A few weeks after my 16th birthday, I made a new friend at my new school, Steve. Within months we’d become best friends and basically inseparable. Just platonic friends but we did everything together, went to music festivals, had our first foreign holiday together, took drugs together, shared our favourite books, had discussions long into the night, shared our secrets and problems that we’d never tell anyone else. Went through all kinds of difficulties and hardships and loss side by side. He was my best friend for nearly a decade, and at age 25 we finally lost touch. He moved to another city and my health took a turn for the worse. One day it was just the last time we saw each other and now it’s been 17 years.
Those 17 years haven’t been good for me, with my worsening health, having to give up work and socialising, and just losing all hope of ever having anything worthwhile. But I often thought of Steve and everything we’d shared.
Today i was googling people I’d known and I found a social media page for Steve. He’s now married with two kids. It seems crazy to me that this whole time I’ve been sitting here rotting alone he’s been living his best life. He and his wife and kids all look so happy in their pictures. All the photos are of them happily goofing around together with all their friends and family, going on holidays and living life. And I am happy for him, he was always a great friend and decent person who deserves to be happy but it just highlighted to me how empty and pointless my life is. 17 years have passed and what has changed for me? Just everything getting worse.
It’s also crazy to me that after such a long and close friendship i didn’t even know he was married, much less being invited to the wedding. So strange how you can be such close friends with someone for so long and not even be at their wedding. I was not well enough to go anyway but the not even being invited does hurt.
I don’t really know what I hope to achieve with this rant other than I have literally no-one else to talk to, and it’s hard and embarrassing living such a pathetic life when everyone I’ve ever known turned out to be “normal” while I’m now a weird loner shut in who can’t even eat without begging for handouts, who never goes anywhere other than hospital appointments and hasn’t spoken to anyone face to face other than hospital staff and shop assistants for 17 years.
EDIT: I’m still creepily stalking Steve’s social media and I can’t believe this. He now works as a work coach for the DWP - one of those people who makes benefits claimants lives a misery by slave-driving them into unsuitable employment and sanctioning them (stopping their benefits) as punishment. I never thought he’d do a job like this, he used to be a real man of the people, now he’s on the opposing side. He always used to want to be an engineer. I wonder what happened.
Remember that when you measure up your life against what you see on someone’s social media, you’re comparing their highlights reel to your outtakes.
shit that’s good.
If it makes you feel better, Steve is probably miserable too as 99% of straight relationships are just hell.
Everyone’s life is meaningless and empty. Some people just like to engage in familyslop as a way to cope. I much prefer alcohol.
After stalking his page I’ve realised he’s actually divorced, so you’re right.
Familyslop is such a wild term lmao
My older brother has the Facebook christian happy family photos showing off his babies all the time last time I checked like years ago. Dude has 5 kids and is angry all the time according to my mom, she said she won’t be staying over there again when she visits she’ll sleep at a hotel. Fuck that dude.
It wouldn’t really make me feel better. Other people being miserable won’t make my life any better. I used to use magic mushrooms to cope when they were legal and they really helped but now they are impossible to get and my previous attempts at growing always failed miserably.
my previous attempts at growing always failed miserably.
My comrade in Christ, all you do is stick a needle in a bag of rice. It’s easier than growing tomatoes and they have an entire website for learning how to do it.
It’s not easy because I can’t keep it at the correct temperature as we can’t afford to have the heating on, also it always got contaminated somehow. The one time I actually managed to grow some, they weren’t effective at all. Anyway I can’t afford the grow stuff any more.
I refuse to grow in Alaska without a heater but that doesn’t mean I don’t grow easy human comrade.
I’ve just tried multiple times and they have never worked out for me. It’s too bad they stopped being legal, used to be able to just walk into a shop and buy them.
I am so sorry you are feeling this way, but just know that you are enough.
When I was on corpo social media my profile probably looked like I was living my best life for sure. Even though I kind of tried to keep it honest, but still. In reality I was piss poor and struggling to feed my kid and stay afloat mentally and otherwise for about 20 years straight. You’d probably never know from the pretty sourdough, hobby, and family gathering pictures though. Looking back at it, I am disgusted by the fakeness of it all and feel the alienation of it in my bones to this day. I mean I even had “a microbakery” in my tiny ass apartment kitchen and boy did the pictures related to it look cool and pretty and like there really is a bakery there. There wasn’t, I sold a few breads a week so we could eat as I had no other income. It’s smoke and mirrors.
I suspect that most of what we see online about others lives is scewed like this. I realized this when I went to a class reunion. I had these people as friends on FB for some reason and had been exposed to the pictures of their picture perfect lives for years, only to hear them talk about failed marriages, lost loved ones, depression, illness and the works once we all had a few drinks in us.
You are enough.
Thank you.
I get this. My ex who was the love of my life at the time has a kid and a life while I rot away as a neet. Comparison being the thief of joy and all that
Sorry to hear you feel this too.
Thanks but it’s okay actually, I mean I live my life, I’m no longer quietly smoldering and killing myself over her I have moved on. It’s just now I need to actually put my life together!
That’s awful. I had a more mild version of almost this exact story a few months ago and all I can say from that experience is that it’s worth remembering that even if someone is doing way better than you, how almost anyone presents themselves on social media is fake and it’s usually biased toward looking wildly more positive than the reality. I say this not because you should take solace in your old friend secretly suffering or to deny that they have evidently been much more fortunate, but because (as least in my experience) it can be easy to compare yourself to something impossibly idealized and feel much worse for having done so.
Sorry if you’re already very familiar with this and it was useless to say.
It’s just, even if people on social media’s lives aren’t as good as they make out, at least they have some good. I’ve got nothing but severe constant physical pain and sickness, absolute poverty with no way out and no hobbies as I can’t even afford to do things I would be physically able to do. I can’t even do something as simple as rent a film on amazon as I have literally no money. I used to love hiking but due to my disabilities walking is so painful and barely achievable any more, even just walking a few steps hurts like hell. Due to brain fog and exhaustion caused by my cancer meds even reading has become impossible as I just can’t concentrate.
I understand that it still sucks. Basically the only thing I can suggest from the given information is that pirating movies is very easy, so if you want watching movies as an accessible hobby (and I think it’s a pretty good one) then you can just do that.
Big Same
I have no friends anymore, my physical reality is very mundane like yours. I am isolated, alone, bored, burnt out and trying my best to overcome depression for good. I would love to work in a job I had passion for and have this nice little social life but our system makes that very hard for anyone who doesn’t fit the mold of normalness. On top of that I have some conditions myself that make life more difficult, not as serious as yours but they do affect me in ways I can’t really control.
You do not live a pathetic life, you live a life in which the system has beyond failed you, a life which proves how flawed western capitalism has always been and how much necessity there is for socialism. And above all else you live a life of resistance, it may not be a life of the ideal kind of armed, organised, glorious resistance we dream of but you are resisting in the ways which you can.
Resist capitalism, fascism, imperialism. Also resist hopelessness, depression, self-hatred.
What is the point though? Literally the only reason I’m not unaliving myself right now is the difficulty of doing so while disabled plus the fear of going to hell. I just feel eternally trapped, like my life is terrible and then when I die it will turn out Christianity is true and now I’m going to hell for the rest of eternity as punishment for not being a Christian.
I have been suicidal too, I am so fucking sorry that you’re in the position you are in. I can’t tell you what is the point because I still don’t know for sure myself. Neoliberal government therapy is very poor quality therapy but it at least it is free & still talking to someone who is qualified to help, I am not really.
To me, life is suffering but there is pleasure and purpose too, and sometimes we can be in a period of our life where we don’t see a reason too but the only way you can exist in a position where you have purpose is by keeping on living. There is no purpose to be found in death, only death. I can also recommend, as much as it is super fucking corny to, to play Disco Elysium if you haven’t already. The lead writer is, even though he doesn’t openly admit, in my opinion, undoubtedly a socialist who has dealt with suicidal thoughts and existential depression, like you and me. It personally helped me find some meaning in this world and appreciate the beauty amongst the, well, shit.
Below are some existential writings from my own journal that helped me pull through that deep depression and still do. If you want to read them, they might help you, I’m sharing them because if you are going to ask me specifically, ‘what is the point?’, I may aswell share specifically what helped me find a point to live rather than some vague gesturing. If they don’t help, then that doesn’t mean give up looking for answers, it just means my answers weren’t the right answers for you. Plenty of smarter, more creative minds than my own have written on the uncomfortable topic of, ‘why live?’
Something I can work on is: What can I do today to make tomorrow better for myself and others?
The more I try to force myself to change. the more I don’t change - I need to let myself be me, the good me, and let him bloom, naturally one step at a time.
I am inconcievably small compared to the universe yet also inconvievably complex & large compared to bacteria. Somehow alive in between two extremes, finitely. I will never quite grasp it and that is ok.
I do not know what I am or even if I am, but ‘I’ know that ‘my’ body and mind will eventually cease. ‘I’ know that injustice exists, and that it is correct to aim to fix that. So, ‘I’ operate within the unknown for now, having hope for my own peace and a better world. A path once walked, continually walking on it for now and then, never again (?) - Surviving, changing, clinging, hoping, trying, helping, hurting. Living. Dying.
Samaritans helpline phone number: 116 123
the health stuff, im sorry to hear. that is just something that can’t be controlled often times. But i definitely have 1 or 2 people who i was pretty damn close with in middle/high school. One went to college 11 hours away. I visited him once and we keep in somewhat contact but very infrequent. I think it’s one of those “you get out of it what you put into it.” I didnt forget about him, he painted a picture of me that has a comic book of a time we went camping together in high school and slept together in a cold as fuck tent. But sometimes interests and priorities change and cause distance, in addition to actual distance.
I can really relate to the music festival part though. I’ve been to a shitload, with a ton of people. We had fun for sure but sometimes those connections arent that strong. Recently i looked at photos of my dad who has been dead for 25 years. I looked at picture of him in the 80s, hanging out with people who are nameless to me, but i can tell he was having fun with them. When i was growing up though, i didnt see those people at all as far as i can remember. It’s a kinda sad part of life.
The “you get out of it what you put into it,” is difficult when you’re long-term seriously ill. I am struggling intensely just to get through each day, stay on top of my myriad of medical appointments, fight endless benefit assessments and appeals, struggling to access things like food and transport, and even medical care and prescriptions, this is all a full time job while feeling intensely ill and exhausted and having no-one to help. Why is the onus on me to reach out? People who know my situation should be the ones reaching out to me to see if I’m OK, but if there is one thing I have learnt through all this it’s that most people aren’t real friends, as soon as you stop being fun or useful to them and become a burden they just don’t care any more.
“you get out of it what you put into it,”
this can just be a text message or something. It does sound like youre going through a lot, does your former friend know about this? If it’s been 17 years since you saw him im guessing he doesn’t. The onus isn’t on you or him, it’s not an obligation or responsibility on either persons part, but when two people stop talking and you aren’t sure why then it was a mutual decision(conscious or subconscious) made by both of you. There’s many people I saw often for a while and I don’t talk to or see anymore, and it wasn’t the result of a fight or some other big moment, it just sorta happened. You are right that if people disappear because youre a burden then they are shitty, but you can’t just assume that was the reason either.
He did know about the fact I got diagnosed with cancer. The last time we spoke I invited him to come and see me and he declined, saying he’d been called into work. I called him back later, wanting to say he could just come over afterwards, but there was no answer. I knew his workplace so called him there and his boss told me he hadn’t been called into work. So I just took the hint and left it, and he never called me again. A mutual friend told me, soon after this, that he’d stopped calling him too, it seemed he just wanted to cut ties with his old friends and move on.
well shit im sorry, that’s fucked.
deleted by creator
