so. Even if they cancel a lot or are quiet when they do show up. That’s helping a lot.
People need community.
Anon got his first date, yay!!!
Honestly, they might not be so compatible, and she might be thinking the same thing, just she is still doing the social script you usually do on dates.
I’ve only been with 2 people so far, and this is how it ended up as well. Only I am also doing the social script too.
Also socially, it is really nice to have a partner you are dating in public, let alone a cute/hot one. Felt like the center of the room everywhere I went.
My advice to anon is to continue for at least another date or 2 and see what happens. If you get the spark again or really like her company anyway, then there is no need to breakup. If you start to not feel comparable, then move on, because she likely feels the same, since it’s only been 3 days.
Also, anon needs to know the difference between love and infatuation, because he was probably feeling more infatuation (which is fine).
Too real…
Broke up with her over text because I feel nothing.
Years later I regret what I have done feeling like I made a mistake.
Fully prepared to accept the consequences of my actions and ready to live alone forever.
Dude needs therapy.
He’s a nut! Crazy in the coconut!
What does that mean?
He was white as a sheet, and he also made false teeth
Yeah I’m not sure what to tell yall, but happiness comes from within. If you attach it to mental formations (i.e. “The only way I can be happy is with a boyfriend/girlfriend”), then you’re gonna have a bad time.
Happiness and unhappiness come from both internal and external sources. The problem is making yourself RELIANT on the external.
happiness comes from within
In my experience, having a constant companion has a positive feedback loop. People you can continuously interact with - joking, catching up, eating together, helping one another out, just Netflix’n’Chilling… it’s reaffirming.
But it is a loop. You don’t just wake up happy forever. There’s ups and downs. There’s psychical and emotional adjustments. You’re not immune to despair. You just have someone you can be glum around who - ideally - fills you in on the lows and rides with you for the highs.
If you’ve got a bunch of mental baggage going into a relationship, your partner (ideally) helps you unpack that shit and dispose of it. Or, at least, shows you their own baggage, so you know you’re not alone. It doesn’t just go away instantly, but over time you can put it behind you precisely because you’ve got someone else in your life affirming your own worth.
I agree with all that, but I’ll also say that getting started fixing your issues first is a hugely valuable thing. If you haven’t it’s so easy to think love will solve all your problems while not even having the tools to deal with your own emotions and baggage.
You need people, we all do, and we deteriorate rapidly without people. But romantic relationships are really easy to screw up by being emotionally unhealthy
Idk, I’ve never been happier than the six months I was dating this girl who’s sex drive was almost as high as mine. Never been able to get there on my own and the other aspects of my life have been way better since then. Sadly her mental health was a mess and that relationship didn’t last.
You’d also be ‘happy’ if you did cocaine for those six months. You are confusing getting high from dopamine hits with happiness.
All happiness is just dopamine hits. It’s all stimulus and chemicals regardless of what’s triggering it.
No, it’s not. Happiness is the action of self regulation. Happiness is choosing broccoli over a cookie because you know it is better for you. And then later choosing to have the cookie after you’ve had proper good food.
Someone tied up to a machine being dosed by chemicals to ‘feel happy’ would not be happy. Just like drug addicts, and other addicts, who are constantly chasing highs, are not happy people. They are fucking miserable, forever chasing and defining their entire life by those dopamine hits.
What you are describing is how children are. They would choose the cookie every time, eat cookies all day, get sick and throw up, and then get angry and sullen about it and still do it all over again. Because they have no ability to regulate, they just act in a state of pure dopamine seeking.
So we’re just making up what words mean now?
Fake: anon got a gf
Gay: anon is broken and lonely because he doesn’t have a bfJoking aside, a lot of these feelings come from childhood problems, whether we understand the triggers or not. It sucks because stuff that happens then carries over for the rest of our lives and it gets progressively harder to fix the older you get. People like this are the symptoms of a not quite functional family. Such families are the symptom of a broken, diseased society.
Lmao same 🤣🤣🤣
